2024 Winners of the Short Story Contest

2024 ADULT WINNER

The Crocodile Girl
By Sally Toner

Like all good stories of transformation, “The Crocodile Girl” maintains its momentum by igniting the curiosity of the reader. Who is this crocodile girl? We ask ourselves as a young woman grows ever more reptilian and strange to the people around her. In seemingly effortless prose, the story reveals its thematic concerns by showing readers the nitty gritty details of the titular Crocodile Girl’s growth. Her senses grow keen, her appetite changes, her skin thickens and her nails grow dark and sharp. You could read this as an allegory for growing up and learning to discard the casual cruelty of others, or you might simply delight in the good strangeness of fantastical story well told. Either way, this gem of a short story examines not merely what it means to be a person or a crocodile. Instead, it explores and celebrates the nature of life itself.
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2024 YOUTH WINNER

Rhonda Reverse
By Ellie Xu

For as long as people have been telling stories, certain storytellers have aimed to push the boundaries of the form. In “Rhonda Reverse,” we meet two women who seem to be fated for tragedy when the titular psychic, Rhonda Reverse, predicts misfortune. Here, however, both the protagonist and the reader are left to wonder about the particularities of this misfortune, which creates incredible dramatic tension that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. But the real magic here isn’t metaphysical or psychic in nature: it’s in the prose writing itself. “Rhonda Reverse” might best be described as a magic trick or a storytelling innovation. However one might want to categorize the story, one thing is abundantly clear here: this young writer’s imagination is wild and capacious. This story is an experimental accomplishment, one that’d be hard for even the most seasoned of writers to get right.
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2024 ADULT FINALIST

In Memoriam
By Thalia Peters

A bleak coastline, a town that’s seen better days, a hurricane on the horizon. These are the ingredients of “In Memoriam,” a story that one might mistake, at first, for something out of Melville. When the story quickly turns, it does so deftly and deliberately, and what at first seems a pastoral story of unlikely friendship quickly becomes something like a meditation on time, nostalgia, and perseverance. Filled with rich descriptive language and snappy dialogue, “In Memoriam” is a difficult story to categorize: Is it fantasy? Body horror? A tragedy? Who can really say? In that particular way, “In Memoriam” is the kind of story that both entertains and challenges readers even as it defies neat and easy description. It’s original stories like these that advance our understanding of what stories can do.
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2024 YOUTH FINALIST

The Knight
By Naomi Bortnick

What are the barriers to being our truest selves? How does a person manage terrible loss at an early age? Can we ever fully recover from lost love? These are just a few of the questions raised in “The Knight,” a story that at first seems like a mournful elegy to the protagonist’s long lost first love. The tenderness in this story is palpable, as is its clearly humane stance on what it means to be different in a world that often demands conformity. By the story’s ending, what at first seems like a sad reverie becomes, ultimately, a hopeful reminder that true love never truly ends.
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