Fiction 59: junior high winners

First Place

The Meal

I sat at the table. I ate the roast pork. I’m quite full, but I wished there was pie. I love pie. I wanted pie! On the table remained scraps of roast pork. As we ate, I had noticed little stumps on the shoulder bones. “Hey, Cook, what are those?” I asked. Cook replied, “That’s where the wings were.”

Luciana Gutierrez, 12
Davis

Luciana Gutierrez is a sixth-grader in Davis, but she used to live in Chico. And while visiting her grandparents recently and upon seeing the notice in the CN&R for the Fiction 59 contest, she thought, “Why not?” Characterizing the challenge as “something to do,” she immersed herself in the writing and came out on top.

Second Place

Crushed

I’m on the road with medicine for my mother. Influenza, but I’ll make her better. I’m walking through fields of grass and spiders, with a heavy rain and nothing for cover. I love her with all my heart, you see, so I’m happy to fight dangers to save her. After all this, my father says, “Boy, your mother’s dead.”

Aeia Peterson, 14
Chico

Chico Junior High student Aeia Peterson says she enjoys science, video games and poetry. And it’s that last influence—especially given the fact that her favorite writers are Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe—that appears to be shining through for this year’s Fiction 59 contest, both in her second-place story and her honorable mention below.

Third Place

Dreaming Outside

On warm nights like these we’ll go and dream outside. We’ll lay Grandma’s old tattered quilt on the damp grass and listen for the crickets who live at ol’ Danny’s pond. Grandma will tell me stories about the stars, and Grandpa will let me wear his shark tooth necklace. And I’ll fall asleep, necklace in hand, listening, dreaming outside.

Clara Shapiro, 11
Chico

A student at Sherwood Montessori school, Clara Shapiro is one of many students who enter Fiction 59 (as well as many other writing contests) every year as part of the eclectic instruction of the school’s literacy instructor, Danielle Mennucci. Shapiro has also entered a tale about a dad who falls into a hole and breaks his body into a short-story contest (she says her dad is cool with it). When she’s not writing, Shapiro takes dance classes six days a week at HYPE Dance Studio.

Honorable Mention

I Don’t Care That I’m Not Grammatically Correct. You Never Said I Had to be. Also, He May or May Not be Guilty.

It’s not my fault. All I did was let him in. And give him the gun. And the ammunition. And turned my back as he shot them. And let him out without restraint. And never called the police afterwards. Or alerted anyone to the deaths. I perhaps cleaned up and hid the bodies, but I’m not guilty of murder.

Aeia Peterson