Weekly Winner #3: Untitled by Andrew Cloud
This past week’s assignment was a tough one. It’s not easy telling a story, which in itself is a practice in consciousness, from the viewpoint of something that generally doesn’t have consciousness. Perhaps that’s why I received fewer entries this week than in the first two assignments. (For the first two assignments, I received more than 10 entries each time; this time I received only seven).
This assignment was also a challenge…for both the writers and myself. It had a 900 word maximum. While that’s not a huge amount of writing by any stretch of the imagination, it can be challenging to fill 2-3 pages with fiction, especially when our lives are all so busy and complicated that we sometimes have difficulty simply finding the time to relax and enjoy ourselves, much less put pen to paper (or in most cases these days, fingers to keyboard). It was also a challenge for me, as the editor, to read all the entries in a timely manner. Even though I received fewer entries, the bumped up word count equaled out to the same amount if not more than the past two assignments.
It might come as little surprise, then, that this week’s winning entry is actually on the short side. In fact, it’s less than 300 words. I realize that might seem unfair to the other entrants, and if you are upset, well…I don’t blame you. I’m sure you put a lot of effort into your work, and it showed.
However, this week’s winner demonstrated a keen sense of sentence structure that lent not only form to the “character,” but also depth. The entry clearly captures the thought process of a hawk searching for food, but adds an interesting existential twist.
So, congratulations Andrew Cloud for your winning entry, “Untitled.” Here it is for your enjoyment:
The solitary hawk surveyed the landscape. Sun. Heat. Clouds lazily cruised through the solid blue sky. Breeze.
A small, brown blur is spotted through the foliage. Rodent. Food. Flight. Wings spread, it takes off. Feathers ripple, wind feebly tugs at the edges of the being. The blur is much closer. Dive. Consume. And that is all. Another second has gone by, the change to the world is minuscule, yet necessary. There were no hard feelings. It just happened because it had to. Anything that conspires against that law will die.
In the distance, a motor hums. There’s a crash. Tree. Gone. Just like that. The past is the past, the present is the present, but the future has changed. Yet the goal remains the same. Always the goal. Now harder to attain. A chink in the chain. What to do, what to do. The same. Small change, but the goal still remains. The goal will always remain.
The sense of survival, of preserving one’s own life and continuing it so that chaos doesn’t erupt is the purpose of everything. One’s given something they must protect. It must be protected using all means possible. Simple, noble. It’s a solitary goal; the preservation of life.
So a tree went down somewhere in the forest, so what? Nothing can be done about it. Move on. So many more may fall. So what? Nothing can be done about it. The whole forest will fall. We tried, and that’s all that can be done. The goal remained the same.
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