Writer’s Weekly Spring 2025 Short Story Contest
This is my first time participating in a Writer’s Weekly contest, and I was super jazzed about the story prompt. It was delivered in the form of a microfiction that you had to write around it rather than respond to a list of criteria. Here’s what I mean:
She was on her annual trek to the Spring Fair to obtain that one essential item. She walked quickly, ignoring the tiny purple flowers dancing in the breeze. It had been a hard winter. While she knew it was wrong, this year she'd have to try to steal it...
That's pretty cool!
We had 24 hours to write a story about this micro, and my submission was Winter’s Thaw.
I leaned into fantasy folk horror, weaving guilt, grief, and desperation into a tale of one daughter’s choice to unearth the past.
For me, a perfect, eerie quiet permeated the story, a sense of something watching from behind brittle trees or listening just beneath the surface of upturned soil. It was fully formed in my mind five minutes after reading that fantastic prompt.
At its center is nineteen-year-old Yseldra: complex, flawed, and hungry. Winter was harsh, and she needs coin to buy seed for spring. But her hunger is more than physical.
The story’s central motif is the veil: part relic, part curse — a wispy, tattered cloth placed over the face of the dead — used to speak through it, if it were, to learn a secret. It operates as a literal and symbolic threshold, a fragile, fabric-thin barrier between the living and the dead. It invites the illusion of control (one question, one answer), but like mourning itself, it is unpredictable, binding, and transformative. Draped over the face of the deceased, the veil becomes a metaphor for unresolved guilt, the dangerous hunger for closure, and the illusion that truth brings peace. In reaching through it, Yseldra speaks to the dead and gives the dead a voice … a voice that may not wish to be silenced.
I had a lot of fun writing it, and hope it fares well in the competition.
Results in … well, I’m unsure, but I’m guessing sometime around May or June! Fingers crossed!
R
