Two Sentence Winners!
Congratulations to the Abbie Greenleaf Library Two Sentence Story winners: Jenny Monahan and Silas Holder!
We had lots of lovely, thoughtful, funny, silly, well crafted stories but we felt that these were the most evocative of the sky and best exploited the two sentence limit. Please see stories below. And, congratulations again to our winners!
CHILDREN’S CONTEST
I just jumped out of an airplane at nighttime to go skydiving. I feel the wind going through my hair as if fingers were combing it. -- Silas Holder
ADULT’S CONTEST
Dear Sky: I Forgive You
A red helium balloon my fifth year's fingers failed tried its best to discover your ending and I imagined it surpassing the infinite blueness and floating for eternity in the burnt smelling blackness beyond where you stop and space begins, (if there is such a place between here and there), while tears streamed down freckled cheeks, and Aunt Gina distracted me with offers of popsicles, but I could not stop looking, even though my neck was getting sore, as the cheerful oval, my new best friend, became smaller and smaller and tinier and tinier, until I could not see it anymore, but later wondered (while guiltily accepting the inferior and equally fleeting comfort of a red rocket popsicle), if it would go all the way to heaven and burst a hole through the cloud floor to all the robed souls' gasping surprise, a sudden pop of crimson in an otherwise pearly-white environment; and pondered if it were possible that the red balloon would go on, in some way, in some other world?
I asked my father after dinner and he thought it possible that there could be a place in the sky for forlorn balloons and suggested we look for it with the telescope he received for his 30th birthday, a white tube on a tripod that we had used to study the gray shadows on the moon some evenings prior, and so we ventured out to the backyard to scan the heavens for a tiny red dot that could be bumping off of stars in the darkness by now, only to see a lot of nothingness and not one hint of a happy red oval, when sensing my disappointment, he finally said to me, "I'm sorry the sky stole your balloon, and I know it was very important to you, but sometimes we can only shake our noble fists at the cosmos and accept what has happened", and so we both balled up fists and let the greedy sky know it had misbehaved when stealing from a little girl, and Dad even threw some rocks up there as far as he could, before we grew tired and accepted that the red balloon had chosen a different path, like our rabbit that ran away last year, and packed up the telescope and went into the warm house to watch Hee-Haw on the couch and dream of the place where the sky keeps all the stolen balloons, and just how fun it would be to play there. --Jenny Monahan