After much anticipation, we are extremely proud to present the top three creative nonfiction placers in our Hypertext High School Writers Contest! Below you will find an excerpt of each piece and a link to the full publication on Hypernova Lit, our sister site publishing the work of teenagers. Enjoy these stunning works. We feel so lucky to have the chance to cast light on such talented young authors.
First Place: Obsidian by Parisa Thepmankorn
I find darkness with its mouth open, expanding. All sorts of thick, musky perfumes leaking from the crevices between its teeth. I had just cracked the door of Apartment 309, my eye catching a glimpse of name plate next to the door: “Resident: Weici ‘Virginia’ Wang.” The starchy polyester curtains are drawn closed, and the fluorescent white lights are turned down. In here, darkness prevails. I enter cautiously.
“Hi Virginia. I brought you some mail! Would you like me to read it for you?” Even though her head is turned away from me, I smile perkily, just like I was trained to do.
There’s no response. The rest of her small body is tucked under a mound of fleece blankets and white sheets, stiff as a board. The air is hot and still, nearly suffocating.
A thought dashes through my mind. I’m not completely sure if she’s awake – or even alive.
Second Place: Life in Little Forrest Hills by Jhett Myers
The hoodrat children would flock to the alley every day. It didn’t matter if we had weed or not – we were gonna get some. We would split up and one would get some smoking device, two would look for a trap house, begging for a dollar on the way, and everyone else would sit on the rocks of the alley. After we got our needed supplies we would sit for hours talking about nothing in particular. Once it got quiet we would start up again. It didn’t matter that we had just talked about it, we wanted anything to keep our attention away from the now boring feeling of smoking or stealing.
That is until we found a couch. We weren’t squatting in an alley anymore. We were sitting and we loved it. We would hang out all day, with a set of different people everyday, with maybe the same two or three from the day before, and we were all planning on how to get money or get fucked up. Each time we went to the couch it was shittier than the day before, with some new smells, new stains, and new holes. It might have had lice from all the stray animals. We didn’t mind because it was still something better than the ground and that made life better.
Third Place: Not an ABC Fat Camp by Judy Luo
In my eight years of Kung Fu training, I have always enjoyed the attention. After a performance, the audience would clamor, “She’s so great! And a girl, too!” But this sort of acclaim belongs to the category that also contains praise for a clown. “Oh, wow, look at the way he pulls ribbon out of his nose. He’s so…good at that,” they would say uncomfortably as the clown fixes a prying and eager gaze upon them.
Because martial arts lack gender balance, I believed I was superior due to the fact that I was of higher skill level than most of my male counterparts. Under the mild teaching style of Kung Fu in America (various laws prohibit the practice of beating your students with a wooden staff), it was inevitable that I developed a firm and unashamed ego.
So in the months before my training at the Shaolin Temple, my excitement built up in a parabolic form. The escalation: a cottony month of dreaming about, ironically, the harsh and demanding lifestyle of Shaolin students. The vertex: a solidification of plans thanks to the corporate connections of my dad. The decline: when I realized I was not going to be in the 12-to-a-room local division, but rather, be forced to frou frou around with a bunch of fat ABCs (American Born Chinese).