I worship the Winds. They are whimsical and flighty like I’ve come to be. The roads, seas, and skies are friends to my gods and me. And every morning I pray on a walk in the woods to the East, to the South, to the West, and to the North. I stop and humbly give my breath for theirs. A windbent branch beckons me. I approach the waving scene. Then at once and with a passion, I’m upsprung by Spring, kissed by Summer, and whisked by Autumn and chilly Winter. Then they plop me down, all wound up and winded.

Title: Wound Up and Winded

Genre: Fantasy / Romanticism

Age Range: All ages

Word Count: 100

Author: River Byrnes

Why my project is a good fit: It’s incredibly short and fun. A great addition to any children’s anthology. Maybe a poetry/short fiction collection. It is so tiny and compact that it would be honored to fill up the extra unused space of a book that is one page shy of an even number.

Hook: “I worship the winds.”

Synopsis: A Wind acolyte goes out on a walk to pray to his or her gods who take him or her on a short flight with them until he or she is plopped down, back to the ground.

Target audience: All ages; those who enjoy cute flash fiction/bit-sized stories

Bio: I’m a 20-year-old university student studying at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I come from a small lower-middle-class family in a small town in Louisiana called Ball. As a kid and even still, my family and I struggle financially–who doesn’t these days?–but through scholarships and Pell grants, I’m somehow blessed to go to school almost debt-free. I’m a Creative Writing Major so this is my hobby and craft. I also know this is a highly competitive business. All I hope to do by entering into this contest is to develop the skill of stepping out into the big beyond and giving it a shot, no matter how terrifying it is.

I stood—staring, sinking—barefoot in the driveway gravel

All alone on this edge of forever and thinking of

The sea—surging, swallowing—the distance between me and it.

The foghorns blasting out from everywhere

And clashing with a ghostly chorus,

The salty waves will claim the weak!

I can see seven suns of lost reason—running, razing—

Until I'm perched on privileged ground, but even there it'll find

Me—marooned, mourning—the last of a green world

The shores might then swell and gorge themselves

On the scraps of my withered human days—drenched and dimmed—

Sunken under the sea-drowned sun,

But for now, my bare feet fight the gravity of it all.

And I'm staring like a paranoid mother who hasn't felt the kick

Of her child's foot against the walls of her unforgiving womb.