Voyage YA by Uncharted

Chapter One There’s this video of Maria João Pires online that I’ve watched a thousand times. It’s 1999 and she’s in Amsterdam, set to perform the piano solo in Mozart’s D minor concerto with Riccardo Chailly conducting. The first few syncopated notes sound from the violins and violas, and as the cellos and basses enter, […]

Third Place Winner of the Voyage Lucky No. 7 Challenge ‘Twas Ravenna who died first in the Wraithwood. It was dark, and we were tired and hungry after our escape from town, and she unwittingly ate some poison berries. Her body lay sprawled over the roots of a tree, blood and saliva streaked down her […]

Second Place Winner of Voyage’s Lucky No. 7 Challenge Gold and sequined, it shone on the rack like a sunrise, bursting like the dawn over a field of muted flannels. It was armor, but nothing like a suit. It was flowing, fluid—a soft shape with hard edges. It signaled protection to the wearer and warning […]

First Place Winner of the Voyage Lucky No. 7 Challenge Now baby, promise you won’t fly too high? A man on the street gets too close when he speaks to me. His breath is a lit cigarette and the words it propels are a leering threat. I realize I’m not afraid in the same way […]

Ella, in the dim, flickering light of the janitor’s closet, could see that the berries had regrown their teeth. Not whole sets—at least, not yet. Cranking the dial on her newly stolen microscope, she leaned over Sebastian, who was prepping a fresh pot of jam on the floor, and she zoomed in on the fruit: […]

No matter what the weather,  there’s always a chill in the air. No warm welcome eases the frosty blast of unspoken disappointment    that hovers above me like a shimmering sword. Conversations are fencing rounds, with a jab here and lunge there. Despite my attempts to parry the barbed observation or pointed question about the state […]

“Zachary Kahn-Molina, do you have siblings?” Mr. Rattrazino paused, stub of yellow chalk cinched between his second and third fingers like the suave, self-destructive, chain-smoking lead of a 1930s movie. Rattrazino—mostly, we called him “Mr. R,” though a few smart-asses (usually after they’d bombed a test) muttered “Mr. Rat” behind his back—was old-school that way. […]

they say grief is the price of love, as if there’s a penalty for loving, as if it breaks rules or laws or expectations . it’s a laugh, really, what they say about grief, what they think they know about love; it’s their rules that have a cost—the rules written on their face as they […]

Third Place Winner of Voyage’s Love & War Contest judged by NYT Bestselling Author Ayana Gray Chapter One Three nails stuck out of the ground an inch from Lane’s left big toe. Their heads were a quarter inch wide, and they stood a half inch from the surface of the soil. They almost looked like […]

Second Place Winner of Voyage’s Love & War Contest judged by NYT Bestselling Author Ayana Gray . Chapter One Present day  “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem […]

First Place Winner of Voyage’s Love & War Contest judged by NYT Bestselling Author Ayana Gray . Chapter One Clio twisted the tuning key and plucked the shortest string again, bending close to her harp to hear it over the patricians’ murmurs. Too much—the note had gone sharp. She inched the key back with twitches […]

Content warning: Themes of death .Your dad woke from a ten-day coma. He was forty-seven and living in the in-between measurements of time. You were fourteen. He shared a room with four men at a nursing home that specialized in neuro diseases like Parkinson’s and MS. He had the latter. During the coma, the nursing […]