Call for Submissions

Cabinet 13, Issue Two: SCHOOL

Horror flash and short fiction, 100–3,500 words.

Pays $25 for stories of 1,000 words or fewer and $50 for stories of 1,001–3,500 words. Flat rate, paid on acceptance, in USD.

First World Electronic Rights with six-month exclusivity. Digital publication.

Reading August 20th through September 15th, or until we receive 200 submissions.

No AI-generated work. No reprints. Simultaneous submissions are welcome. Up to 10 submissions per writer.

Open Call: SCHOOL

THE CALL

Issue Two is for all things SCHOOL, and something has gone terribly wrong.

🎒✏️📓📚🚌🧪📐🖍️🏫💀

Maybe it happened during fourth-period chemistry. Maybe it has been waiting beneath the football field since 1978. Maybe your ten-year reunion has a body count. Maybe the faculty meeting really could have been an email—but then we wouldn’t have a story.

We want horror that understands school is more than a building. It is a hierarchy, a pressure cooker, a rumor mill, a testing ground, a holding cell, a stage, a laboratory, and—for better or worse—the place where many of us first learned exactly what other people were capable of.

Send us somewhere we would rather not enroll.

WHAT WE WANT

We’re keeping this one wide open.

Elementary schools. High schools. Colleges. Boarding schools. Trade schools. Sunday schools. Driving schools. Dance schools. Reform schools. One-room schoolhouses. Corporate training rooms with suspiciously cheerful facilitators.

Give us students, teachers, administrators, cafeteria workers, custodians, parents, coaches, substitute teachers, professors, alumni, dropouts, school mascots...basically, anyone that has been or could be in a school.

We’re interested in:

• School legends that get passed down from class to class
• Field trips, lock-ins, assemblies, dances, reunions, testing days, and senior pranks
• Academic pressure, competition, obsession, conformity, and ambition
• Secret clubs, old traditions, strange curricula, and faculty politics
• Empty school buildings after dark
• Bright, candy, bubble-gum teen horror
• Dark academia
• Nostalgia with a side of dread
• Institutional horror
• The horror of being laughed at, watched, graded, ranked, trapped, called on, or left out
• Schools from any era, country, culture, or corner of the educational system
• Supernatural horror, psychological horror, body horror, creature horror, slashers, weird horror, folk horror, and stories that can't be confined to one category

Your story may take place entirely at school, years after graduation, or somewhere else altogether. The school simply needs to matter. If we could replace it with a grocery store and nothing would change, it probably isn’t for this issue.

We want vivid writing, flawed characters, and stories with an actual point of view.

Most of all, we want to be surprised.

ABOUT THE FAMILIAR STUFF

Yes, we know the school was built over something terrible.

Yes, the bathroom may be haunted.

Yes, the bullied student may have returned for revenge.

Yes, prom night may end with considerably more blood than the decorating committee anticipated.

We are not banning familiar tropes. Familiar is not boring. Just make it fun. And scary. And you.

We are much less interested in stories that use school shootings as a shortcut to horror. We already know they are horrifying. If real-world mass violence appears in your work, it needs to be handled with exceptional purpose and care—not used as atmosphere, spectacle, or an easy source of dead students.

Not for us: stories built on sexual violence; harm to children or animals used primarily as the engine of the horror.

THE SPECS

• Horror flash and short fiction
• 100–3,500 words
• $25 for stories of 1,000 words or fewer
• $50 for stories of 1,001–3,500 words
• Paid in USD upon acceptance
• Digital publication
• No reprints
• No AI-generated work
• Simultaneous submissions welcome
• Up to 10 submissions per writer during the reading window
• Submissions close on September 15th or when we receive 200 submissions, whichever comes first

THE FINE PRINT

Rights. We ask for First World Electronic Rights, exclusive for six months from publication. After that, all rights revert to you. We retain a non-exclusive right to keep the piece in our back-issue archive and quote brief portions for promotion.

Copyright remains yours. If we ever assemble a Cabinet 13 anthology, we will ask again—and pay again.

Simultaneous submissions are welcome. Please withdraw promptly if your story is accepted elsewhere.

Multiple submissions. You may send up to 10 stories during the submission window. Send each story in a separate email.

AI. We do not accept work generated by AI, in whole or in part. We read everything ourselves.

Payment on acceptance means before publication, not after. If we say yes, you get paid whether or not the issue ships on schedule.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Send your story to submissions@cabinet13.com.

One story per email.

• Attach the manuscript as a .docx
• Standard manuscript format—or close-ish—is preferred
• Use the subject line: SCHOOL — [Story Title] — [Word Count]
• In the email body, include your name, story title, word count, and up to three sentences of biography if you want one
• No cover letter needed
• Put your name on the manuscript or don’t; we won’t Google you

We respond to everything.

If four weeks pass without a response, send us a DM. Something probably got lost between classes.