During November 2024, we invited writers to enter a writing competition themed around Stories of Hidden Shadows. This was our first writing competition, and participants were invited to submit either prose or poetry responses to the theme.
We received many lovely submissions and our judges, Emmett and Linda, chose one poetry and one prose winner. Keep reading to check out the winning pieces and runners-up!
Poetry Winner: Jonna Kihlman
You Never Really Left
You never really left,
you’re still floating in my space.
Passing through walls like a memory kept.
Echoes of stories we shared before bed.
Like a ghost you simmer above my skin.
Whispering things that are better left unsaid.
“Tell me to go and I’ll leave straight away.”
But I don’t have the heart, there’s still space for you left.
Under creaking floorboards where I walk at night.
I prepared you a room where you can safely rest.
Jonna Kihlman is a Swedish poet whose work delves into love, grief, magic, and mythology. Her poetry, blending vivid imagery with emotional depth, has appeared in The Thicket Magazine, Litmora Literary Magazine, Poetic Reveries Magazine, The Letters Home Collection, Prosetrics Magazine, Coalition for Digital Narratives, and The Petrichor Gazette. Jonna’s writing invites readers into a world where the ordinary intertwines with the extraordinary, creating timeless reflections. Explore more of her work at poemsbyjonna.com or follow her poetic journey on Instagram @poemsbyjonna.
Prose Winner: Leslie Wilber
Unsolved Mysteries, With Robert Stack
We are tiptoeing down the stairs, shoulders of our tee shirts whispering against the wall. Silently, we lift our purses off the hook and slide on our shoes. We pull on the heaviest jacket by the door if it’s winter, even if that jacket isn’t our own. We are turning the door knob so slow and smooth it should be a World Cup sport, all training and skill and beauty; we are taking the pickup truck at the end of the drive, if we’re in the country. Unless we have to run into the woods. If we’re in the city, we slip away —to a diner, to a subway, to a taxi whose driver will be the last person who swears he saw us.
Some of us are crazy and some of us are cunning, and it’s hard to remember which is which. The crazy ones woke up one day with our skin hot-itching like it wanted to crawl off our bodies, and it made us think new things: maybe someone was coming for us, maybe a brilliant knowledge sparked in our minds and we had to protect it. The thoughts made us stir, until we had to bust out and leave. The cunning ones weren’t driven by heat. We started planning long before. We knew we had to be careful, and we knew we had to be smart. We had to be quiet, except saying all the right things before we left: we’d noticed a strange car, gotten a funny letter. Our boss had sketchy business dealings.
We cook grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup on Tuesdays. We pull out cloth napkins and TV trays, and make a homey little theater in front of the big-screen TV. We like to see whose family didn’t think us clever enough to make a plan, to see who really misses us. If anyone does.
The man in the trench coat will say how perplexing it is, that we just disappeared. He will ask: whatever did we mean, by things that we said those months before—that we got those strange phone calls, or knocks on the door, or that things were suddenly fine, after all this time, that our marriage was falling apart, that it was coming back together. Our families will tell him we were excited about our new car. Our new job. Our new love.
And the viewers itch to know—why were the keys on the seat of the pickup truck? And why did we take our purses along? And why did we leave our purses behind?
Leslie Wilber, (she/her) writes short fiction and draws little comics in Morgantown, West Virginia. Find her on X @LeslieWilber, Bluesky @lesliewilber.bsky.social, or on her website, LeslieWilber.com.
Runners-up
| Poetry | Yirou (Eva) He | Armour Shouldn’t Be Sharp |
| Prose | Sophia Adamowicz | Closing Time at Mr Marvell’s Museum of Curiosities |
Both winners had a choice between a print copy of a recent Spellbinder issue or a free subscription to our website for one year. We look forward to hosting more competitions in the future!