The Chattanooga Writers' Guild is excited to announce the winners of the August Fiction Contest.
This month’s theme was “Heights.” The First-Place prize goes to Shawn O'Neal with the submission "Honeysuckle Skies." Honors for second place go to John C. Mannone for his entry “In the Center of the Forest.”
Thanks to all who participated and special thanks to our talented Fiction Judge, James Brumbaugh!
First Place: Shawn O'Neal
Honeysuckle Skies
Scala rubs a half-peeled cactus pad on my crimson arms.
“Ouch!” I wrench away from her efforts. “That burns.”
“This isn’t burning you. You are burned.” She smiles, kneeling down to my height and tousling my hair. “Hold still now, Gradus.”
“How was I burned?”
“From the sun.” The cactus leaves a smear of slime on my skin.
“The sun doesn’t burn.”
“Out here it does. There. All done.”
Scala knows so much. I always thought so, even when other boys taunted me at Lectures. The slime cools my aching arms. I squint at the brightening orangeness creeping up behind distant structures, massive crests looming to the east. Mountains, Scala called them. Where we are going.
“Don’t stare at the sun.” She scowls.
“Will it burn my eyes too?”
“It can. And don’t touch your arms. Let it be. Let’s get moving before it gets too hot. Remember to look for water. And better shelter for tonight.”
I snap my eyes down. The bright image sticks to my eyelids as I try to blink it away. The sun is so different beyond the city. There, it was always the same—a diffuse glow filtered through the protection of the arcing Clypeum. Out here it changes. Sometimes it’s gold. Last night it was violet-red. And it can burn. Still, its warmth feels good after another night on cold sand.
“Drat!” The cactus impales Scala’s hand. She hops around flailing her arm until it dislodges. “OW, ow.” She picks at a spine in her palm. “Drat.”
I blush at the profanity. She has used so many vestigial words in the Wilds. Her knowledge astounds me. If the Scholars had understood, they would have honored her with Selection. They certainly wouldn’t have exiled us. She shoulders her bag and marches toward the sun. Toward the mountains. I let her get some paces ahead, whispering my new knowledge into the muffle of my scarf—“drat.”
Last night we ate fibrous stalks plucked from damp soil. I asked Scala how she learned about the Wilds, an environment I was Lectured that we are not adapted to.
“From my grandmother,” she replied.
Another vestigial term. “What is a grand mother?”
“My scala’s scala.”
I was sired in Urb Caelum. Scala was not. She was appended to the city in an eleemosynary experiment: Feral Development. Still, she reveres the crude knowledge of her own savage youth. The Scholars of the Evolutionary Order deride this reverence. I overheard her shouting at an Adjudicator: “The word natural isn’t exclusive to some theoretical selection process! You have no idea what natural really means!” The Proceedings began soon thereafter. Scala was convicted of “inciting the Progeny and impeding Adaptation.” The verdict was Exile to the Wilds. My own sentence was debated. But due to my genetic culpability, I was deemed an unfit future Sire and ordered to accompany Scala. We were immediately loaded into a transport drone, flown through the Clypeum lock, and deposited deep in the Wilds.
When the sun is overhead—it’s gold again—Scala finds us shade shared with a meager pothole of water. “That’s enough, Gradus. Rest now, and we’ll drink more before we move on.”
She falls asleep, but my arms itch under the flaking rind of cactus slime. The shadows move here, although the objects that cast them hold still. I try to catch the shadows shifting, but I can’t—I can only tell later that they are different than they were before.
From one of the shadows, a small mammal creeps toward the pothole. It eyes me as it sips, with none of our desperate slurping. “Scala,” I whisper. She springs up gasping, wide hazy eyes scanning as she scrambles upright. I tug her down and point—“There's a canine. Look, a corpulent little canine, but it's not on a leash.”
Scala’s eyes settle. “No! No, no, no—” She heaves a fist-sized rock at the animal. The creature retreats, its awkward waddling gait carrying into a round orifice as the rock splashes into the pothole, sending most of the remaining water onto the surrounding sandstone.
“Why did you do that?” I know there’s a good reason.
Scala rubs her temples. “We need that water, baby.”
Baby. Another vestigial word. But I’m more enthralled by the encounter. I could do a presentation on it for Lectures—when we return to Urb Caelum. “Are there canines out here in the Wilds?” There are a few permitted socially-prescribed animals in the city, for research, but controls are managed with appropriate rigor.
“There are wild dogs. But that’s not a dog. It’s a groundhog.”
“Could we domesticate it?”
We study the orifice. The animal peeks from its burrow with wet eyes and a quivering nose.
Scala props her elbows on her knees. “We’ll stay here tonight.”
I pass the heat of the day scanning the vast expanse of Wild-sky until my neck hurts. I want to spot them first, the retrieval drones I know they will send for us. As dusk falls I strain to hear their turbo-props as the air wavers with escaping heat. Scala hunches in the dirt, rending her scarf into thin strips.
“What are you doing?”
“We need food.”
Our first morning in the Wilds she taught me foraging. She discovered sprawling flora, speckled with pale flowers. She pinched off a blossom and handed it to me, taking one herself. “Like this,” she said, withdrawing the thin pistil from the flower’s base. A drop of clear nectar clung to it. She touched it to her tongue then nodded at me. Her face cracked into a giant smile as the sweetest taste tickled my teeth. “It’s honeysuckle.” We ate until the ground was covered in blossoms.
Scala braids the strips of cloth into a thin rope and constructs a loop in one end. I follow as she eases toward the hole where the animal resides. Attaching her scarf-rope to a spindly tree, she drapes the loop over the opening in the ground.
“Are you making a leash for the . . . ground-dog?” I ask. We slurp up the last of the water and trudge off to make camp. Scala excavates the roots of another plant, hacking them free with a sharp stone. She scrapes the coarse outer husk away then pounds the roots into wiry threads. It is abjectly dark by the time she hands me my portion. My stomach tumbles with honeysuckle memories. But this root is bitter and sinewy. I spit it into my palm and hide the rest in the dirt, scanning the sky and listening for turbo-props.
In Lectures, I took a course on pre-Evolution. I learned that proto-sapiens believed that stars could reveal the future and that there was salvation in the skies. Of course, no one in Urb Caelum has seen actual stars. I wasn’t certain they were real. But there are so, so many of them! If the stars are real, maybe there is salvation up there too.
In the morning we return to the animal’s den. Scala perspires already. My arms throb but I don’t want more slime on them.
“Drat.” Her curse is quiet this time. Lamenting. She leaves the empty leash, hobbling on toward the mountains. They appear no closer.
We’re impeded by a sheer bluff at midday, a severe chasm plowed deep into the earth. Scala crumples to the ground, breath wheezing. While my skin grows redder, hers has turned a pale green. Can the sun do that too?
“Rest now.” She collapses back and shivers, cradling her abdomen. I try to rest, but I crave the shade we found before.
A shadow crosses beyond my closed lids, a fleeting degree of coolness that awakens a gnawing greed within me. I blink my eyes open into the sun—I forgot. But there is something else—a squadron of dark shapes orbiting overhead.
“Drones!” The Scholars have elected to retrieve us. “Scala! Wake up! Drones! They found us.” The drones appear substantial enough to carry rations and water. Maybe even med-shots for Scala. I lift her head to look, pointing at our deliverance. She coughs and tries to follow my trembling finger.
These drones are unfamiliar—rescue models? The trailing edges are rough, irregular. They sweep in wide arcs, tilting silently through the air. So silent. Not even the slightest whirring of the props.
I leap up, stretching closer to them, waving my arms and shouting. “Here! We’re ready to return!” My head swims and my eyes fill with static. I buckle onto Scala.
“It’s okay,” she wheezes. “Just sit.”
The drones descend anyway, circling lower. They saw me. I can’t wait to give a presentation about the sun in Lectures. “They’re so quiet. What kind of drones are they?”
She smooths my hair over my forehead. “Vultures.”
“Vull-churs. Vull-churs . . .” I whisper it a few times. The word tickles my teeth like honeysuckle. “They are here for us, right?”
“Yes, baby.”
Good. “Vull-churs. They’re beautiful.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “They are.
Shawn O’Neal is a fiction writer living in East Tennessee.
Second Place: John C. Mannone
In the Center of the Forest
An allegorical micro fiction
The center of the forest was a beautiful place, except for the tainted gnarls of a scrub pine with brambles overshadowing the towering, good pine. When the wind stirred, only cacophony would leave its branches and thorns, in contradistinction to the true evergreen. How majestic it was, swaying to its own melody of spindled leaves raining its air with the scent of promise.
But for a moment, the enchantment, ugly tree transformed into something gorgeous. And it climbed above the heights of the Cedar of Lebanon; however, the lizards and rodents knew better because it couldn’t change its hissing tune. Its bright, but duplicitous, glitter had blinded the man and his wife to the truth, while its thorns entwined and gouged the Evergreen. Then their eyes were opened ... but it was too late.
John C. Mannone’s work appears in Appalachian Journal, Artemis, Critical Humanities, Appalachia Bare, Red Branch Review, Poetry South, and others. Awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017), he has six full-length collections, including the Weatherford nominee Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing and Audio, 2023) and a top-eight finalist for the 2025 Tennessee Book Award, Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2024). He’s a retired professor of physics and the Poet Laureate for the City of Oak Ridge (2026-2028).
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month.
Go to chattanoogawritersguild.org and scroll down to "Latest News" to view the genre and theme for each month.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE.