The Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Ramona Ausubel with the seventh annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “Perfect Numbers,” which appeared in the Summer 2024 issue, guest-edited by Rebecca Makkai. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in the journal from the previous year.
“I don’t know what to do with my ghost in the city,” says Ramona Ausubel’s protagonist at the opening of “Perfect Numbers.” The protagonist is a math teacher, and the ghost in question was once her neighbor, until he was shot at a nearby grocery store. The ghost takes up residence in her apartment and the two learn to coexist: the teacher offers comfort to the ghost as he comes to terms with his death, and in turn, the ghost reminds the teacher of the importance of taking care of herself. When it’s revealed that the shooter has been arrested, the ghost asks, “What is the consequence of harm?” and this is the question Ausubel asks readers to answer, too. How do we take care of each other after tragedy occurs, and how do we find the strength to move forward?
Ramona Ausubel is the author of five books, most recently The Last Animal: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2023), which was a national bestseller, received the National Book Foundation Science + Nature Prize, and was a Barnes & Noble book of the month. Her previous books are Awayland: Stories (Riverhead Books, 2018), Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Riverhead Books, 2016), A Guide to Being Born: Stories (Penguin, 2013), and No One is Here Except All of Us (Penguin, 2013). She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, One Story, Tin House, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University.
What was the inspiration for “Perfect Numbers”?
In 2021, I was teaching a graduate fiction workshop on Zoom when a student texted me to say that there was an active shooter in a grocery store a few miles from my house. Many people died. It was one of those moments when everything stops, and it feels like continuing with normal life is nonsensical, but also the only thing you can do. That shooting changed Boulder and felt like a ghost we were all living with, even those of us who had not lost someone. When I started to write about living with a ghost, I wanted that ghost to be particular and exact, and the story grew from there.
What did you discover or grapple with while writing “Perfect Numbers”? Were there any risks you took that paid off?
I wanted the story to wrap its arms around both the depthlessness of loss and the way life—bright, strange, funny—continues. I wanted to keep the mundane on the page with the same volume that tragedy took on. Math and food and jobs and family are up against such sharp pain, but they don’t become less real.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
It’s three parts. First, as Jim Shepard says, “Follow your weird.” Do what you most truly want on the page. Second, care a lot and try hard. Do not wait for someone else to give you permission to make space in your life to write. Third, stay with it. Writing is an endurance sport, and so much of what determines who holds their own stories and books in their hands is simply who kept going through all the twists.
What are you working on now?
I am super, super excited to be publishing a craft book called UNSTUCK: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page with Tin House in April 2026. I’m also working on a new novel, and I always have short stories hanging around.
