First Place:

To my Daughter

By Sarah Hirons 

There is a charm in quietness. Moonlight pools on your milk-drunk form, gilding eyelashes and fists as you curl tight against my chest. I look at the stars and think of Laika; first dog in space. A dark-eyed stray, selected for her “calm grace” and “quiet acceptance” of a strange new place: a tight, electrode-bristling cage.

Did she lick the hand that locked her in with one last meal and seven days’ breath?

Did she howl, I wonder, as she watched the world turn?

As she burned?

For what? What did we learn? 

Make noise, my daughter. Take up space.

Second Place:

‘Space’, You Say?

By Kelli Johnson

Darling.

Did you know, our molecules are the unlikeliest events in the history of the universe? Soon, in the very blink of an (all-seeing) eye, they’ll be ripped apart – flung asunder – until we form alternating bookends of space-time... In ten-million-trillion years, even memory will be sucked into the crushing voids already spiraling us-ward like great black pinwheels. 

And yet, knowing this, you set down your coffee mug and – the clink of ceramic on granite echoing between us – tell me you “need space”.

Darling. Please. Don’t you know how lucky we are to even imagine ourselves separate things to begin with?

Third Place:

Space for Rent

By Claire Louise Marsh

Hosting a blowout party without limits? Need to train troops battling world-ending atrocities, but not on your planet? We’ve got your solution.

Earth—available now for (very) short-term rental!

4.6 billion years old, 8000 miles across and ideally located third from the sun. Communal facilities (temporarily) include water, oxygen.

Want low maintenance? How’s no maintenance? Fried by global warming; inner core rotation decelerating; its polar vortex spinning backwards. Perfect for alfresco nihilism; go wild.

We’re waiving dilapidation deposits. No references, no problem. Invade immediately.

Sorry, feral humans cannot be kept as pets, but exterminating the reckless locusts is fair game.