Prize: £1,000

Finalists:

Alternative History/Fantasy

Wendy Markel, Betty E Benson, Galen Gower, M H Pitcher, Jacob Ashton, Scott Christensen, Kelli Johnson, SJ Masters, Aggie Novak, Felipe Orlans.

Urban/Fairy Tale

Morgan Baker, Rowan Evans, Allison Hall, Melinda Pouncey, Chris Morris, Gavin Taylor, Victoria Slaide, Fred Gray, Robert Burns.

Dystopian/Romance

Alyssa Buchthal, Susan Wigmore, Laurel Hanson, Jo Braithwaite, Robin James, K.L. Vincent, MM Schreier, Barlow Crassmont, Jenn Keohane, Jasmine Brown, Shea West, Sam Bromley, Ruby Seniva, Irene Ressa, Aglibut Bagaoisan.

Western/Horror

Gordon Phillips, WR Platt, Gwynne Weir, Annie Batterman, Carrie R. Hinton, Rachel Atkins, DLC Hanson, C. E. Simon, K. T. Clark, Paul Peters, Kerri Ashes, Lisa Robertson, Sarah Turner, Laura Cox, Cate McDermott, Jamie Campbell, Scott Sawaya, Valerie Monckton, Samantha Grant, James Wolfe, J.L. Theoret, Ro Mitchell, Karen Sheard, Lin Whitehouse, SZ Shao.

Regency/Thriller

Lisa H. Owens, Leanne Tidsey, Kat Morris, Melanie Mulrooney.

Isekai/Crime

K.L. Vincent, Jordan Beckett, Michael Swaisnon, Maria Achihaitei, Katrina Moinet, Anna Sharples.

and the winner is…

Faire Holliday

The Impossible West

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY/FANTASY

The prairie is peaceful at night. Ever since Ezra died, I haven’t been able to sleep, so instead I wait until the noise of camp quiets down—until the fires burn down to embers and the canvas ends are cinched tight, until Mama has stopped singing to Isabel and Mr. and Mrs. Sturm have stopped arguing and Tav has quieted the last of the horses. I wait until the only other person awake is the poor soul destined for night watch. Then I slip out of my bedroll and walk outside of the ring of wagons. I lie back in the long grass and stare up at the night sky and pretend I’m weightless, floating through starlight. I pretend Ezra is beside me, restless, the way he always was. Be still, I think to this phantom, this memory, of my brother. Let the night hold you. 

Eventually, I fall into something that’s not quite sleep and not quite waking. The stars seem to tilt on their axis and the earth hums me a song of sorrow and sweetness, of life beginning anew. My chest opens up and I can breathe again. I let the night hold me and, for the briefest of times, I am free. 

---

We’re behind schedule. That’s the truth the men whisper about when they think the women aren’t listening. That’s why Tav’s been saddling up the fastest horse and riding ahead for hours every day. We should be to the mountains by now, but they’re nowhere in sight. Every day, I strain my gaze against the sun, willing to see those knife edges rising to the sky. Every day ends the same: with sore eyes and a sinking heart. Mama doesn’t say it, but I know she feels the weight of it, too. The what if. 

This is the other truth that both of us know: Papa wants to be first. He wants it so much that it’s burrowed its way into his skin like some sort of parasite. We can wait a few summers, Mama said, when he first brought up going west. Let other wagon trains go through before us. It’ll be safer then. But Papa said what was the point of it all, if it had been made safe and tidy. And for a while, I thought Mama might win and, for a while, I thought maybe she’d take us all to Aunt Caroline’s and let Papa go on without her, but they love each other, so in the end, we all packed up and went. And when we got to that second river—the one Tav said was higher than he’d ever seen—well, Papa wanted to be first over that, too.

I know he knows it’s his fault. None of us say it—not Isabel, not me, and especially not Mama—because we can see it in the way his cheeks are hollowing out, in the way he delays as the men are leaving camp, finding one last strap to tighten, one last bundle to tuck deeper in the wagon. I can’t stand the thought of losing anyone else and so, even though I’m angry to brimming, even though the words spill through my mind from the moment I rise from the prairie grass every morning, I stay silent. And maybe we’ll find a way to heal in that omission. 

---

Tav is a good man, a brave man, and handsome enough that I find myself blushing when he’s around, even though he’s closer to Papa’s age than mine. After Ezra died, he stayed up all night, whittling his knife into an old plank from someone’s wagon. I expected a crudely lettered sign, an acknowledgement of life lost, nothing more. But when he showed it to us in the morning, the edges of the weathered wood had been transformed into a fairyland: curling tendrils, leaves, flowers, a small deer nosing its way through the undergrowth. 

We planted it alongside the river bed. Ezra Murrow, Age 13. That night, as I wandered through the starry skies, I waking-dreamed of finding it again. It had grown roots into the silty mud. From the curved top of it, little twigs poked out like feathers on a fledgling. I knew if I returned again, it would be resplendent in leaves and flowers, fully alive again. 

I wonder sometimes how far Ezra’s body traveled. Did he make it to the ocean? Did he finally see the waves dancing along the shore, taste the salt of it on his lips? Even when he was a small child, he longed to visit that endless blue. Dreams of it quelled his eternal restlessness. All Mama had to do, if she needed him to sit still for a time, was pull out her copy of Songs of the Sea and let him lose himself in the eternity of those pages. 

I know it’s foolishness to think he made it that far, just as I know a tombstone taking root and growing is foolishness. But it helps, sometimes, to linger in a place where sorrow exists in harmony with joy. Where the two play chase together, first one in the lead, then the other. It helps to think of a world where the earth sings to the broken-hearted and a quiet man creates magic in his weathered hands and my brother, lost forever to me, sits on some far-off golden shore. 

---

Mr. McCracken and Mr. Sturm, the two self-appointed leaders of our wagon train, think we should find a place nearby to winter. Even though it’s not yet July, they think it’s better than forging ahead and hitting snows in the Cascades. They, like Papa (and, in secret, me), poured over the reports by John Jacob Astor and Zebulon Pike. They know as well as Papa (and I) do that if we arrive at the mountains after the snow falls, we’ll be stranded. Our prairie schooners aren’t fit for icy mountain passes. Neither are our shoes, which grow thinner every day. I know this (as do these men), and yet I don’t want to stop. Not yet. Not when the memory of Ezra is dogging my steps. 

A few nights ago, Papa asked Tav what he thought. Tav said that he’d been brought along as a guide, not a leader, but that if we chose to winter here he wouldn’t stay. It’s hard to imagine being out here without him. He’s the only one among us who’s been across this wild continent. Across and back again, twice. Even though, raging rivers notwithstanding, it’s been a surprisingly uneventful journey so far, I’d hate to imagine what sort of perils we’d encounter without his steady wisdom to guide us. He’s wrong, anyways. He is our real leader, much more than Mr. McCracken with his veiny red nose and Mr. Sturm with his whispered belligerence and meaty fists.  

“Could we go on anyways?” Mama asked Papa. 

And Papa, who wants so badly to be first, said, “Perhaps.” 

---

Mama is the first one who really sees me. I’ve been watching her. I know she hasn’t really seen anything since Ezra died. Not Isabel, not Papa, not the golden grass moving outside of the wagon, not even the heavy cast iron she cooks in every night or the clothes she washes along the river banks. She’s looked at all of these things, to be sure, but I know that her heart can’t take in the information. Not when it’s so full of sadness. 

When she sees me again, after weeks of looking away, I’m not prepared for it. Our eyes meet across the campfire and her forehead crinkles slightly. 

“How long since you slept, Leah?” she asks. “How long since you combed your hair?” 

I’ve stopped caring about my hair. After all of these nights on the ground, it’s knotted and filled with twigs and burrs. I haven’t bothered to replait it, so it hangs down my back, swinging heavily as we walk. I’ve liked imagining I’m some sort of woodland creature, free and wild. Now, at Mama’s gaze, I’m ashamed. She sits me down and combs all of the knots out of it until my scalp aches. She can’t make me sleep, though, not even when she forbids me to leave the ring of our fire. I lie awake, listening to Papa and Isabel snoring, missing the tall grasses and the whispers of the prairie night. 

“She’s fading away,” I hear her tell Papa a few days later.   

Papa asks me to ride in the wagon with him the next day. “Your mother won’t survive losing another child,” he says. I look at him and know he hears my silent accusation. “I’d take it back if I could, Leah,” he says. “I’d take it all back.” 

---

Another week passes and still the mountains don’t appear on the horizon. People start murmuring that we’re lost, that we’ve been lost for months, that Tav’s riding out for hours every day with the faint hope of seeing a familiar landmark. It’s been three days since the last river and people are rationing what water they have left. We’ll die out here, someone murmurs. Once the words are spoken, they spread like an ember through dry grass. By the time Tav returns that evening, the camp is crackling with it.  

Mr. McCracken slaps a map against the canvas of his wagon, pinning it in place with his knife. “We’re not going another step until you tell us where the hell we are,” he says.  

“If you don’t go another step, you’ll die,” Tav says, moving around Mr. McCracken’s blocky form. His horse nickers, lowering its head as if hiding a laugh. 

Mr. McCracken’s face turns purple. For a moment, his anger hangs in the balance and then he swings his heavy fist at the back of Tav’s head. I cry out, knowing it’s too late to stop the blow, but Tav’s already stepped out of the way. Mr. McCracken hits the earth with his limbs splayed, spitting a mouthful of saliva and tobacco on the ground.   

“You don’t know,” he yells at Tav’s back. “Just admit you don’t know.” 

Later that night, restless again, I find Tav by the sound of his knife. He’s sitting on an outcropping of rocks near the opening of the wagon ring, whittling in the darkness. His blade, flicking in and out of the wood, catches the moonlight and holds it there in shimmering shards.  

“Is it true?” I ask him. He’s not surprised to see me. He must have heard me coming yards ago, although I tried so hard to quiet my steps. 

“What if I told you I’ve never seen this country before?” he asked. “Would you be afraid?” 

“No,” I say. “Not if you’re here.” 

He laughs gently. “That’s a heavy thing to carry,” he says.  

---

Perhaps out of all of us, Isabel grieves the most honestly. She cries when she feels like crying, laughs when she feels like laughing, talks or doesn’t talk to her own whims. That’s the beauty of being seven, I suppose. No one expects her to be anything but herself. No one expects her to make her grief a respectable thing. 

Usually we walk next to the wagon with Mama, but she’s been coughing from the dust the wheels kick up, so today Mama makes me take her out into the tall grasses. We walk parallel to the train, watching that winding caterpillar of canvas and wood. Isabel stretches out her arms and twirls, face tilted to the sky. When she stops, she’s dizzy, listing around like a sailor. 

“Catch me, Leah,” she says, and I do, swinging her up by her arms the way I used to when she was small. She shrieks joyously. 

Later, I look over to find her cheeks are streaked with tears. She catches me watching and swipes a hand at them, smearing trail dust across her skin. I step close to her so that our hands brush as we walk. So that I know that she’s still here with me, flesh and blood and tired feet. 

---

It’s now been six days since the last river. Parched, I wander through waking-dreams of Ezra’s river all night. His tombstone is gone now, hidden in thick leaves and curving vines. There are yellow flowers threaded through that verdancy. I pluck one and hold it to my lips, and water pours forth onto my cracked skin. It smells of the sea, although it is sweet to the taste. I pluck all that I can reach, piling my skirts high with them, but when I make it back to camp, they’re gone. 

---

The Cormac’s baby dies the next day. The earth is hard from drought, but the men manage to chip at it with their shovels. While they dig, Isabel and I collect all the rocks we can find. Tav’s gone ahead again, so Papa tries his hand at carving a gravestone. His knife slips and the I becomes a J. Ljilly Cormac, it reads. We press it into the newly-turned earth, piling rocks over the mound to keep the scavengers out. 

That night, Mr. Sturm drinks himself into a rage and breaks his wife’s arm. The other men hold him back before he can do more damage. Mrs. Sturm beds down around our fire. Her quiet sobs keep everyone awake until dawn. In the morning, she announces that she’s going home, Oregon be damned. Her husband, sober and shamed, begs her to change her mind, but she gathers a bundle of belongings and begins walking the tracks that disappear towards the horizon. Mr. Sturm catches her and carries her back to the wagon, but the moment he moves to the front to drive the oxen, she climbs out again and continues her long walk. 

“We can’t wait for her to change her mind,” Tav says. I look around at the gathered faces, eyes bloodshot and tongues swollen with thirst, and know it’s true. When I look back an hour later, the wagon is as small as a beetle. Ahead of it: a small dot moving resolutely eastward. 

---

We find the river before nightfall and make camp there. The water is low, lying in stagnant pools that are swarming with flies. No matter how hard Mama tries to strain it, we get a mouthful of mud every time we drink. Still, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. We fill our barrel and Papa’s waterskin. A few of the women go downstream to bathe in it, but Mama holds Isabel and me back.  

“It’s too precious for that,” she says. 

There are cottonwoods along the river and some of the boys collect enough branches to build a bonfire in the center of camp. We gather around it with the other families. Someone pulls out a fiddle and a harmonica. A few couples dance, although most of us are too footsore to do more than sit and stare at the leaping flames. People talk about Oregon, about green valleys and endless forests, about land free for the taking.

“Jacob,” Tav asks my father, in a voice too low to be overheard by anyone but me. “How long has it been since we’ve seen another soul?” 

My father is silent. When I turn my eyes towards him, his brows are drawn together. The firelight dances across his cheeks. 

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Not since before Ezra died.” 

“It’s never been this empty before,” Tav says. 

Something about the set of my shoulders must alert them that I’m listening, because they step farther away, conferring in whispered tones that I can’t decipher above the soaring fiddle. I turn my eyes towards the fire and see Isabel twirling again, on and on, until she falls to the ground and lies still.

---

In the morning, we are sick. I’m better off than Isabel, Mama, and Papa, so I drag myself down to the river to collect more water. I find an ember in the remains of the bonfire and feed twigs to it until it flickers grudgingly to life. The water boils so slowly that I almost give up and take it back to my family half-heated. I’m exhausted, though, and when I rest my head against the earth, I fall asleep so deeply that I don’t wake until the water is gone and the pot is sending up acrid smoke. I try again, pinching the flesh of my face to stay awake this time. Sickness comes over me and I vomit into the ashes. Around me, the only sounds are the groans and whispered prayers of the other travelers. 

I make Mama and Papa drink. Isabel is curled into a tight knot, one fist pressed into her sweaty cheek, so I let her be. I tell myself I’ll rouse her in a few minutes, but I fall asleep again. When I wake, she’s far worse, her body heavy and listless. Somewhere in camp, someone begins wailing, and I realize the first of us has already died. I pry Isabel’s mouth open, ignoring her cries and her feeble attempts to push me away, and force the water down her throat, stroking her neck to make her swallow. 

After I drink, there’s enough water left for one more person. I drag myself to Tav’s wagon. He’s lying outside of it, hair wild across his face, chest bare, blankets tangled around his midsection. He mutters in feverish discord when I prop his head up and bring the water to his lips. If I was stronger, I’d drag him back to my own wagon, but I know I’ll never make it. Instead, I wipe the sweat off of his forehead and place his shirt near his outstretched palm in case he grows cold in the night. 

I know I should boil more water, go from wagon to wagon until everyone has had their fill. When I get to the river again, though, I’m too weak to lift the pot out of the mud. I leave it there and use the last of my strength to crawl back onto shore. When I turn my head, I see a creature upstream, mouth lowered to the water. It’s big and shaggy, with black-rimmed eyes, and small horns covered in soft green fur. It pauses once to scent the air, but takes no heed of me. 

---

In the end, there are too many to bury. We strip the canvas from their wagons and use them as makeshift shrouds. The rest of us—Mama, Papa, Isabel, Tav, and three others whose names I do not know—say a prayer over their bodies. After that, we gather as many boughs as we can and light a funeral pyre that must be visible for miles. 

Before we leave, we take what food we can from the skeleton-wagons. It feels wrong, furtive, but we are alive and the others are not, and this country is not what it seems. 

---

For two more weeks, we wander across that prairie. Tav stops riding ahead. He must realize there is no point to it anymore. Two of the others, Emily LaDuke and her son, Philip, disappear one night without a trace. Their boots are still in a neat row near the fire. We look for the prints of bare feet in the dust, but find nothing. The third stranger, Lachlan, lingers near death for several more days. He hasn’t eaten since before the sickness. We take turns giving him water—fresh and clear, now, from the rushing streams we pass—but he does not grow stronger. When he dies, we bury him in the shade of a cottonwood and carry on. 

We see no one else. No Native people, no fur trappers, no distant riders, fleeing the setting sun. Even the prairie animals grow sparser and sparser until one day we wake with the realization that we are all alone.

“We should turn back,” Mama says. Isabel clings to her skirts. She no longer wanders more than a few steps away. 

“We have to be almost through it by now,” Papa says. And I know that whatever this land is, he longs to conquer it. 

Tav does not say anything, but in his silence I read the same thing that I feel: a restless fear that there is no survival in either direction. 

---

Still, if this is where death waits, at least it’s beautiful. At dawn, the wind ripples the grass in endless waves and I think of Ezra and his ocean. He would love it here. The sky is a blue dome above us, endless and unchanging. Even the cottonwoods have a majesty they never had back home. From a distance, they look like sentinels, guarding whatever stream they took root beside. Their boughs provide coolness and sweet dimness after the glare of the afternoon sun. Even the dust, rising from the wheels of our lone wagon and the hooves of Tav’s horse, dances in the air with a peculiar sort of magic. 

I think of the city we left, the sprawling miles of houses and storefronts, crammed against one another like too many teeth in a jaw. There was a little patch of green near our building—a park more in aspiration than reality—and Ezra, Isabel, and I would go there some afternoons. The grass felt like a foreign creature, an interloper among the wood and brick and stone, something to be tamed. One summer, an anthill appeared in the corner of that lawn. We feared it, this invasion of another species, this reminder of untidiness. Some older boys kicked it down, stamping out the remainder of the colony as it fled. I remember feeling nothing for that, not sorrow, not regret for the lives lost. 

How far that life seems from me now. 

At night, Mama sings. I haven’t heard her voice since I was a child, before she lost her first baby. Her voice is low and sure, like the rushing of a river. She sings songs from some forgotten past, strange twisting tunes in minor keys. Isabel sits against her knees and Mama wraps her arms around her, rocking them both back and forth. Sometimes Papa joins in, his own voice reedy and off-key. Once, long after the other three have fallen sleep, I hear Tav adding a final verse to Mama’s song, his voice a deep rumble, hardly distinguishable from the humming of the earth. 

---

The end of the world comes suddenly. One moment, we’re walking through prairie grass and, in the next, emptiness is gaping at our feet. Papa grabs Isabel before she can tip over, hugging her tightly to his chest. Tav’s horse rears, sending him spinning to the ground. He jumps to his feet, reaching for her reins, but she dances out of his grasp and gallops away. 

“What is this place?” Papa asks. 

I step to where the earth shears away. The dome of sky is as vibrant as it’s been for all these long days, but now there’s nothing else. No far-off horizon, no place below where the chasm becomes land again. Nothing except endless sky and a dead drop into that infinite blue. 

“It’s the edge the world,” Tav says. 

“Impossible,” Papa says. I think of the globe Mama gave to Aunt Caroline before we left. As a child, I spun it countless times in my hand, feeling the syrup of the unfamiliar words on my tongue, waiting for my finger to return to a place I knew. The world has no edges, no end, and yet, here we are. 

Isabel wiggles out of Papa’s grasp and steps next to me, burrowing her hand into mine. She shimmies her toes to the edge until they hang over open air. Mama, murmuring a prayer, moves to her other side. She cranes her neck downward, taking in the enormity of this nothingness. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tav do the same. He shakes his head and smiles a strange smile. Only Papa hangs back, gazing out at this unconquerable place as if it’s a riddle to be solved. 

“There is no way forward, Jacob,” Mama says gently. 

He lurches towards her then, his body curving unnaturally. For one terrible moment, I think he might fall off the edge, but he simply sinks to his knees, head bowed as if in prayer. We stay like that for a long time, at the edge of this beautiful impossibility. 

Isabel is the first to move, saying she’s hungry and her feet are sore and isn’t it time we started going somewhere. The oxen are still yoked to the wagon, looking placidly over this strange landscape. The sun, hanging midway down the western sky, looks the same as it always has.  

Papa rises clumsily to his feet. “Homeward then?” he asks. 

Mama takes his hand and raises it to her lips, pressing it there for a long moment. In that gesture, I see all the things they have lost together. And all the things they have not.

“Homeward,” she says. 

I let them go on without me, telling them I’ll catch up. My family does so without question, but Tav slows his steps. From the patient set of his retreating back, I know he’s waiting for me. He does not turn, though, granting me the gift of privacy. I unbutton my shoes and slip out of my stockings. The ground is warm under my bare feet and that earth-thrum is stronger here. I can feel it against my soles, as steady and persistent as a heartbeat. Something weighs strangely in my pocket and, when I reach in, I find a yellow flower that smells of the sea. I step once more to the edge of the world and hold it in my outstretched hand. A breeze springs up, lifting it from my palm, twisting it out into that endless blue. I watch it dance through that infinity until it’s out of sight.  

---

From a newspaper clipping, 1902: One of the almost forgotten chapters of American history is something called “Manifest Destiny.” This belief, that God had endowed Americans with a destiny to conquer the North American continent, was stymied by several occurrences, most notably the vanishing of the first ever wagon train destined for Oregon. This wagon train, led by one Arthur McCracken, left from Independence, Missouri on April 14th, 1841 with an expected arrival in the Oregon territory that fall. It was never seen again. The three following wagon trains, in 1842, 1844, and 1851, respectively, were victims of the same fate. Other attempts to colonize the land were equally unsuccessful. Suffice it to say, any American fervor—some might say fanaticism—about being selected uniquely by God to conquer the continent was extinguished. Today, the land is stewarded by the Confederated Tribes of North America. 

The final resting places of the four wagon trains remain unknown.