Contests

Our July Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #160—provided by Jane Levi, Stone Soup Director—which challenged participants to choose one proverb from a list of five ( “A stitch in time saves nine,” “The early bird catches the worm,” “A problem shared is a problem halved,” “A leopard cannot change its spots,” or “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”), and write a story in which the opposite was true. As we have come to expect from our brilliant participants, the individuality, creativity, and outright quality of the work was breathtaking. Stories ranged from humorous to serious to heartbreaking, taking us on journeys to the animal kingdom, the times of Greek myth, a college campus, and much, much more! In fact, the breadth of quality apparent in this month’s submissions was so great that we selected two stories—”The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo and “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong—to be published on the blog at a forthcoming date. As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! In particular, we congratulate our Winners and our Honorable Mentions, whose work you can appreciate below. Winners “Mortal Complex” by Arishka Jha, 12 (Redwood City, CA) “The Early Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm” by Nova Macknik-Conde, 9 (Brooklyn, NY) “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Bitter” by Pranjoli Sadhukha, 11 (Newark, OH) “A Trifle Shared Is… Big Trouble” by Daniel Shorten, 10 (Mallow, ROI) “Weighing Threads” by Eliya Wee, 11 (Menlo Park, CA) Honorable Mentions “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder—or Not!” by Sinan Li, 11 (Allendale, NJ) “All for a Root Beer Latte” by Yutia Li, 12 (Houston, TX) “In Which Later Is Better” by Serena Lin, 10 (Scarsdale, NY) “How the Leopard Changed His Spots (with Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) by Ava Shorten, 11 (Mallow, ROI) “7 Days” by Chloe Yang, 12 (Cranbury, NJ) Chosen for the Stone Soup Blog “The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but it Is Never Too Late to Get in the Game” by Phoenix Crucillo, 12 (Los Angeles, CA) “A Vacation, an Idiom, and a Wedding” by Joyce Hong, 11 (Oakville, Ontario, CA) Arishka Jha, 12 (Redwood City, CA) Mortal Complex Arishka Jha, 12 The oldest of us left the town, but we liked to pretend that she was exiled. That it was us, the pulsing insides of our city, who drove her away. She arrived a few winters ago when the air was silvery and translucent for weeks and we were ten. That afternoon, we knelt inside our thicket of branches and saw the black tires of her compact car eat at the road in front of us. No one had moved here in years, and we knew no better than to imagine that anyone who did would be deadly. We didn’t know who the visitor was until she held a match to the ivory fences the next night and we watched them metamorphose until the embers flitted through space, moths to a growing flame. She reminded us of a bird from afar, with fragile sand-coloured wrists, eyes that were more raven than brown, and dark hair that pinwheeled down to her fingertips. She wore a long charcoal coat and iridescent shoes that flooded with sunlight. Up close she was less of a hummingbird and more of a buzzard or hawk, a bird of prey. When we asked, she told us that her name was something strange, Blue or Cyan. We thought it wasn’t a real name at first. If she had lied and said that her name was something more like ours, less pure, maybe we would have feared her presence more. “What’s that blue person doing?” the smallest of us said, forehead pressed to the foggy window. It was unnatural. The fences kept us safe, and we knew that they surrounded us like the walls of a greenhouse so that we could grow poisonous and contagious. “Burning it down, what else?” “There’s a reason we have it. It makes no sense.” It made no sense to the rest of us either, so we asked her why. She said our town was too isolated. Being so removed from the outside world had made us feral and invasive and she would save us. And that no, her name was Indigo. Everyone in our neighborhood used to insist that we weren’t old enough to use matches, but we knew that they were scared, scared that these feral children were like lightning: too unpredictable and charged to last long. *** Two years of nuclear skies and twisted secrets had passed by until Indigo left, and by that time, she was an idol to us. She was silver and astral in a dark, short-lived way, and we had thought she saved us until the last moment. The day before she ran away, we convinced her to take us into the forest. It was a gray place, rife with woven roots, overgrown grass patches, and yew pines. She told us that the natural world was beautiful, a blessing, while we hid underneath a tree behind her and fashioned fish scales and hummingbird bones into necklaces. Hours passed like a battle—victory, violence, and defeat compressed into simple blows. We wondered how those lifeless parts could infuse into one and create a body capable of both destruction and construction, futility and power. She left the next morning, and we took enough solace in the fact that we were the only ones who truly knew who she was before they all worshipped her. After all, her leaving made everything less messy. We used to be second in command, then we became first. Even so, we still felt forsaken. Our town’s lifeblood was history and rewriting it was the ultimate coup de grâce, a checkmate of sorts. We took to it with a scalpel instead of a pen, blanketed our town in dusk and shadow, dreaming ourselves