Small Kindness Challenge Winners

J. Otis Haas, a Vocal stalwart, has his first Grand Prize challenge win with Portrait of a Finder of Lost Things, which takes our prompt and runs with it. Here is not one specific action, but an imagined sequence of actions that create a character, and therefore an idea of what the world might be like with such a person in it. From the detail of the Rolex to the twenty dollar bill dropped at an ATM, there’s something haunting in the narrator’s voice here. Well done.

And we’re never sorry for a laugh — we laughed out loud at J. L. Green’s As It Should Be. ‘This behavior is ridiculous, and unfair, and I will not stand for it!’ Green turns our rubric on its head by giving voice to the famed ingratitude of cats, for whom no kindness is ever enough. Top marks for humor and imagination.

We think it’s worth remarking on the fact that many of you chose to focus on people who have no homes to live in: a vision from our streets that clearly haunts us, collectively. A fine example is Cathy Holmes’s Shoeless, one of our runners-up, with a letter from the author’s conscience. And we were moved by Karina Thyra’s Sometimes, All It Takes is a DM which demonstrated, as the saying goes, the kindness of strangers, and how the virtual can become very real indeed. And Pitt Griffin’s A Teaspoon of Sand brought us back to another era — distant, and yet not so much thanks to the vividness of this tale.

This challenge was a beautiful reminder to be kind to yourselves and others. A tip of the hat for the kindness shown by all our Vocal creators, creating community as we do. Thank you.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: