First Place:

Lines that can’t be Erased

By Jay McKenzie

I had ten days to learn your face. 

Lips to your apple cheek, tracing fingertips over your tiny button nose, I learned you. 

You learned me in whispered lullabies poured into the hollowed-out shells of your ears, learned that love is a saltwater baptism. I scratched your face in charcoal to remember you harder.

After they took you, I remembered you in the hollow cavern of my deflated belly, in the whispered hush of cells still carrying your footprint.

You now, a man regarding a picture in a gallery, find yourself in graphite spaces, come home to your mother.

Second Place:

The Man Who Woke Up Thinking He Could Fly

By Chloe Hor

They say he wasn't right in the head—the man who jumped from Kinta Mall’s rooftop. 

But before the black and yellow tape, before they cordoned off the mall, he perched precariously on that ledge. Back pressed against the town's biggest bowling pin, he spread his arms like wings. He imagined his bones were hollow, full of air like a bird's. And for a second, he tasted sky. 

His flight was just shy of two seconds, anchored by a skeleton crafted from anvils. He is survived only by a speculative news article and the whispers of hollow-hearted housewives.

Third Place:

Parent Trap

By Rhian Yoshikawa

I last saw our son at night. Wild-haired, hollow-eyed, ghostly in the glow from the fridge. He pushed me against the kitchen door and fled upstairs to the sanctuary of his room.

For two years our lives have echoed to the hollow ping of bullets as he decimates his onscreen adversaries, communication limited to unwashed clothes and half-eaten meals left on the landing. 

The space outside his door has been empty for two days. The house is silent. His father and I stand on the threshold, afraid to breathe, silently willing each other to turn the knob and step inside.

Fourth Place:

Consequences

By Wendy Markel

Hollow-hearted Ted, took a shallow-minded wife, and they mired in misery, and they suffered in strife, and she called him worthless, and he wracked her with pain, until the hollowed-out wife took a hammer and a chain, but the hollowed-out wife left a wallowing child, when the Holloway hangman kept her swinging for a while, and a headline hungry pressman made a martyr out of Ted, so the wallowing child put a bullet through her head, and the gravedigger's shovel made a hollow, ringing sound, as he buried little Daisy in a hollow in the ground.