Fireside Fictions Autumn 2021: 1st Place SFS Winners

Welcome, readers. Whether you've come here via the magazine or through our profile, we hope you enjoy these fictions as you settle in with a warm beverage and cuddle up somewhere comfortable next to family or in your own quiet solitude. Each of these stories took home a first place prize of $5,000 from Vocal Media. For more about the contest itself, Vocal summarized their Summer Fiction Series (SFS) challenge as follows,

"Each prompt is inspired by a different book from a traditional summer reading list, full of the classics that so many of us read and reread throughout childhood and adolescence to prepare for the school year ahead. We'll start with childhood classics like Matilda and Charlotte's Web, and work our way up through those high school staples like Catcher in the Rye and The Bluest Eye. It’s a little nostalgia, and a whole lot of creativity."

SFS 1: Old Barn

Prompt inspired by: Charlotte's Web

"Painters and children know that the horizon, which others suppose to be a fixed location, is in fact a traveling line. Sunset and sunrise are when this line runs over your head, and it always stirs your hair at precisely the moment it passes. Dogs and cats know it’s there. Very young children can hear the high whistle that the horizon makes as it zooms overhead, and all eyes across the world that are watching the horizon are watching you and your little town, with its half-of-a-bridge across the stillest river."

SFS 2: Death By Chocolate

Prompt inspired by: Matilda

"She had the bowl tucked firmly between her side and her arm. Her curvaceous hips swayed and her head rolled rhythmically to whatever song she had playing in her head. While her curls bounced freely over her dark choc-oh-la-tay face and a broad smile. Her wrist rotated with the speed and precision of an expert baker, beating each of the ingredients until they melded beautifully together like a song."

SFS 3: Brown Paper Box

Prompt inspired by: The Phantom Tollbooth

"Here, the land is untouched. On the other side of the house, the west, all is surely still ashes. But I read once in an almanac that land can heal itself after a fire, the purified soil eager to start anew. That was the point all along, I have realized: a cleansing of sorts. But, of course, nothing from inside the walls can live again. That is not a power we deserve."

SFS 4: Golden Summer

Prompt inspired by: The Bluest Eye

"The first six weeks after the baby was born were the hardest, as everyone had told Estelle they would be. The days ran together and her body felt foreign, raw and reapportioned. She tried to nap alongside her daughter, heeding the separate urgings of all four of her aunts to sleep when the baby sleeps, but instead found herself lying tired but wide-eyed, scrutinizing every rise and fall of Mona’s tiny stomach. The nights brought no reprieve. Mona rarely slept for longer than a three-hour stretch, and the 5:00am thunderstorms inevitably woke her, ushering in a new day before the last had had a chance to settle into memory."

SFS 5: Raging Bull

Prompt inspired by: The Sun Also Rises

"She’d come out to the Jornada, an experimental cattle range tucked between and creeping up into the Gila Mountains in New Mexico, to study the ranchers and how they came to know what they knew about the landscape...

But these weren’t the huge, sleek animals, who lumbered through the humidity and thick grass of back home, back east. They were skittish, half-wild creatures; scrappy and worn down by the sun, the sand, and the summer heat of the high desert. They were the descendants of Criollo cattle that the Spanish had brought up from Mexico centuries ago.

SFS 6: Green Light

Prompt inspired by: The Great Gatsby

"Between the dying day and the approaching storm, the air was glowing with a sickly green light.

Our last yard of the day was Mrs. Spurlock’s house. It was an easy yard to mow: not too many hills to navigate and not much stuff to trim around. She did have this one dogwood tree right in the middle of the front yard. More a sapling than a tree, really."

SFS 7: Long Thaw

Prompt inspired by: The Catcher in the Rye

"He peered into the fishing hole he’d carved from the ice. He killed his headlamp, and watched the fluorescent shape slide past the opening. It was smooth, with a translucent, mottled sheath. When it glided to a stop, a dark, varnished eyeball the size of an orange peered back at him. The shock tipped him backwards. Just as abruptly, the light disappeared, and the pond was plunged into darkness."

SFS 8: Pear Tree

Prompt inspired by: Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Even all these years later, Nic remembered that moment with incredulity. She remembered thinking, I don’t know what folk art is, but that’s not the problem here. It was the sideways people, painted in two dimensions despite existing in three. The textured mural existed in bold relief, faded paint adding eerie life to the trunk and branches, leaves and, yes, the tree people. Each was sculpted in profile with only one eye, and while their arms and legs had physical depth, they were shaped like paper dolls, as if they might curl up and blow away on any breeze."

Until next, time...

~Return to Magazine~

First published by the Vocal Creators Chronicle November 15, 2021