Thank you to all who entered this year's Creative Minds Fiction Contest, and congratulations to our winners:

First Place | Second Place | Third Place

About our judge

First Place

Floating in the Bitter Sea

by Emma Chu

Since I was a young girl, I always remembered something my father once told me one autumn afternoon many years ago. As we sat on the stone walkway, I was crying because I had scraped my knee against the concrete. As he wrapped the white gauze around my leg, he said, “Shhh, Xiao-Mei, Shhh.” After a pause, he continued, “During the Chinese revolution, your grandparents were forced to escape the Communist persecution. They swam across the shark-infested waters from the mainland to Hong Kong…—Xiao-Mei, be still.” I wriggled against the stinging rub of the tape. “If they had that courage, you can deal with minor discomfort. You must learn chi ku 吃苦, which means to swallow bitterness. Our people throughout history have had one extraordinary distinguishable quality that allowed us to prevail throughout all obstacles we faced. You must be stronger, harden yourself to the world.”

At the time, I did not understand the euphemistic tone to his words and had taken his words literally. That evening I stole outside quickly to scrape with my small fingers the chipping bark of the cherry tree nearby to stuff into my mouth, so as to prove I was strong enough, only to spit it out quickly in disgust.

Now I was sixteen. My mother had always described me as slender, but I was just scrawny. When I was born, my father said my mother was overjoyed for my black hair and my flat nose bridge, but when my little sister Xiao-An was born, with her porcelain complexion, tinted red hair, and wide eyes, she gazed at her in wonderment. I always thought that when I tipped my chin skywards, my neck had the same silhouette mother had. She was beautiful, and it often made me jealous of my sister, Xiao-An, when people commented how they looked alike.

 If you wandered outside of our modest restaurant, there are still marks from my miniature fingers all those years ago on the cherry tree nearby. Every day as my sister and I walked to school, we passed our comforting little neighborhood. Our world was small. It felt small to me, so the bitterly angry tone in our home was abruptly apparent as we walked from school one day. My father was sweeping the linoleum flooring when I asked him where Mom was. She didn’t come home for a few days after that.

Winter was very bitterly cold and lonely. Snow weighed the bows of the cherry tree near my window, and I had believed once that it was also the snow that weighed down our hearts. I sensed an ominous presence that something was horribly amiss. When I asked my father why, he pulled me tightly against him and murmured, “ 没关系 mei guanxi, it doesn’t matter”.        

That night I dreamt that my father and I were swimming in dark waters, trying to escape to a safe place. I dreamt of sharks tearing at my chest. They laughed when I begged them to stop. I told them if they took my heart, I’d have no way to support my soul. We swam and swam, the frigid water stinging our calves. We could feel the hopelessness of the bitter sea. I felt myself sinking under the weight of exhaustion. Then we saw it. A light on a distant shore, and despite our numbness, we kept paddling, pushing against the rough current. Through my dizzying pain, I knew we would survive.

When I finally awoke, I muffled my sobs, fearing if I let any sound escape it would disappear with shattered pieces of myself. That night, I tiptoed into the attic and saw my father asleep on a spare mattress. From then on, mother began to spend hours at night on the phone, murmuring soft words to someone I did not know. I knew they had been fighting. I had hoped then it was an aberration that their quarrels were temporary and that life would return to normal. I was aware of hushed arguments late at night, when she thought I couldn’t hear. My mother wanted to escape us, but at the time, I did not know to where or why.

On the surface, as the months passed and the snow melted from the bows of the cherry tree, our emotions became an eerie undercurrent. As the wintry days turned to spring, my sister’s laugh grew more whimsical, life felt warmer and brighter. Pink cherry blossomed bloomed, and spring brought out the reddish hues in my sister’s and my mother’s hair; lovely, I remembered thinking. It was the first time I wondered how we could be related when we looked so different. I had brought up the idea in jest while cleaning dishes and my mother whipped the towel at my hands. She said to stop thinking such stupid thoughts.

One day, my father had to go on a trip. It was very abrupt, since someone in our family had taken serious illness. The day he left, he promised in three days to return. It was Saturday when I heard noise in the back; Xiao-An began to cry. My mother rushed into the kitchen, saying Xiao-An had to go to Mr. Lee, the doctor around the corner because she had hurt her arm.

An hour later, I walked around outside the apartment to look for them and ended up sitting on the steps waiting, my knees pulled up against my shoulders. And then I saw them across the street, but they weren’t alone. A man whose back was faced to me stood with them, his arms surrounding my mother in an embrace. He picked up my little sister, and she laughed, reaching out to touch his hair. This simple gesture indicated this was not the first time they had met, but that was the last night I ever saw Xiao-An or my mother, as they disappeared around the bend in the road with the red haired man.

Emma Chu is a freshman at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and has also studied Chinese since the age of three at The Chinese School of Southern Westchester, NY. She is actively involved in the performing arts including theater, dance, and choir. Emma trains as a competitive fencer and is a member of her school’s fencing and track & field teams. In July, Emma will participate in her third CTY summer program at Skidmore College.

Judge's comments: I was amazed that a story this complete could be so brief. The writer has a great instinct for structure and builds a cohesive whole out of small incidents and observations that might mean nothing in isolation but, put together, dramatize the narrator's dawning realization that something is very wrong in her household. Well-placed and well-chosen details heighten the tension and bring this world to life. Sharks mentioned in passing reappear in a dream. Blooming cherry trees are interrupted by a snapping towel. I particularly loved the wonderful moment when the narrator tastes tree bark because she doesn't understand that her father's metaphor about learning to swallow bitterness.

Second Place

Gym

by Shelby Burke

In gym class, you are offered a choice; walk around the track for 90 minutes or play the competitive activity. This week, it’s tennis. All the boys pick up racquets; none of them know how to play, but they still want to win. And they don’t care if they get sweaty. The only people who choose to walk are the four of us. It’s surprising, because Alex is the most athletic girl I know, and Finnley tries unnecessarily hard at gym, the same way she tries unnecessarily hard to get people to like her. I’ve faked being unathletic and incompetent enough that the gym teacher feels a sort of disgusted pity for me and she leaves me alone when I walk the warm up instead of run it. I’ll let her continue believing it. I’m a tennis player, second singles for my school team and I feel a nagging need to show her that I’m good at something. But I play enough tennis outside of school, and I woke up before it was light this morning to curl my hair, so I decide against it. Kate is new, so she doesn’t complain. I thought at first that she was intimidating and strong, but she isn’t. She’s afraid, like me. We are always the last two left after class, applying makeup, fixing our sweaty hair, and talking about everything we hate about ourselves. She tells me a secret and I want badly to keep it for her.

The day is cold, too cold to be outside, and it makes our hands numb and pink. It is the first frigid day of the school year. The cold is something we’ve forgotten the sensation of. I try to conjure up the feeling and come up short. Some sensations are impossible to recreate in the mind; we have to feel them to be true. The bleakness of this day is a whole, complete, real thing, a heavy force that wraps us up and binds us tightly. We move closer together.

It’s just us and the overweight autistic girl who ambles behind us every class, listening silently to our conversations. When she runs during the warm up, the boys laugh. My heart breaks a little but I laugh too. Sometimes I talk to her after class, after Kate leaves. The girl, whose name I don’t know, stays behind, applying mascara with the deft precision of someone who has spent a lot of time trying to look pretty. She tells me she wants to be a veterinary assistant. I hope she will be.

We can see our breath, and the air tastes raw and naked, burning our lungs and rushing to our heads, making us dizzy and high. The sky is gray and yellow. We talk and we laugh, big genuine laughs that stretch out our faces and wrinkle our noses, not the delicate giggles we use when we’re flirting or being polite. We would never make such big, bold noises in front of boys; they are too ugly and too true.

Kate talks about being one of twelve children and never being alone. Finnley talks about being an only child and always being alone. Alex mentions her boyfriend. I used to think I loved him. It took admitting it to him to realize that I didn’t. When she mentions him, I look down at my shoes. They aren’t mine; I stole them from the locker room. I always put them back after I take them, but today I’ve decided I’m going to keep them. I’ll forget to bring my own pair; it’s easier this way. I don’t think of the owner. The sneakers smell like other people’s sweat. I pick off the plastic lining at the heel, liking the way the rubber feels against my fingers. I don’t feel bad for destroying them. When I concentrate on one thing, I don’t have to think about everything else.

Our conversations cut deeper. We’ve covered all of our usual shallow subjects; it’s all been stripped down to the bones. We keep pace in a loose line. Kate breaks the silence. “What makes you afraid of dying?” Alex says she is scared by the fact that the world would go on without her. People continue breathing, even when you’ve stopped. She knows it sounds selfish but at least she’s honest. Before, I never thought she was this truthful, this gritty. You never know with people.

I look down at my arms as my hairs prickle with fear and cold. “I’m the opposite. I want my death to be the end of my world, not the end of the world. The idea that things continue when you’re gone is the last hopeful thought,” I say, feeling the same way I do when I’m alone at night in bed and all I can do is stare into the dead light of the street lamps and think about the sky turning white with a nuclear glow. Every passing car sounds like the rumblings of an atomic bomb in the silence.

“We get so deep in gym class!” Finnley jokes, and we laugh our ugly, true laughs. The whistle is blown. We walk inside, pull off our uniforms, gossip and fix our hair. The white sky of apocalyptica and the yellow-gray expanse over the track are gone, and it’s only blue skies in our minds; boys and parties and our happy, careless teenaged rebellion. We’re young, invincible, resistant to decay. When we leave the locker room, we don’t think about dying anymore. We don’t think about much of anything, until next gym class.

Shelby Burke is a junior at Moorestown High School in Moorestown, New Jersey. When not writing, she plays tennis, volunteers and obsesses over her ever-expanding music collection. She hopes to eventually work in advertising, journalism, or international business.

Judge's comments: This writer has really zeroed in on one of the major feats of good fiction: to combine meaningful insights about life with mundane happenings. Here is a story about four girls walking around a track in P.E. class that ultimately turns out to be a discussion of death. The observation that something as profound as mortality hangs over us even while we're doing everyday things like being bored at school or gossiping with our friends is a wise and startling one.

Third Place

The Verdict

by Kang Yeon Lee

The night was stifling. Leaning against the vent fan on the bare roof of his office building, Tom could feel the towering aluminum frames shudder with every gust of stale air it spewed out. Looking up, he saw not the sky, but an endless expanse of black light. Like his own life, he thought. Up to this point.

He was having difficulty recalling how his day had gone. The courthouse… what courthouse? The only thing that kept lingering on his mind with regularity was his memory of seeing himself in the mirror just that morning, in the bathroom in his penthouse apartment, him spiking up his long brown hair, then washing his hands in the stream of frothy ice-cold water and rubbing fingers against palms to see if any oil was left, then yes, the glasses, the old horn-rims off the shelf, up to his face, fitting the supports firmly against the bridge of his nose, a sigh, then a look in the mirror again, trying to see how his blood-red tie went with his white shirt, and finally, the cologne—one short psst—then over…

Tom took out a pack of cigarettes. He was not a smoker. This was his first pack ever, one he had bought from the corner store on his way to work with a little hesitation but no regret. Yet he expertly removed the plastic wrapping and flipped open the lid with his right thumb, then reached inside and slid out a slender cigarette.

He weighed the pack in his hands, but his eyes had long lost focus. The smooth white filter at the end, and the bluish band cutting the waist of the otherwise perfect tube… the frilly substance of the tobacco showing, but never sticking out, never. Tom kept the cigarette firmly in his hand, his sweat making it cling.

He strode over to the railing, then in one fluid movement upended the entire pack onto the street seventy floors beneath him. At first, all nineteen floated down parallel to each other—like warbirds flying in some eerie formation of death—then they bumped among themselves, then against the wall of the building, and scattered, disappearing out of sight. Tom watched until the cataracts in his eyes became painful and blurred everything out.

Tom’s feet carried him out of the building, with the single cigarette still in his hand. Outside, a gust of warm, musky air the smell of sweet smoke and popcorn swept past Tom, a lightning storm of flashbacks. But his eyes kept on staring to the far beyond, at least to whatever far beyond that could exist in a crowded city street at night. Tom felt drained of all that made him human. Perhaps it was the cigarette that was leading him on, feeding him health and strength. Perhaps it was.

He walked the streets, glancing at storefronts and people, mainly people. It was as if his undecided legs were floating him without consciousness or conscience. And he saw people for the first time. He saw white-collars grabbing a quick bite, a sandwich each, before the night shift, and college students wrapped in coats as they trudged back to their studio apartments. He saw pretzel and roasted nut vendors and newsstands and people rushing into a subway exit. He saw people playing guitars and electric violins on the sidewalk, and taxicabs speeding away as soon as the riders stepped out. Little kids walked by, admiring the city of night, the night of the city, their eager hands safely encased in their parents’. He saw a couple crossing the street.

He himself had done many things just for the sake of doing them, yes. But this night, just one of the many was consuming him. He would not forgive himself for doing that, and he would also never forgive the others. They had taken away all there could be taken away, except for the clothes on his back, as far as he was concerned. They had robbed him of his life by letting him live.

Yes, they should have killed him, taken away his life instead of his will to live. They should have taken away his apartment and his ’87 Mustang instead of taking away his verdict and sentence. They were convinced he had done any wrong, but he was not. It was his choice over theirs. And the falling cigarettes could not make him feel any better.

He loved life, he loved to live, but he just wished he could live a different life from this, or the life of his younger self. Which one he wished for more, he couldn’t decide. But again, the falling cigarettes didn’t make him feel any better.

All of a sudden, he impulsively wished he had smoked when he was young, now too, for his whole life, somehow wanting to believe that the sin of smoking might cover up a part of everything else he was so ashamed of. He wished he could have been a drunkard, a pickpocket, a mercenary slaughtering natives in their own homes and villages. He imagined crushing, wringing, the cigarette in his hand. The thought left him hollow.

Tom found himself standing at the railing once more—this time, on it. It all came back to him. He remembered the short days and the long nights, the days he spent feeling hopelessly drugged, thinking about things he didn’t know, or understand… not realizing that he was doing so at all. It was like turning on the rear lights on his car—knowing that he flipped the switch, commanded the lights to glare a bright red—but having no way of telling whether those lights were actually on. But for that matter, one couldn’t really know whether one’s headlights were on either. It was a guess at the truth, a guess most people seemed to be most willing to embrace.

Tom just stood there, the wind thrashing his hair. He closed his eyes.

Kang Yeon Lee lives in Seoul, Korea, where he attends Daewon Foreign Language High School as a junior. His many interests range from political history and international economics to Homer's epics and comparative jurisprudence. An avid reader, an active writer, and an enthusiastic photographer, he currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for his school's newspaper, the Beacon, and is on the editorial staff for another student publication, Prism. He has too many "favorite" writers to name them all, but among them are Jack Kerouac, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Franzen, and Sylvia Plath. When he isn't at his desk or in the darkroom, he rows for his crew team and tutors North Korean child defectors.

Judge's comments: I liked this mystery of this piece and its tight, meditative focus on a single character. This writer has a gift for word choice and visual imagery. Cigarettes dropped off a rooftop float down "like warbirds flying in some eerie formation," and the night sky is "an endless expanse of black light." Language that manages to be both exact and surprising is such a pleasure for a reader--it certainly was for me in this piece.

About our judge

Maggie Shipstead is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writer's Workshop and was the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her short fiction has appeared in many publications, including The Best American Short Stories 2010, and she is a finalist for the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction. Knopf will publish her first novel, Seating Arrangements, in June.