Thanks to our guest judge:

Literary Agent Isabel Lineberry

WOW! was honored to have guest judge literary agent Isabel Lineberry choose this season’s top winners. Thank you, Isabel, for sharing your time and efforts to make these contestants’ dreams come true!

Isabel’s bio:

Born to two bibliophiles, Isabel could not have grown up to be anything else. She was born and raised in the Southwest United States but always knew she wanted to move to the UK. In high school she set her sights on a job in the publishing industry and hasn’t blinked since. 

Isabel graduated in 2021 from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University with dual degrees in English Literature and Business Entrepreneurship. Just a few months later she was in Scotland pursuing an MLitt in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. She wrote her Masters thesis on Tamora Pierce and is a fan of Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler and Samantha Shannon.

At PLE, Isabel looks after foreign rights and audio rights inquiries, assists the Managing Director and is building a client list of her own focused on YA, New Adult and Romance of all kinds.

When not working, Isabel can usually be found reading or wandering a bookstore. Some of her favorite books include The Hunger Games, Pride and Prejudice and The Mysterious Benedict Society.

Pérez Literary & Entertainment Agency: https://www.perezliterary.com/about-us/the-team/

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Emily Bio:

 

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Huff and Puff

By Emily Rinkema

 

I built with straw first, because what did I, a girl, know about building a house. Stick with muffins, my late father and brothers liked to joke whenever I offered to help around the pig farm. 

I chose straw because it’s versatile and light, stronger than expected, more flexible than imagined, sturdier than written about in fairy tales. That’s what the straw salesman said, anyway, when he came by the farm and saw me all alone in a field behind a burned out foundation, digging holes. 

“You all alone out here on this big old farm digging holes?” he asked, and I told him that I was, in fact, all alone out here on this big old pig farm digging holes. Three of them, to be exact.

“Well, I’ve got just what a lady needs,” he winked, leaning on the bed of his truck. 

What I needed was a break. I listened to his pitch. I felt the merchandise. More hands, even salesman hands, would make for faster work, and straw sure would save me some money.

But it didn’t take long to figure out that hands, even helpful ones, get handsy. And there’s really only so long a lady can listen to facts about straw before she wants to burn it all down, dig another hole, and start over.

I built with sticks next, thick sticks the size of my lady arms. I planned better, took my time, watched YouTube videos. I built a tiny house with a tiny kitchen and a tiny oven just big enough for a tray of muffins. With only the roof to go, a man in a straw hat drove up, wrong turn on his way to visit his grandmother, he told me. 

“I have some advice,” he said. I climbed down my ladder, wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, asked him to hand me my water bottle. 

“Go on,” I said, after I had replenished my liquids. 

He explained it all to me. He talked slowly so I could take it in. 

His advice wasn’t bad, really, but he brushed my breast with his hand as he told me how angles work, why roofs need a slant. 

Sticks the size of my arms are not great for building. They are great for other things, though, being about the size of baseball bats, and they burn hotter and longer than straw.

Finally, I landed on brick. I found myself a bricklayer, not having the time or patience to watch any more YouTube. He said he was only willing to work for muffins and I chose to take him literally. He had strong hands, would make fast work of this build—and I knew my way around a muffin pan. 

For a few days I assisted, unloading bricks, moving bricks, inserting bricks, mixing mortar, spreading mortar, until I realized it really wasn’t all that difficult after all if you didn’t mind getting a little dirty. I didn’t actually need a bricklayer, and I was getting tired, exhausted, really, of the jokes about what I could insert or spread. 

“Muffin?” I called to him a few minutes after I took a sledgehammer to the wall he was working on. But he couldn’t hear me anymore, under all those bricks. So I started another fire. And I ate a muffin, wild blackberry and lemon.

And I built myself an impenetrable fucking house.

 

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What Emily Won:

• $400.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Rachel’s Bio:

Rachel O'Cleary studied English with a creative writing emphasis at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and then wrote mostly in secret for nearly 15 years before joining Writers HQ. She moves around quite a bit, but for the present moment lives with her family in the UK. Her stories have been printed in such wide-ranging publications as Smokelong Quarterly, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, and Reader's Digest, among many others. Her writing has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find a list of her published work (and not much else) at https://rachelocleary.wordpress.com.

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Belly Full of Stones

By Rachel O'Cleary

 

I find Dad in the hospital cafeteria, staring at a plate of runny scrambled eggs next to two triangles of white toast. I sit down across from him, and he looks up at me and nods, but neither of us says anything. I watch him nudge the eggs with his fork, watch the oily yellow liquid rush to fill the channels he digs through the middle. I’ve never seen Dad let his food go cold before. When we were kids, he always wolfed down his entire plate before I’d even touched mine.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Meggy?”

“What are we going to do if she really dies?”

“Same as always,” he says. “Guess you’ll fly back home to your life in the city, won’t you? And I’ll be here, where I always am. Jeff’s not far away.”

“But Dad…”

“What?”

I want to tell him I know how it was, now.

I want to ask him if he regrets anything. If he thinks it’s fair. 

I want to ask him if he ever actually loved her, or only needed her. Instead, I fall back into silence.

He looks up from his eggs.

“I’d have preferred to die first,” he says.

I clench my teeth so tightly I can feel it in my shoulders. Look up at him, then back down at his plate. I feel safer with my eyes on his eggs.

“What do you mean, Dad?”

He shrugs.

“She’d have coped better,” is all he says. But under the fluorescent lights, there is no hiding, and I can see it there: a single tear on my father’s cheek.

This man sitting in front of me, ignoring his breakfast, looking like a funhouse version of my dad (proportions wrong, slightly droopy), crying—actually crying—this man isn’t my dad, can’t possibly be my dad. My dad is someone else. My dad is a beast. He is the fabled wolf with a belly full of stones.

I don’t know what to say to this man who both is and is not my father.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?” I finally ask him.

He ignores the question. “Remember that place we used to have breakfast whenever we went to the waterpark in Wisconsin Dells?”

“Paul Bunyan’s,” I say, remembering the giant lumberjack statue that Jeff and I would race to spot from a mile away, the long tables with red-checked tablecloths, the platters of fluffy eggs, leaning towers of pancakes, and row upon row of bacon. Nothing in moderation, everything in abundance, always.

“They had great breakfasts,” Dad says.

“They did.”

“I loved those trips.”

“We all loved those trips.”

“Your mom didn’t.”

“Really?”

He shakes his head. “She wanted to. She tried, but she could never stop worrying long enough to enjoy herself. She’d go down the waterslide practically twisting her neck all the way around so she could make sure you and Jeff were ok without her.”

“But we were with you,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says.

And I see it now. I see the blue-green light inside the waterslide. Remember the way the double donut tube seemed to fly at warp speed with Dad’s added weight at the back. The hollow echo of my squeals, and his laughter. The way my weight couldn’t balance his, so he would sink like a stone in the little pool at the bottom of the slide, and I would fall backward into the cool water, and his big, tanned hands would tighten around me, but instead of pulling me down with him, he would lift me up, push me away, towards the steps where my mother was waiting, always waiting to pull me up.

 

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What Rachel Won:

• $300.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Amanda’s Bio:

RUNNERS UP: