US Student Wins National Writing Award
Colorado Academy Upper School student Trinity Goderstad is the winner of a National Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and she is invited to take part in in ceremonies in New York City in June and accept her honors at Carnegie Hall.
Goderstad won a silver medal for her work titled Planes Over Los Angeles, in the Flash Fiction category. Flash fiction is a highly-focused story characterized by brevity. Scholastic’s category description says flash fiction is “quick, precise and often, cuts deep. A tightly-written piece uses its economy to convey tone, voice, and also to capture a scene that is worth re-examining for its nuances. Like a roller-coaster ride, it may make you both breathless while you read it and wanting immediately to return to its first word. “
Here is Goderstad's award-winning piece:
Planes Over Los Angeles
by Trinity Goderstad
It was a mixed cocktail of the clouds and Betty Crocker that turned the children grey. A month had gone by since the first sighting of a little boy suspended in the sky. Initially there was speculation as to the legitimacy of the floating child. On days when the offering reaped in the churches' favor, he was considered a saint. Days the wicker basket remained empty, the young boy was considered a demon sent to test one’s faith by way of their wallet. Soon two weeks had passed and with each day a new child was spotted somewhere in the sky. The children were of all ages, but none looked over twelve. They didn’t move much, and some days they were thought to be dead only to startle an onlooker by a shift in their seating.
Bite-sized vanilla bunt cakes intoxicated the town. The scent stuck in the streets and homes of women, whose ovens collected dust, making it nearly impossible to know if anyone could really bake or just let their husbands think as much. The factory that mass-produced the sweet scapegoats sat on a hill overlooking the small town that was now peppered with floating children. Townspeople craved the cakes day and night so much so that it was not unusual to see a basket of the confections on any given dinner table in place of bread. The factory’s air was so sickly sweet that it could make one’s teeth ache if they ventured too close. Even the dark clouds it fumed into the sky smelt of vanilla.
They were grey by Thursday. The pale, smoke-skinned children seemed heavier in the mornings. By late afternoon the factory was running, and it was nearly impossible to spot them. The townspeople didn’t know what to make of it, and even the churches remained mum. They speculated as to what may have happened, acting as though the culprit wasn’t perfuming their homes. And so it continued this way; the townspeople, seeing that the kids were not their own, went on living in their vanilla-scented homes trying not to sound guilty over conversations on charcoal children.
For some time the children stayed suspended like this, each day their dark shade seemed to deepen. Sales for the bite-sized bunt cakes were at an all-time high, the citizens sensing that they may not have such sweet snacks for much longer. The children were growing rounder, their lungs filling with smoke and pollution. Citizens continued to cram in cakes to avoid talks of boycotting the factory. And so the small
town would sit and eat and wait for something to rid them of the guilt it took to do so.
Some fell in swimming pools. Others formed a morbid kind of smoke stack atop churches. The streets were lined periodically with black balloon-like children bursting with ash. It was not as though they had all fallen all at once in a shower of smoke and sky, but one by one, the children had descended to the vanilla-scented streets. There was something so sickening about the smell. The town now lived inside a vanilla wildfire.
The cakes became bitter. They now came with the familiar taste of chalk and ash under the icing. It took months before the town was rid of the soot. Men worked to sweep the streets while women made lunch in their dustier ovens, not one knowing how to use the appliance. The only traces left of the fallen children remained in the corners of kitchens where men would eat their breakfasts and look for validation in taking their coffee black.
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