My Three-Minute Fiction Losing Streak Remains In Tact
In addition to everything else I do, I sometime enter writing contests. Rarely do I win. This time is no exception. The upside is that there were over 5,000 entries and the “runners up” stories don’t appeal to me, so chances are what I wrote was simply not to the liking of the judges. I don’t take it personally – and I will probably enter the next one. Free contests appeal to me.
Of which contest do I speak? The NPR Three-Minute Fiction Contest. Entries must be around or under 600 words — able to be read in three minutes. The influx of submissions are read and the finalists are passed on to the judge. This time the judge was Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours. Each contest has specific parameters, either words to use, a photo prompt, etc. Round Five’s parameters were that each story had to begin with “Some people swore that the house was haunted.” Each story had to end with “Nothing was ever the same again after that.”
Here’s my non-winning entry.
HERE COME THE GUYS
Some people swore that the house was haunted, so I ran past it. My neck tickled and I rubbed away the feeling, or tried to.
“What’s the matter with your neck?” Kyle said, still far behind me. He giant-stepped and caught up.
“Nothing.”
“You ran past the old Smith house. It still scares you.”
“Does not.”
“Does too,” he said making bug-eyes like he was ten instead of twenty, but that’s what little brothers do. He threw back his head and laughed. “You’re not scared of that house you’re scared of that one.” He pointed ahead to the house we could almost see through the disrobing trees.
I looked at my feet and put my hands in my jacket pockets, which were too small and not meant for warmth but for style. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since that afternoon and the wind whipped hard enough to carry leaves down the sidewalk as if someone was huffing and puffing and scattering them at our feet to move us along.
Maybe someone was.
As Kyle and I got closer, every window in the house glowed amber. A spicy, woodsy smell grew stronger and I noticed the puffs of smoke coming from the chimney. After another hundred yards I heard music I didn’t like and voices I didn’t recognize. I stopped. One black shutter swayed and creaked in time with the wind and out of sync with the music. Kyle yanked on my sleeve and then let go, having better luck than me putting his hands in his pants pockets.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“I’m not going,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
He pulled his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms. He looked like a little old man instead of a college junior. “I’ll leave with you if you really want.” He cocked his head away from the white colonial with the red door.
“No, I have to go in. I mean, I want to go in.”
“Sucker,” he said.
I punched his arm and head locked him like when we were boys. Someone appeared at the now open door at the top of the stone staircase. Back-lit, I knew it was a woman because her dress flowed with the breeze and filled the space around her. My neck tickled again, and again I rubbed it to erase the feeling. I looked at Kyle and he was rubbing his neck too.
“What are you two doing down there?” The voice forced us to stand at attention. “Kevin, what were you thinking?” our mother then said. “You almost missed your own wedding.”
Kyle patted and pushed me up the steps of our childhood home.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
