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First Place Winner: Cassie’s Pearl

First Place Winner: Cassie’s Pearl

Wine in hand, I stepped into the scalding shower without checking the temperature. The sensation offered a brief reprieve from the ache in my heart. I stumbled on a leftover sliver of a soap bar, sloshing half the wine into the drain. “What a waste,” I mumbled. I chugged the rest in two gulps and plunked the glass onto the floor, where it quickly overflowed with spray.

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Yesterday’s Self

Yesterday’s Self

The phenomenon first happened when I was seven years old. Mud caked my pants and the tip of my nose as I stirred an earthy concoction with a stick. “Leaves!” I commanded, my hand outstretched. My friend Lily scurried toward the bushes. Within seconds, she returned and placed the ingredients I’d requested in my palm. Careful not to break the surface of the murky water, I spread out the green embellishments and removed my makeshift utensil. “Soup’s done.”

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Second Place Winner: Simple Dances

Second Place Winner: Simple Dances

Brown leaves battered Mr. Cotter’s beat-up truck as he pried open its door. He shook his head. How much time had withered since he last drove it? A year. He sighed, remembering the plot he puttered it to last. The once-green paint peeled in his hands like a snake shedding its skin.

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Lifewarden

Lifewarden

Shadows draped over the furniture in the small Lifewarden cottage. Death hung over Madiya’s mind like that darkness, clouding all her thoughts. Except the one that chided her for sleeping through her last chance to enjoy the beams of dawn penetrating the curtains and casting beautiful patterns on the floor. But she needed no such distractions today. As she rose from her cot, a vision crashed into her.

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Second Place Winner: Skeleton

Second Place Winner: Skeleton

Dec. 24. Victim discovered 3 min. off San Pasqual Valley Road/Highway 78. Mile marker 12. Female. Mid 20s. Face down. Homicide suspected. No attempted burial. Thrown and discarded. Decomposition suggests 6 weeks since death. Wild animals got to body. Skeleton mostly intact. Left femur missing. No ID. Prostitute? Photograph in back pocket.

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First Place Winner: Something Green

First Place Winner: Something Green

Green. Not eaten. Not trampled into the dust. Food, or maybe poison. It didn’t matter which. Prisoner 13358 hadn’t been actively searching for either. If he had, he would have passed over the spot. An inconspicuous clay lump shielded the leaves that cowered between the stack of lumber and the barracks wall.

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Second Place Winner: The Will of the Sky

Second Place Winner: The Will of the Sky

Mahzar sat cross-legged on the sandy floor and gripped his staff to still his trembling hands. Suluboya’s painted face stared at him from the corner of the tent as if waiting for him to renounce his promotion. “This is the will of the tribe,” he said to the idol. “I did not choose this. Nor did I choose Devrim’s actions.”

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First Place Winner: Ella

First Place Winner: Ella

Sand swirled like a plague of locusts across the plain, spitting against Travis’s goggles. A line of fenceposts and an abandoned bunker contentedly slept while the world died around them.

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