A year and a half ago, I entered a short story competition with some rather unusual rules. The publishing house sponsoring the competition provided the first and the twentieth paragraphs of the story, and the contestants would write the story around these two paragraphs. Oh, and the story had to be exactly fifty paragraphs in length. I learned of the competition the day before the closing date. Since the cash prize was a nice one, I decided to give it a spin. I sat down at my desk with a cupful of sharpened pencils, opened a fresh notebook, and started scratching words onto the paper. I wrote all day, taking…

I entered the store and left the city’s noise behind me on the other side of the glass. Born in the last century just six blocks away, I was a child of the concrete, but the shift in the air and in the streets over the decades had caused me to imagine often that I was going to sell the apartment and take Marcie to live in the country. We would shop at farmer’s markets and greet our neighbors by their first names and we would never hear sirens and we would sleep with nothing but screens between us and the trees and flowers outside. I longed to flee the…

  The damp leaves muffled all sound as Wynn moved down the slope towards the creek. A crow sitting high in a pine called down into the woods, and the sound reminded Wynn of human conversation. It had been a few days. He was warm from the exertion of movement, but his nose was red and numb from the air’s bite, and Wynn couldn’t tell if it was running or not, so he rubbed the back of his glove across his nose and the glove remained clean. A large, dark shape to his left drew his attention, but it was only a boulder jutting free from the earth, blackened with…