This week, I dropped a 2,000-word flash piece into the can for the latest Globe Soup challenge!

Globe Soup attracts thousands of writers to their challenges, and I predict my story will face stiff competition.

Still, it’s a good Magical Realism story, and I hope it makes it through to the honorable mentions and/or longlists.

Results will probably be in, heck, May 2024!

But I’ve got my fingers crossed! Let’s see where we go with it!

March 7, 2024

Okay, the contest is over, and the story has been submitted; all that remains is to wait for a verdict. In the meantime, I’m free to discuss my story.

This story is about a teen named Dwight who takes pictures of urinals in bathrooms. I used the same character and concept in a recent Not Quite Write 500-Word contest.

Overall, I felt it was a decent idea, and I wanted to keep exploring Dwight in a longer form and the magical realism context offered by this contest.

In this version, I stripped out his dad, Mike Ward, and changed the device from a phone to a Polaroid camera, but that doesn’t mean Dwight didn’t have a Polaroid in the first story. In fact, I have a Polaroid picture of Dwight’s deceased mom stuck to the dashboard of Dad’s truck.

Now, I’m not suggesting the stories are related, but, if they were, that would mean Mom has disappeared, leaving Mike and Dwight all alone (a plot point in the original story, Till the Roots), but Mom is a remnant in the photograph (WOW!) adding a bit of fantastical, eeriness to the original story if you think about it.

The idea for the urinals came from visiting an old Elks Lodge in downtown Portland, Oregon, over the winter in 2023. I was there to watch a play. I was doing my business and noticed that the urinals were exceptionally old antiques. I took pictures of the urinals and jotted down some notes, thinking it’d be cool to use the concept somewhere down the line.

I submitted this story to a similarly themed Reedsy competition, so I’m curious to see how it does there, too! I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Update: It’s April 17, 2024. The results are in, and Remnants finaled under the Magical Realism category in the 7-Day Writing Challenge #11! Thank you, Globe Soup!