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(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
Yearning Curve
(Spotlight Runner-Up!)
His name was Santiago, Santi to friends, and to her his skillful leads felt like coming home. He made it all feel so easy. Suddenly and unexpectedly, she was in love with the weeping violins of the music. Suddenly she felt the whole mystique of tango was not a mistake, not a trap, and not a cliché. Well maybe a cliché, but one that got to be that way on merit. He smelled of vetiver.
Beate Sigriddaughter
Now, 20 years later, the mannequin is swollen with inheritance. Boots, glasses, belt buckle, coat. Someone forced his wedding ring onto a rigid finger. It rattles when the body shifts, a sound like coins in a tin can.
Bethany Bruno
I like to think of myself like a surgeon who causes pain ripping into flesh because he has been paid to do this job. Like a physician, I wear gloves. I wear gloves in the various greasy spoons and bars where I meet my clients. From my mentor I learned a client might pocket a glass for the purposes of black mail to get the money back. I discreetly wipe the lip with a napkin.
Marina Harris
The reason why Jack and I were still texting was during "lunch" that day at Sally's, we had both decided to "let go." He was going to drink, and I was going to eat. And neither of us was going to do so in moderation. You couldn't call it a relapse because neither of us had a problem to begin with. I mean if we had a problem, it was the opposite, a sort of obsessive avoidance. Jack kept saying "Man, we've just got to walk across the coals. If you feel the fire, you won't fear it."
Gideon Leek
Annalise Rashid Foster had been one of those homeless. She arrived in my classroom a few days shy of her 18th birthday, a tall, lanky girl of African American and Lebanese extraction with narrow hips and straight black hair. She had spent the previous two years in and out of foster homes—five altogether—after her parents threw her out of the house for doing ups. In the first foster home she was raped regularly by her foster father. In another she was locked in a closet, sometimes all night, when she refused to eat rotten meat or threw up after trying to.
Thomas J. Hubschman
Their message, and its implications, hit international relations like a live grenade. Within minutes American politicians and commentators expressed outrage at the slight through every venue possible. These tirades were accompanied by accusations often in direct contradiction to each other, alleging the message was a) a fakeout by the Chinese to destabilize relations, b) a result of secret backroom deals the Chinese had made with the aliens ahead of time, or c) in an alien language only phonetically similar to Mandarin, and therefore incorrectly translated. The Chinese government elected not to respond to these petty barbs, and with only a hint of smugness they sent a message back to the ship welcoming their arrival and began hasty preparations for a state visit in the capital city.
J. Elyse Purvis
