In addition, we offered a new collaboration with the Micro podcast team. This was an additional bonus opportunity for writers who entered our contest by September 30. The following 5 writers were selected to read their entry on air. Listen here.

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Antonia Headlam-Morley from the United Kingdom:

 

You will die, I tell my baby. But first you must live. In my prayers, your sweet flushed skin will thicken and crust, your feathered hair will gloss and shine and silver. I insist you indulge a marvellous life, one chaptered with brilliant misadventure, which leaves lines on your face and scars on your knees. You must grow and stretch and bend, ache from laughter and love and be weighed down with a heart sodden heavy and brimming.

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I will die, I tell my baby. But haven’t I lived quite the remarkable life, to have
found myself here, with you?

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Caris Pasch-Cooper from the United States:

 

Matryoshka

54 years before I pee on a plastic stick, I am an egg inside a fetus inside my grandmother.

 

Nestled like matryoshka dolls, we drive from El Paso to Juarez for a cheap haircut. I measure 120 microns in diameter—the width of each hair on my grandmother’s head. My mother is cauliflower-sized, with no hair of her own. We all share a single body, a single scalp.

 

And yet, the snip-snip of the barber’s scissors foreshadows our inevitable unnestling.

 

I can still hear it now, as two pink lines form.

 

I run for my phone to call them.

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Dana Wall from the United States:

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Metamorphosis

Mother’s Alzheimer’s blooms backwards—first forgetting my name, then my father’s face, finally her own reflection. But today she remembers the pond behind our childhood home, describes tadpoles with perfect clarity: how they breathe through gills before discovering lungs, how their tails dissolve to birth legs, how transformation requires forgetting what you were.

 

“We’re all becoming something else,” she whispers, touching the window where rain traces temporary rivers down glass.

 

I hold her hand—paper-thin now, translucent as a tadpole’s skin—and wonder if forgetting is just another kind of metamorphosis, memory dissolving to make room for whatever comes after knowing.

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Jessica Merrick from the United States:

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Bench at Dawn, Bench at Dusk

 

At dawn, the bench is a stage for beginnings: runners stretching, coffee steam curling, a woman rehearsing apologies to the gulls. The wood smells of dew and forgiveness.

By dusk, the same bench becomes witness to endings. Lovers argue quietly. A boy folds a rejection letter into a paper plane. A father counts fireflies, promising himself he’ll call tomorrow.

 

It’s the same slats, same bolts, but the light changes everything. The bench holds laughter and tears without preference, a custodian of our fragile cycles.

 

Sit there twice in one day, and you’ll understand: beginnings and endings share the same seat.

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John Delaney from the United States:

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Fireplace

We lie in bed like old logs on a grate:
a little kindling, and we glow.

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Judging for our November contest is still underway. Results will be announced around January 2026.