February 2021 Storytwigs Competition Winners
For this month’s competition, we asked writers to submit up to three 100-word micro-stories on based on the prompt “Cube.” We selected these as the top five entries. Storytwigs has new competitions every month, and more information on this month’s competition is available here.
1st place — CLOUDS, by Jack Furth
One of the clouds is shaped like a box.
Everyone knows this is wrong.
The cloud passes.
We try not to speak of it.
2nd place — Sweet, by Zoe Wong
From the safety of the projector screen, a grainy Mayan temple watches over the knots of concentrating second-graders. In the hallowed name of social studies, they huddle over towering bowls of sugar cube bricks and plastic cups of Elmer's glue mortar.
Of course, the glue is delightfully sticky. But the sugar — the sugar is what holds them captive.
Perfect, white, crumbling, tantalizing.
Slowly, lopsided sugar ziggurats rise up from marker-streaked desks amidst whispers and giggles. More than one cube is squirreled away, slipped into a pocket or a watering mouth. Ms. Cardenas pretends not to see.
3rd place — Clear Escapism, by Jack Hawkins
Maurice the mime was an acquaintance of mine. I’d notice him at his usual spot to and from work, that was, until he relocated a few streets down. From then on, he spent his days curled into a tight ball pressed against a graffitied wall. So, in a fit of altruism, I took my invisible pickaxe and chipped away at the invisible box he’d constructed around himself before finally clearing out the invisible debris.
“I got evicted,” he said.
“Goodness, how unfortunate.”
“Will you help me?”
I didn’t reply, but I did spend fifteen minutes putting the bricks back.
4th place — Replay, by Colleen Alles
You ready yourself for future conversations—sex and death—but down the road. Which comes first? Sex by accident—a steamy scene in a PG movie you play to cook dinner in peace. Risotto. Red wine. But death? Death is for later. Death is meant for later. Death is always meant for later. Death is not for your three-year-old to understand, to witness in a video game. You watch him clock it. “He died,” your son says. It’s shock. He understands. You reach for the green cube on the controller, touch it. “It’s okay,” you say. “You can go again.”
5th place — The Most Creative Man in the World, by Jack Hawkins
The most creative man in the world stands proudly onstage, though a metal box is secured firm around his head. Onlookers, a potpourri of television execs, watch perplexed as the wires from the device are plugged in to a computer screen.
“Our machine will display an organized database of our subject’s unfiltered imagination,” the lead scientist states, “all creations from birth until death.”
Yet as the machine whirs to life, so dies the body of the most creative man in the world, collapsing as the audience ponders how long it’d take for this miraculous invention to enter mass production.