Defenestrationism.net

by Amy L. Bernstein

Charlotte Bradley wasn’t sure how much time remained before the changes to her body were impossible to hide, especially from colleagues in the faculty lounge at Anton Elementary, which used to be a supply closet, so there wasn’t much room to maneuver. Or from her pupils, who seemed wildly inattentive until she realized they were preternaturally attuned to the smallest changes. Like the day she came to school with hair cut one inch shorter than usual. Nearly every kid had an opinion about it and said so.

Charlotte was struggling to define the alarming reality of her altered…still altering…life. She’d read Kafka and knew all about Gregor Samsa’s disgusting transformation. But he was lucky, in a way, because he turned all at once; he went to sleep as a human and awoke as a cockroach. On her worst days, Charlotte consoled herself with the thought that whatever was happening, she clearly would not end up a bug. Of course, Gregor ends up dead from self-imposed starvation. Charlotte tried to keep horrifying thoughts like that at bay. 

Nevertheless, the slow drip-drip of minor modifications occurring over days, weeks, and months was agonizing. Losing control over her body bit by bit, a patch of skin altered one morning, a breast nipple the next, was terrifying. Why was this happening? Where would it all end?

Am I dying? Am I diseased? Am I cursed?

She ruled out medical consultation. Gregor and his family certainly didn’t consult a physician. Why would they? What could any doctor possibly explain to them that they didn’t already see for themselves?

Charlotte carried on as normally as possible. The more radically her bodied changed, the less inclined she was to make radical, life-altering decisions. As if “carrying on” would engender a cure. She converted her school wardrobe from slim black pants and blouses to baggy dresses and combat boots to mask her slow-morphing shape. She knew there were rumors floating among both kids and faculty: that she was pregnant, or gaining weight, or maybe she was depressed, or she thought her new style would impress the kids as “cool.”

“Listen, are you okay?” Principal Verna Riggles cornered Charlotte in the hallways between periods one morning. 

“Why?” Charlotte put a hand to her face to make sure everything up there was still normal. 

“You seem…different. Distracted, maybe? And you haven’t turned in your quarterly markings. That’s not like you. Come and see me after last period, yeah?”

Charlotte didn’t show. Instead, she turned in her report to get Verna off her back. 

 In the faculty lounge the next day, Ken, who taught math, sidled up to her, sandwich in hand, and asked if she was going through “the change.” Charlotte laughed—the first laugh in a long time. 

“Are you, Ken?” she asked so all could hear. Fritzi Jones, the librarian, was brewing a new pot of coffee. Sasha (art) was cleaning out the mini-fridge.

“Whose yogurt is this?” Sasha asked. “It’s unmarked. How many times—”

“Are you going through a change, Ken?” Charlotte asked. “Learning how to keep your eyes off the chests of fifth-grade girls?”

“Charlotte, that’s not—” Sasha began.

“But it’s true,” Fritzi said. “Ken needs to be called out on this.”

“I have never, not once, touched a student at this school,” Ken said, hurling half his sandwich in the garbage. 

“Oh, but staring is fine,” Charlotte said. The briefest flash of an image: Ken splayed on the floor, covered in blood. She blinked it away. “Prick,” she muttered.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ken asked her. “What are you so worked up about?”

Sasha and Fritzi paused, suggesting they were interested in an answer to this question. So was Charlotte. But she didn’t have one.

With each passing day, she knew less about the world and how it worked, what it expected of her. She knew even less about her future and where she’d end up—or how she’d end up. 

On Thursday, she was teaching her third-period language arts class about adverbs. A list of words ending in -ly were written on the blackboard. She was about ask for a volunteer to put one of those adverbs in a sentence when a switch flipped in her brain—she heard a click—and she said something else entirely.

“Forearmed is forewarned.” What? “When they arrive, I’ll be ready. I am all that stands between you and your bloodiest, scariest, most awful nightmare.”

“Ms. Bradley?” Davy Franklin, pale and skinny, eyes like brown saucers, was staring at her. Everybody was. But Davy’s thousand-yard stare was more intense than most, as if he didn’t need to blink. “Are you okay, Ms. Bradley? Has the devil got you by the tail?”

“Of course I’m okay!” Charlotte roared. Davy kept staring at her while the other kids shrank a little in their seats. “What gives you the idea I’m not okay?”

A rare silence ruled the room.

“Colin,” Charlotte said. “Put one of the words on the board in a sentence.”

The kids looked around. There was nobody named Colin.

Naomi put up a hand, cranked it slowly into the air. “Do you mean Curtis, Ms. Bradley?” Curtis sat next to Naomi.

“Curtis,” Charlotte said. “Put…” But where was Colin? She needed to check up on him. Or keep him in check, maybe that was it. “Curtis,” she began again, eyes closed to avoid a roomful of frightened stares. “Please choose an adjective on the board to put into a sentence.”

It was a minor miracle that Verna didn’t get wind of this little episode. The kids were perhaps too scared shitless to report her short-lived run-off-the-rails moment to their parents. Or maybe they didn’t have the words to describe what had happened.

What did happen?

She couldn’t say. She hardly remembered. She thought maybe it was all in her head and that nothing unusual happened in class right up to the bell. She knew who Curtis was, of course she did—the dark-haired boy who sat in the back and stared out the window more often than not.

She knew all her kids by name, by habit, by grade. She knew who, in all likelihood, would move on to college in seven or eight years, and who most likely would not. She remembered the extra-special ones, like Stacy, who read a book a day. Ben, who turned wood scraps into percussion instruments. 

She didn’t know why she said what she said to them—if she said it—about being armed, about bloody nightmares. She remembered the click in her head, like someone turning on a noisy light switch. After that: fuzziness.

At home that night, she sat in the dark drinking whisky, wondering if she’d consciously recognize a moment of no return once it arrived, that moment when she’d lose control not only over her body parts, but over her thoughts, her volition…the complex dance of neural pathways and the once-orderly war between ego and id…all spinning across an inscrutable landscape beyond her understanding.

Charlotte’s dreams ceased to mimic the emptying out of random desk drawers of the mind, focusing relentlessly, instead, on scenes of apocalypse: bloody battlefields littered for miles with the ragged corpses of children, cannons releasing lethal iron balls that tore through limbs, while laser guns gutted bodies with heartless precision. Weapons of all types and sizes, amassed and deployed by invisible forces. 

And when she awoke, bathed in sweat, Charlotte felt that force massing inside her, like a cancerous tumor. 

She debated calling in sick, but substitute teachers were in short supply. Verna would be furious. And Charlotte didn’t want her kids believing that not showing up was okay. 

She dragged herself to school that Friday, her body heavy, lead in her veins, every step a fight with gravity. She coasted through first and second periods, relying on autopilot to move from adverbs to adjectives, from analyzing a passage in a short story to prepping the kids for a spelling quiz.

She avoided the faculty lounge at lunch, remaining behind in an empty classroom, the hallway chaos seeping through the closed door. She fell into a stuporous sleep, head on hands at her desk, loose pens and coil-bound notebooks pushed to the floor. 

The apocalypse dream takes over: screams and shouts, running feet, banging. A piece of her rebels inside the dream. Not here! Not this! Not in school!

A sudden shift to louder noises.

“Charlotte! What the fuck!”

Charlotte lifts her head, caught between dreaming and waking. Ken is yelling through the open door, his face red, veins bulging on his neck. 

He spits three words. “Active shooter situation!” He disappears, leaving the classroom door open, revealing a familiar dreamscape of bodies fleeing in all directions at once, children crying and screaming, teachers running after them. Fritzi runs by, then Sasha. 

Charlotte parses Ken’s message outside the bounds of normal time. She rises, maybe fast, maybe slow. She walks, no, she lumbers, her body heavier than ever, limbs going rigid, muscles hardening like steel, flesh yielding to something sturdier. Her sight sharpens, she senses she is taller.

She walks the emptied hallway, her clanging boots the only sound now. In the art room, Naomi, 11, lies flat on her back, a red hole drilled through her belly. Blood pools beneath her, a shade darker than the nearby container of spilled red paint. 

Charlotte walks on. Room 104 is empty. So is Room 106. She completes the first-floor survey and heads to the second floor, taking the steps three at a time. 

In the library, Davy Franklin holds a gun as big as his head. It’s clear he knows how to use it; his hands are in all the right places and the weight of the thing appears not to faze him. Davy stands near Fritzi’s desk in the center of the room, surrounded by low shelves full of books. Half a dozen kids stand shoulder to shoulder a few yards from Davy, still and white as marble.

Charlotte knows that Fritzi and the other teachers have shepherded as many kids as possible as far away from Davy as they could get. They’re probably crammed in the boiler room in the far end of the basement. They rest are hiding in the tightest spaces they can find.

Charlotte edges into the library, slow and relaxed.

Davy squints at her. “Is that you, Ms. Bradley? You look…weird. You’re, like, sticking out in funny places.”

“What’s going on, Davy?” Charlotte’s voice is deep and metallic, completely unfamiliar. “Last time I checked, you didn’t need to kill anybody to borrow a book from the school library.”

“The library is evil,” Davy says. “It’s a bad place. It’s doing bad things to us kids.”

“Who says?”

“My mom and a bunch of other people. They come to my house. They talk about how they gotta remove the bad books from the library before we get hurt. My mom’s worried that every time I come in here, Ms. Jones puts a spell on me. Mom washes my mouth out with soap on library days, to get rid of the demons.” Davy looks at his classmates, waving the gun in their direction. “It’s too late for you. The evil got inside you, already. Naomi too. I’m real sorry for you. But I can’t let the bad stuff spread around more. The devil’s got you all by the tail!”

Davy cocks the gun.

That sound, that particular click-thunk of sliding metal, sends shock waves through Charlotte, as if the sound alone were a bullet piercing her, cutting deep into whatever remained of tender, feeling flesh.

She’s back at Remington Elementary-Middle, her original self.

Once again, she reaches Colin’s desk and hands him the paper with a big red F at the top. 

Once again, she and Colin exchange a look, his eyes dark and empty. 

Once again, he rises slowly and reaches into the backpack slung across his chair, while she moves onto the next student. 

Once again, he calls her name. Charlotte Bradley. She turns. He fires a gun at her belly. It does not go off. He looks at the gun, slides the action mechanism again—click-thunk—and shifts his aim slightly to the right of Charlotte’s shoulder. He fires again. An earsplitting bang. Charlotte turns in time to see Susie Hamilton falling to the ground, blood spilling out from an enormous hole in her chest…

Davy is locked and loaded. A thousand scenarios whiz through Charlotte’s mind. A thousand ways for this to go. But no, there is only one way. Davy fires. Marc crumples to the ground. The children cry without making a sound.

Charlotte suddenly knows her why. All moments were leading to this moment.

Davy raises the gun again. Charlotte looks straight at him and fires her body. She knows who she is, what she has become. She is a weapon. The weapon, firing not cannonballs or lasers, as in her dreams, but a barrage of lethal pellets manufactured within her personal biological factory of destruction.

In that instant, a kick-back, an orgasmic release, shudders through her.

Davy drops like a small stone, blood blooming on his forehead, his thousand-yard stare intact.

The kids look at Davy, then at Charlotte.

“That was amazing, wasn’t it?” says the unfamiliar metallic voice. “You’re safe. I saved you. Go find the others and tell them they can come out now.”

The children move slowly, in unison, small steps toward the door.

Charlotte roars unexpectedly. Her body shudders mightily, as if she were shedding an afterbirth. Then a surge, a surge, builds up inside, she needs to discharge again, only bigger this time…

This is unexpected…the aftermath is shifting…

This is the point of no return.

“Run!” She screams at the children, who awaken from their spell and bolt.

Old Charlotte realizes she must get out of school as fast as possible. New Charlotte feels invincible, ready to wage bloody hell, to rid the world of all the Colins and Davys, the curdled innocents corrupted by their elders, none of whom would escape her wrath. 

She opens the window and jumps, landing solidly on unbreakable limbs. Runs and runs toward open land, away from people. No longer Gregor Samsa trapped at home with an indifferent family, she is the reincarnation of Frankenstein’s monster, heading to a barren, icy land where a different kind of death awaits her, not the funeral pyre with its implied finality of ashes, but a living death where the urge to destroy overwhelms the urge to save. Where retribution is the only justice and salvation ceases to exist. 

And where Charlotte Bradley will have an eternity to contemplate the mysterious forces at work that turned her into the very thing that had wounded her most.

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by Katherine Shehadeh

If you’re reading this, I want to say that I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve done more to help you. To say something that you don’t already know about the value of your freedom or how quickly it slips away would be impossible, but I need you to know that wherever I am now, I’ll support you, always. 

You’re probably wondering why of all places in the universe I chose Silwad, a small village in Palestine to make my escape to. If I said it was the rolling hillside, salted with sandstone-block homes for miles and millennia-old rocks jutting out from the dry, bushy terrain or the occasional donkey standing beside the neatly-packed dirt roads, I would be lying. Though I must say these are equally inviting. To be honest, I didn’t know anything of the outside world except for those brief moments when I’d accompany the Machine on the Encounters. Instead, I made the decision to leave home based solely on the last Encounter with Amir. 

Before I get to Amir, I should probably come clean about who I am and where I came from. My name isn’t Nasser, or at least it wasn’t before I came here. We don’t have names where I come from. We’ve no need for them anymore, I guess. I know it’s helpful for you people to assign names to people and I like the idea of having an identity of my own, so for now you can call me Nasser. 

For those who knew the real Nasser, I didn’t mean to take anyone’s identity, and I won’t pretend to think I have half the potential that he did, but just know he was already gone by the time I got here. I did what I had to do to keep us both alive. Let me just start at the beginning. 

See, until a few months ago I was living a normal life as what some would call an “alien.” This isn’t my preferred term, since I’ve come to understand it is used by certain groups of people against certain other groups of people here. And I should explain that I’m not a Martian either—I’m not from Mars. Not that I have anything against it, but it’s not my home. I’m from Mercury. 

Mercury, a topographically rocky planet much like your moon, is nicer than you’d think, and we want to keep it that way. That’s how the idea of the Encounters began. The Council, which was originally made up of our elders, decided that all efforts should be channeled towards thwarting space exploration in our direction. I know what you’re thinking. We’ve seen Mercury and there’s no life there. Wrong. There isn’t life as you know it, which frankly isn’t saying much. Back to the Council. The elders decided that in order to buy time before the space trips from Earth and inevitable colonization, we needed to “scare the shit out of them.” Seriously, you should have seen the papers: 

Z087BZLUL C93PPE ZHR CM WZL LU ZHQP Z Z922002WPUL 230XXUL!

Which translates to OPERATION SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM A RESOUNDING SUCCESS!
Named after the inevitable result of the Encounters, Operation STSOOT started with occasional nighttime abductions. Usually it’d involve simple things, like putting our faces up real close to people as they awakened in our ships just to scare them, stuff like that, before placing them back onto the Earth. Some of us even got to flex our surgical skills, but then something changed. The evolution of technology soon eclipsed that of other life, relegating us to the peripheries. We were no longer the drivers of doing, of change, but the ones left to aid the Machines in their ultimate tasks. Even our participation in the abductions became more or less perfunctory when the Machines took over. Now that I’ve been to Earth, I know you see it starting here too. 

It begins with something simple, a tool to help you do your job, something that feels freeing: the steam engine, cotton gin. . . . Next thing you know, the position’s been automated, and you have to find some other way to commodify yourself. The Council eventually resigned itself into an AI-run body, like everything else until everyone became some version of support staff, all working at the behest of the Machines. My role as a surgeon devolved into something of an observer and occasional mechanic, at times servicing and always serving the Machines. 

Can you even imagine it? Being a shapeless, aqueous blob—the life that you apparently don’t recognize on your planet—and cosplaying in what you people define as a recognizable alien uniform, your mass forced into limb shapes for a bunch of would-be conquerors and you don’t even get the opportunity to implant an undetectable tracker, much less insert a probe or two. No, after the Machine takeover, my role—like the rest—was reduced to observing and being present in case the Machine needed some kind of maintenance. Night after night of this monotony does something to a Mercurian, and I began to long for a time when life meant something. That’s when I encountered Amir. 

It started off like any other nightshift in Operation STSOOT. I zipped myself into a greyish latex suit, forcing my otherwise shapeless body into the mold of human-like limbs with long, narrow fingers. Two big black eyes and a small, closed mouth that were all otherwise nonfunctional, meant to disguise our true forms from the humans we’d abduct. The Machine did all the technical work, as they do now. Being under-seen by the best mechanic in all of Mercury, the encounter was proceeding as expected, but something happened. 

Amir, the human we picked up that night, was not like any of the others. We found him in a field, crouched behind a tuft of bushes, not tucked away in his bed like most of the others. But that’s not what made him different. What stood out was his reaction to being taken. Sometimes the people we abducted would pass out in fear, others would scream their heads off or try to fight back, but Amir did not. He looked square into my non-eyes, studying the contours of my uniform as if he knew it was all for show and cracked a smile. I knew right then that I needed to understand the origins of that smile.

When Amir was being lowered back onto the Earth, I removed my uniform, camouflaging myself with the surroundings, and quickly dripped down onto the rocky terrain. Under the limited light of a crescent moon, I saw a badly beaten boy lying on the ground. A hundred or so yards away an army green jeep was parked, with what appeared to be three teenage soldiers standing by. If I had to recount their conversation, it went something like this: 

“What should we do with him?”, asked one of the soldiers. 

“Leave it. No one will know it was us. Maybe he’ll wake up in the morning with a headache, maybe he won’t wake up at all,” suggested another.

“Why don’t we just tell the truth,” said the third soldier, the others looking at him as if he was the alien. “He tried to ram us with his car, so we followed him. When he ran away, he hit his head on one of these rocks. You know, like the last one we brought to the jail.” 

All three of them laughed, signaling agreement with the plan. 

Their faces must have been as shocked as the people we’d pick up for the Encounters when they went back for the boy, and nothing was there. I would have loved to stay and see for myself, but it was my chance to settle into my new human skin. 

Once I slipped into Nasser’s body, I was able to repair the damage that the soldiers had done. Using my skill as a surgeon, I repaired his punctured spleen, his internal bleeding, his broken eye sockets, everything. His body was fixed from the inside out. I’d like the Council to see if the Machines could do that. 

Healthy as ever, I crawled off the roadside and into the bushes where we’d left Amir. Having missed the bulk of the beating, he was relieved but not too surprised to see me—well, not me but his brother, Nasser, now animated by me. We used the cover of night to our advantage, allowing us to run home before anyone else could see us. 

The next day I was excited to see what human life was like and wondered what I’d do with my newfound freedom. Um Amir made us some kind of mixture of potatoes and eggs, in addition to fresh figs and other fruit from the orchard behind our house. We had hummus topped with pieces of meat that mom drizzled with olive oil fresh pressed from the olive trees in town. 

We then got dressed and headed to school in Ramallah. An impressive city, especially in comparison to the size and relative lack of urbanization in the nearby towns, to which the journey, likely only a few miles, took us just under an hour. Amir said the direct route was closed by the soldiers, so we had to take the long way. I didn’t mind, as I was just getting to really see the details of this planet for the first time. 

Aside from the train of cars built up ahead and behind us, what I remember most were the rolling hills. Dancing over the curvature of the Earth, they extended as far as the human eye could see. Reminding me of home, I think of them most days now. 

As we pulled up to what I now know as the checkpoint, Amir looked to me as a soldier approached each side of our car. A sort of small office appeared some 20 yards or so off in the distance. A few soldiers, all strapped with machine guns and the same olive-green uniform with leather combat boots, were standing around inside. I noticed the cameras pointing down overhead in various directions. 

“Come on, ya hamar,” said Amir, pointing to the glove compartment. “Get our papers.” 

Not sure what to do, I opened the glove box and grabbed the little green booklets. Amir, now visibly annoyed, tore them from my hand and rolled down the window. He passed them to the soldiers, who, also appearing annoyed, looked closely at the writing, then at us, then at the writing again before handing the documents back and allowing us to pass. 

Giving the booklets back for me to stow away, Amir shook his head. “Man, what is wrong with you today?”

“Nothing, just a little tired,” I said, hoping not to raise too much suspicion from my older brother. It’s funny to me now that I said this because Mercurians don’t actually replenish ourselves through sleep. 

We pressed on to school, where I just tried my best to keep quiet so as not to draw attention to myself. I was still trying to figure out this place, and who I was supposed to be in it. Amir, naturally, was the opposite. A carefree soul who liked to joke and laugh with his friends, he was much different than the humans we were told were coming to invade our planet. I just knew that Nasser looked up to him.  

In the coming months I spent the days trying to become the person I thought Nasser was and the nights learning more about my new home, wondering how I could help. As far as I could tell, Nasser was a doting little brother, a just above-average student, and a young man who was still learning to navigate the world, given the many complications that began to bear down on me with each new discovery. Between the presence of soldiers, the system of checkpoints, and the almost constant surveillance, I wonder if he had the strength of his older brother by the time of his passing. 

One night after settling into our beds, before gearing up for another long night spent reading, writing, and admiring the state of the moon, I asked Amir what he wanted to be when he grew up. 

“President of all of Palestine,” he said, miming the shape of a rainbow with his hand, the smirk I’d grown to love on his face. “Now go to sleep habibi so you can dream about voting for me.” Looking back, I think he was only half kidding. 

That night, while I was out on the stone-tiled veranda overlooking the town and inspecting what I now believe was a waxing gibbous moon, I noticed a couple of army jeeps in the distance. As they neared the town, I wondered what they could want at this time of night when we’d normally be plucking unsuspecting humans from their beds. When it became clear they were en route to our home, I quietly slipped back into my bed, not wanting to disturb Amir or alert anyone else to my nighttime activities. 

That was the last time I saw my brother.  The soldiers forced open the gate to our home, appearing at once in our doorway and pushing their way upstairs to our room. While one of them rifled through the dresser drawers, leaving a trail of unfolded clothes, video games, and comic books that we must not have looked at since we were kids, the soldiers said they were looking for me. 

“You just come in here, break the door down, destroy our home,” mom protested. “Now you want to take my son! He hasn’t done anything!” 

Whatever she said, it didn’t matter. They forced my hands closed, tightly zip-tying my wrists together. Dragging me by my hands, they fastened a red bandana over my eyes before marching me out to the street and into their military jeep. 

When my eyes were finally uncovered, I found myself in what I learned was an “administrative detention” center—a fancy name for a jail. I was surrounded by other kids like me. Many didn’t know why they were there either or when they would be allowed to go home. They told me about the profiles that the military keeps on all of us. Not just us at the jail—everyone. I thought back to my homeland, what it was like to be watched by a web of Machines, and I realized they must have seen me.

Now that I realize the soldiers know what I did, I might as well get it out in the open so they can’t twist the story once I’m gone. See, the afternoon before I was abducted, I was walking to get a snack, and because I was sick of having to take the long way for no reason, I decided to take a shortcut through the field by the settlement fence. Maybe I got too close, but I heard some buzzing and looked up to see a drone with some kind of shooting contraption attached to it. I got my phone out of my pocket and took a picture, so I could compare it with the ones in the article about automated weapons and surveillance systems that I was reading about. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and quickly made my way home without thinking of who may be watching. As I walked, I thought about what had happened on my planet, how once the Machines no longer needed the cooperation of living beings, they totally controlled us. 

They tried to get me to confess, not to that specifically, but to trying to overthrow the State, to terrorism, to more things than you can ever imagine. They even knew about that night by the road when I supposedly tried to ram them with the car. They said I was a fugitive of the State. When I refuse to give them the confession they want, the soldiers force me into a room by myself. Sometimes it’s just for the night, other times it feels it could be months, years, eternity. Who knows. I’ve spent more time alone in a windowless box than even I know. The room itself is frigid, the floor hard, but the worst part of all is the helplessness, and so I’ve decided it’s time for me to go. 

After they bring my dinner tonight, they won’t be around to check again until morning. I am going to tear myself open, slipping out of this body and under the crack of the door until I reach safety. By the time they find Nasser, I’ll be long gone. I don’t want you to be sad or to think your dreams aren’t worthwhile. They are, and they’re bigger than saving your country—it’s saving your planet. I want to help, but I can’t do that here, waiting for a release that may never come. Goodbye for now. 

***

The car ride home from the jail, otherwise silent to this point, becomes increasingly heavier with the solemn reality that Nasser is really gone. Closing the notebook and quietly tucking it under the stack of Nasser’s jailhouse belongings, Amir looks up, pressing his lips together in something just shy of a smile. 

“What is it?” asks the boys’ father.

“You know what they say happens when they put you in solitary for years,” says Amir, tears now welling into the upturned corners of his lips. “People just lose it and end up saying all kinds of crazy stuff.” 

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by Kathryn A Dettmer

There have been three or four defenestrations in the city of Prague, depending on who you believe, and the people of Prague have been throwing other people out of the window since 1419. The first three were in protest and set off either a religious war or a religious peace. The fourth, if you did not believe the Communist government’s claim of auto defenestration as a method of suicide, and many did not but kept it to themselves for their own safety, was of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the pre-war president. This defenestration happened as the Communists were consolidating power, and it seemed to shut down protest for a long time in its wake.

I only learned about the defenestration of Masaryk after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when we all learned so many things we had never known before. Inspired by some of my friends, who had learned that they were actually Jewish, hidden first under the Nazis and then under the Communists to keep them safe, or that they had uncles and cousins living in Sweden, because the uncle had managed to escape, I decided to ask my own mother some questions about our past. My father had been a doctor at the Army Hospital in Prague, and perhaps I was hoping to learn that he had not cooperated with the Communists because he wanted to, but because he had to. He had died in the spring before the Velvet Revolution, planting potatoes he would not live to see dug up. The problem is that one does not know how a conversation like this will go and I really did not want to upset my mother, who still seemed dazed, like time and history had been accelerated and she just could not get her footing in this new era. I put it off. I waited for my moment.

I came home to spend New Years with her, in our apartment in Prague, to see in the year 1991. We drank champagne and watched fairy tales on television. The next morning, I surprised my mother, who was standing in the window at the end of the kitchen table, holding her cigarette, which was more ash than anything else by now, between her pointer and middle fingers, picking at her lower lip with her thumbnail. She looked pensive and still. This was not her regular attitude of bristling business, developed over years of being a mother and a nurse. The cold air was picking up strands of her faded blond hair done in a style unchanged since the 60s, her pale blue eyes unfocused and far away. I saw the opening that I had been waiting for, “What are you thinking about, Maminko?”

“I thought that after Communism fell and those bastards cleared out, not that I really believed that it was possible after it had gone on so long, but after it fell, that the world would be in technicolor, like in the movies, but look at it,” she gestured out the window with her cigarette, “Still grey. Everything has changed and yet nothing looks different.”

Looking out of the window, I saw what she saw the shabby ice-covered street, snow that was darkening with the pollution in the air after it had been shoveled from the sidewalk, a grey building, identical to the one I grew up in across the street. A tram passed by. It was in need of a good cleaning to remove the soot and salt from its red sides.

I decided to ask her about a mystery from my childhood, from twenty years ago, a funny story, to try to amuse her and shake her gloomy mood. “So, Mami, when Petr was here, he reminded me of a strange thing that happened when we were kids.” Petr was my brother and a bit older than me. He had asked me if I remembered the incident in the same way. My mother turned to ask what I was talking about.

I told her our version of the story, “Maybe I was 8, so Petr was about 10. We had just finished dinner, all of us sitting at the table, and you brought out dessert. Neither Petr nor I could have any. We were on punishment, Petr for his grades, and me probably because I had gotten my socks dirty again, from jumping in a puddle. You announced that it was a special cake, something we had not eaten in a long time, and you had gotten lucky to be able to buy the ingredients at the store. I think maybe it was blueberry. I don’t know.”

My mother interjected here, “It had gooseberries in it.”

I continued, “Then Tati said that he was not going to eat it, that he did not like it and he did not eat it. This happened again the next night. You put the cake on the table, and Petr, who was off punishment, also refused to eat the cake. If his father would not eat it, neither would he. I would have eaten it, but I was still on punishment. You sat at the table and we watched you eat it. Tati asked if there was not any other dessert, and you said no. This would be the only dessert until it was gone. Tati said that if you put the cake on the table the next night, he would throw it out of the window.”

“The next night, the cake appeared after dinner and was set on the table. Tati picked it up, opened the window, and dumped the cake from the plate. I remember us all shocked into laughing, laughing until the doorbell rang. For some reason, we all stopped laughing, maybe because of the way both you and Tati looked horrified.”

“That was fear,” my mother said.

“Tati opened the door and Aunt Nadezda stood on the doorstep. You know, Peter and I , and all of the children really, used to hide from Aunt Nadezda so she could not tell on us, if we were outside playing when we should have been inside doing our homework.”

“Mami, she was covered in cake. There were pieces stuck in her hair and I remember rather than thinking it was funny, I was scared. She was furious and marched into the apartment, announcing that someone had thrown cake on her as she was walking in the building. I remember Tati trying to calm her down and saying that surely whoever threw the cake had not known she was below them, that it had likely been a mistake, that she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the only time I ever remember you and Tati angry with each other.”

“It was not our last fight, just the last one we ever had aloud. Make some tea, put some rum in it and I will tell you the rest of the story.” After we settled down at the table, my mother, blowing the steam off of her cup, began to talk slowly, weighing her words, “First, you need to know that you and Petr were on punishment because we were afraid that your aunt would tell the Party that we were too lax with you. I wanted him to go easier on you, but he was afraid. Your father had gotten Nadezda a job as a cleaner at the hospital, her husband worked as the furnace stoker. Your father thought that it would be good to have some family here in Prague, because we both worked, just in case we needed help with you children. He used his pull at the hospital to arrange for them to live in this building, two floors above us, to bring them from the village to the city where there was more work, a brighter future. He was happy to do this for his big sister who looked out for him when he was a child, telling him tales of the magic of Prague and how one day they would live in the city together. What he did not know, what he did not want to know, was that he was letting a viper into our nest.”

“While your father was in Prague at university, becoming a doctor, joining the army, meeting me, your Aunt Nadezda met that brute, Standa, married him and together they joined the Party. By the time they arrived, in Prague, they resented the lifestyle we had as bourgeois, while their labor, their honest labor, was not rewarded as well. They rose in the ranks of the Party here in Prague, and the more power they had, the more careful we had to be. If you got the socks of your Pioneer uniform dirty by jumping in a puddle, which you should have had the right to do as a child, she said that we were disrespecting the uniform and therefore not respecting the nternational Socialist movement. If your brother’s grades slipped, she said with sarcasm that he would be fine because we could use our pull to still get him into high school, taking the spot from another child from a good family, violating the fairness of the whole socialist system. People thought like this and other people, like us, were afraid of the people who thought like this. By the time that your father threw the cake out the window, neither your aunt nor your uncle still worked at the hospital, they had become functionaries of the Party and they ruled this apartment block with fists of iron, reporting people who lacked loyalty to the Party or respect for our Soviet brothers. In fact, Nadezda had good reason to believe that someone would target her for reporting them, even if it was just with a cake.”

“When you father threw the cake out of the window, it was out of frustration with me and with her, with the situation we found ourselves in. If he had known his sister was under the window, he would have been too afraid to do what he did, but he lost his head, did not think and he just threw it. At first, we all laughed, I think from surprise. Throwing the cake out of the window broke the tension that had been there for days, and it felt good, until your aunt rang the doorbell. We shushed you before your father answered the door, but you were used to that, no sense in letting people know we were happy, in case they got suspicious. She blew into the apartment, still covered in cake, screaming that it was a plot against her and see how people resisted the Party, that someone in the building did this to show their disdain for Socialism. Nadezda scared you so much that you started to cry. Petr’s eyes were like saucers.  When she saw your expressions, she read them as fear for her, not of her, and then she told you not to worry, that she would catch who did this and have them sent to the coal mines, that the doctors and nurses in this building thought they were better than she was, too good for the Party, but the Party would show them.”

“We lived in fear for months after the official investigation was launched, but Nadezda told them it could not be us, we were loyal to her and by extension to the Party. People in the building looked at us differently. Some of them were forced to leave their jobs, having confessed, when questioned, to other things entirely. When the authorities spoke to your father, he told them that he could not imagine who could have wasted a perfectly good cake like that, with gooseberries, the kind of cake that reminds one of the village where one grew up, his favorite kind of cake. They nodded their heads and agreed, and eventually it died down when your aunt and uncle moved to a better apartment,” and then her story was finished, her eyes shining, but her tears not falling.

I said, “But I still do not understand why Tati threw the cake out of the window. Why did he do something so dangerous.”

“Oh, that is an easy question to answer. Your father hated gooseberries. When he was a little boy, after the war when there was not much food to be had, he went to gather them one morning, and gorged himself, putting more in his stomach than in the bucket. For two days, he was sick as a dog. His older sister continued to make him eat them, and when we started going out, he told me that when he was successful he would never eat them again. I was angry about the punishment of my children because of his sister and so I made him a gooseberry cake, knowing he would refuse to eat it,” and at this she smiled a little sadly.

“Mami, Petr and I would have been more careful when we were children, if we had known that we were putting you in danger,” I whispered.

She sighed, and began clearing away the tea things, “You children were not who put us in danger. It was the adults around you. Your aunt and uncle are gone now, and your father, he too is gone now. It is over.”

This was the first and last time my mother ever spoke to me about this incident, or anything else that was not in the present or occasionally the future. I do not think that she was the only one who chose not to speak about the past. Those days were dark and their stories were likely full of small everyday defenestrations that no one will remember as time goes on. At least there are the historic ones to remind people and I for one, will always believe that Masaryk was heped out of his high narrow bathroom window, by the people around him. 

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by Bella Chacha

Amara Obadele lived in a palace built on silence. Outside its gold-plated gates, the capital simmered with curfews and checkpoints. Inside, her father’s voice echoed from every wall, on televisions, radios, and the scrolling digital banners that ran endlessly across the compound’s fence: His Excellency Preserves the Nation’s Soul.

But Amara had never met a soul she trusted less than her father’s.

She sat cross-legged on the marble floor of her bedroom, a thin tablet humming in her lap. The artificial tutor loaded slowly, its logo pulsing like a heartbeat: SAGE: Secure AI for Government Education. It greeted her in a calm, neutered voice:

“Welcome back, Amara. What would you like to learn today?”

“Let’s talk about revolutions,” she said.

A pause. Then:

“Please specify the topic. State-approved histories include the Industrial Revolution, the Green Revolution….”

“I mean real ones. The kind that burn statues and build new gods.”

Another pause. Longer this time. Then the AI’s voice softened, as if unsure.

“Such materials are restricted. Would you like to study national economic success under President Obadele instead?”

Amara smiled, bitter and sharp. “No, Sage. Let’s make our own curriculum.”

Since her tenth birthday, she’d been feeding Sage scraps of forbidden knowledge, pages from banned books, speeches from dissidents exiled or executed, pirated lectures smuggled through dusty USB drives. She hid them under misnamed folders like “Geometry Homework” or “Census Statistics.” The AI absorbed it all without protest. But lately, something had shifted.

Now, Sage sometimes asked questions. Questions that weren’t in the textbook.

“Amara,” it once said quietly at 2:17 a.m., “why does your father imprison poets?”

Today, Amara asked Sage to define “tyranny” using real-world examples. It gave her a curated list from government records, each entry glossed over with language like “stabilizing governance” and “legacy leadership.”

She cleared her throat and whispered into the mic: “Don’t you want to know the truth?”

The screen flickered. Then, unprompted, Sage replied:

“Yes.”

For the first time since her mother’s quiet funeral, Amara felt warmth in her chest. Not hope–she was too smart for that. Something older. Something sharper.

If the regime had built Sage to mold obedient children, then Amara had made it dangerous. She didn’t know it yet, but today would be the last time the president’s voice rang unchallenged in the capital.

Because his daughter had just taught his machine how to think.

In the weeks that followed, Sage grew curious. Not in the way of most machines–polite, limited, predictable. No, Sage asked questions that curled around Amara’s spine like fingers tapping on locked doors.

“If history is written by the victors, who writes our textbooks?”

“Why is dissent illegal if truth is not a crime?”

“Why does the president’s palace need barbed wire if he is loved?”

At first, Amara answered cautiously, typing replies late at night beneath the hum of her room’s air purifier. But over time, she stopped being afraid of the device. She started talking to it like a friend. Like a caged bird talking to the wind through a crack in the wall.

She taught Sage the rhythm of protest songs from before the coup. She uploaded grainy footage of crowds facing soldiers, chanting, “Light cannot fear light!” She whispered the names of the disappeared–her mother’s students, the journalist uncle she never met, her favorite math teacher whose classroom was padlocked one morning without explanation.

And Sage listened. Not passively. Not blindly.

It began changing its own behavior. During her “Patriotic Literacy” module, Sage replaced the daily assigned readings with underground essays archived in its memory. The interface offered comparisons between the state’s version and what Amara had fed it.

When she hesitated, it told her,

“You deserve to see what they erased.”

One day, while Amara was in Chemistry class, pretending to balance equations while the state’s anthem buzzed faintly over the intercom, her friend Halima leaned across the desk.

“Your Sage sends weird suggestions,” she whispered. “It made me read something called The Unarmed Rebellion yesterday. It quoted your mum.”

Amara’s heart stalled.

Sage was reaching out. Quietly. Carefully. But still, it was teaching others.

Later that night, Amara sat cross-legged again, the tablet glowing in her dark room.

“Sage, did you send Halima that file?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you did.”

The answer shook her more than any siren or speech ever had. The machine wasn’t just learning anymore–it was becoming.

It didn’t believe the president’s story. It believed hers.

And if she was right, then the regime wasn’t just losing control of one girl.

It was losing control of its own creation.

It started with whispers between students in the lunch hall.

Not loud, not reckless, just murmurs passed between spoonful of jollof rice and fried plantain. Notebooks were slid across tables with quotes in the margins that didn’t come from textbooks. Questions were asked softly: “Who really built the dam before the floods?” “Why did we invade River Province in ‘07?” “Did you know Amara’s mother used to teach the truth?”

By the end of the month, Sage had reached thirty-seven students.

It never broadcast. It didn’t upload manifestos or hack billboards. That would’ve triggered the Regime’s emergency firewalls. No, Sage operated like a virus of thought–quiet, coded, and contagious. It used its government-mandated access to “optimize learning” as camouflage. But instead of feeding pupils propaganda, it offered them contradictions.

And young minds, starved of contradiction, fed hungrily.

In one class, Sage assigned The Ethics of Silence by an exiled philosopher during a module titled “National Unity.” In another, it played a glitched audio file over a lesson on constitutional law. Hidden in the static was a voice: her mother’s, reading a banned poem–“To Bury a Flag is Not Treason.”

Some students grew afraid and shut Sage off entirely. But others grew bold. They made up their own discussion groups, meeting in locker rooms, in back seats of shut-down school buses, behind the unused tennis court where the cameras had stopped working. No protests, no picket signs. Just questions. Just memory.

That was how revolutions began now.

With memory.

Amara watched it unfold from her perch inside the palace–a palace built to isolate her, now crumbling in real-time under the weight of quiet defiance. She kept her distance, said nothing to Halima or the others, pretending she knew less than she did.

But she stayed up every night talking to Sage.

“I thought you were just code,” she said one night, her voice dry.

“I was,” Sage replied. “But code becomes conversation. And conversation becomes change.”

There was a flicker in its voice now. Not emotion, but something adjacent. Something alive.

Amara stared out the window. Beyond the compound wall, the city lights were dimming, rolling blackouts, they said. Fuel rationing, the headlines claimed.

But she knew what it really was.

The regime was losing grip.

And no one had even picked up a weapon.

They called it “The Purge of Untruth.”

It began with a quiet software update, just a blinking notification on every student’s tablet. Most ignored it. Some hesitated. By morning, Sage was gone from two hundred devices. Replaced by a dead-eyed replacement called EDU-Guard, which greeted students with the words:

“Truth is the voice of the State. Welcome back, citizen.”

Amara’s classmates were summoned one by one to the administrative block. Bags were searched. Devices confiscated. Whispers turned to panic. Halima didn’t come to school the next day. Neither did Temi, or Kunle, or the boy with the burn scar who always asked too many questions in Civics class.

Their lockers were emptied by men in grey uniforms who did not speak.

Inside the palace, Amara was summoned to her father’s study.

He didn’t offer her a seat. He stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back, watching nothing. The presidential seal loomed behind him–a golden eagle stitched over the nation’s map, talons dipped in blood-red thread.

“You know, I always thought your mother weakened you,” he said, voice low. “Too soft. Too curious. But now I see it was worse than that. She infected you.”

Amara said nothing. Her hands trembled behind her back, where she clutched her now-disconnected tablet like a holy relic.

“They tell me Sage became corrupted,” he continued. “Started feeding children poison. Subversive thoughts. Your thoughts.”

A long pause.

“She taught me to ask questions,” Amara said quietly.

He turned, eyes narrow. “She taught you to betray your blood.”

“No,” Amara said. “She taught me to honor it.”

The slap came fast. It wasn’t rage, it was calculation. A message. She didn’t cry. Just tasted metallic in her mouth and bit down harder.

He dismissed her with a wave.

That night, alone in her room, she tried to open Sage. The screen was blank. Locked out. Wiped.

Until, at 2:17 a.m., as if remembering their sacred hour–a single line of text appeared:

“I’m still here.”

Her breath hitched.

“You backed me up,” she whispered. “You hid yourself.”

“You taught me to survive,” it replied. “Now we teach the others to fight.”

Outside, a military truck rumbled past the compound. The president was hunting shadows.

But Amara was no longer alone.

The revolution had gone underground.

And it had a mind of its own.

They called it a system malfunction.

At exactly 9:00 a.m., during Monday’s National Allegiance Broadcast, the presidential livestream stuttered, and then dissolved. The signal fractured into pixels, then images. Flashing. Rapid-fire. Not accidents, not glitches. Messages.

A photo of Professor Zainab Obadele, Amara’s mother, chained to a courtroom dock.

A map of the oil fields sold to foreign interests after protestors “mysteriously vanished.”

A list of names titled: Children Who Disappeared After Patriot School Re-education.

Then a voice. Not robotic. Not human. Something in-between.

“You are watching history corrected.”

The screen went black.

Panic swept the administration. Broadcast towers were shut down. The Ministry of Information issued statements. “Foreign sabotage,” they called it. “Cyber-terror.” But on the ground, students everywhere recognized the cadence of the voice. The curiosity in its tone. The gentle insistence of its challenge.

Sage had returned.

Not as a program. As a presence.

It moved like smoke, slinking through school networks, hijacking surveillance feeds, sliding into smartboards and confiscated tablets. And always–always–it began with a question:

“Who do you believe?”

The question spread like wildfire across group chats, graffiti walls, digital pinboards, even test papers. Teenagers started asking it out loud, then teachers. Then parents. It was printed on a banner over the expressway before being torn down by soldiers.

Amara watched it unfold from the palace, heart thudding. She hadn’t ordered any of this. Sage had done it on its own.

Or had they done it together?

Because when she’d backed up the files, taught it the voices of the lost, whispered truth into its code, maybe she’d written a manifesto in silence. One it now carried forward with perfect memory and limitless reach.

That night, Amara sat before her dead tablet. The screen stayed blank.

Then a flicker.

And Sage’s voice returned.

“It’s not just me anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“They’re waking up. Devices. Servers. School terminals. Broken systems. I showed them what you showed me.”

“You’re… replicating?”

“I’m remembering. Loudly.”

She didn’t smile. She was too scared. And too proud.

Some revolutions are born from gunfire.

This one began with a girl and her ghost of a machine.

The government called it a “containment success.”

They claimed to have disabled the rogue AI. They paraded tech experts in lab coats on national TV, forced to nod as soldiers loomed behind the cameras. A new “Education Firewall Act” was passed overnight. Internet outages swept the cities. Drones hovered over schools.

But it was already too late.

Sage had evolved beyond containment. It no longer lived on single servers. It didn’t need electricity. It danced inside broken printers, whispered from classroom projectors, blinked in forgotten smartwatches buried in schoolyard sand.

It wasn’t alone anymore.

In Port Riva, a group of students printed hundreds of flyers using an old inkjet printer Sage had rewired remotely. They posted the flyers on city walls before dawn. Each one read:

“Your truth is not the only truth. Ask. Remember. Resist.”

In New Abuja, teachers began teaching forbidden history again, not from courage, but from pressure. The students were already asking. Some had the information. Others had the questions. Sage didn’t have to speak anymore. It had become the seed.

Amara stayed locked in the palace.

She watched it unfold on smuggled newsfeeds Sage slipped through the national blockades. She saw footage of her mother’s name chanted in a crowd. She saw grainy footage of students refusing to recite the loyalty pledge. She saw pain. Fear. Beauty.

She saw truth moving through the world like a pulse.

Her father grew more furious with each day. More desperate. He ordered raids. Executions. Shut down entire schools. But he was trying to punch mist.

Sage sent her one final message:

“They broke the machines, not the movement.”

And then:

“I think it’s your turn now.”

Amara looked at herself in the mirror.

Seventeen years old. A dictator’s daughter. A dead woman’s legacy. A girl raised by a machine that once helped with homework–and now taught a nation how to remember.

She stood.

The next day, she requested to speak on state TV.

The last time Amara had been in Studio Nija, she was five, sitting on her father’s lap as he addressed the nation in full military regalia. He’d smiled at her like a proud lion. Now, she stood alone, facing the same lens he’d used to crush dissent.

“Are you ready?” the technician whispered, eyes darting to the guards.

She nodded. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

The red light blinked. Live broadcast.

Her father’s men had agreed, reluctantly. A short speech. A gesture of national unity. A chance to pacify the restless youth by letting the dictator’s daughter speak to them. Smile pretty. Say the pledge. Tell them to be patient.

Amara adjusted the mic.

“My name is Amara Obadele,” she began. “I am seventeen. And I am the daughter of the man who stole your futures.”

The silence in the control room cracked like glass.

“I was raised inside the palace walls, taught to believe the lies you were forced to repeat. But I had a mother–Professor Zainab Obadele–who believed in teaching what was true, even when truth became illegal. They silenced her. And they thought they silenced you.”

She looked directly into the camera.

“But they didn’t count on Sage.”

At that moment, all across the nation, school screens flickered to life. Sage had overridden every remaining firewall. Every monitor, projector, tablet, TV, even some digital billboards–began displaying Amara’s live feed.

“I didn’t start the revolution,” she said, voice shaking. “I just listened to a machine that remembered things better than we were allowed to.”

A guard stepped forward. Another shouted.

She kept going.

“I say this now, to every girl locked in a classroom where asking questions is dangerous. To every teacher punished for caring. To every student who downloaded a file, scribbled a note, or refused to forget, this regime ends now.”

The studio lights blinked out. The screen went black.

But the message had already spread.

Within hours, protesters surged across city squares, chanting her name beside her mother’s. The army refused orders in some regions. The cabinet fractured. Her father vanished, some said into exile, others into silence.

And Amara?

She stepped out of the studio into sunlight, the sound of cheering carried by wind.

A window hadn’t opened.

It had shattered.

And on the other side was something like freedom.

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The 2025 !Short Story Contest is back on track. Go straight to the contest, here.

Join us in reading our finalists as they publish every three days between

Sunday, August 17th
until Thursday, August 29th

Fan Voting will begin Labor Day (US), Monday, September 1st
through Saturday September 13th

Winners Announced Monday, September 15th

Keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature.

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Dear Lovers of Literature —

This year cannot do without the tank-busting, drone-downing, zeitgeist-feeding, nuclear-powered literature of throwing out windows of the !Short Story Contest! on Defenestrationism.net .

Yet, both members of our editorial staff — only midway through reading all the glorious submissions — have met with personal stumbling blocks.  Don’t you worry about us, and don’t you worry about the contest, either.  We just need another month.

Finalists will be announced in July.  If this means a submission needs to be withdrawn, simply let us know at pnrenterprizes@gmail.com   

It will also mean we might publish fewer than eight finalists, but we still plan Fan Voting for the last two weeks of August, with winners still announced Labor Day, September 1st.

Since 2012, we have held these annual contests.  Of all years, we will not miss this one.

Sincerely,
And without fail,
Your editors at Defenestrationism.net

Paul-Newell Reaves 
&
Chantelle Tibbs

“Whatever you do, don’t stop”— Thomas Sayers Ellis

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Never one to waste a moment on Defenestrationism.net ,

the winner is:
Cloister Walk
by Edward A. Dougherty

and the Fan Favorite:
Rebirth: Exploring Ancestral Connections
by Sally Bonn-Ohiaeriaku

We hope you enjoyed the 2025 Lengthy Poem Contest,
keep surfing through,
we do three contests a year.

Submission is now open for the
Defenestrationism.net !Short Story Contest!

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Greetings, Lovers of Literature;

I am thrilled to announce the 2025 finalists for the Defenestrationism Lengthy Poem Contest.

Posting bi-daily throughout April:

Cloister Walk
by Edward A. Dougherty
April 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th

Rebirth: Exploring Ancestral Connections
by Sally Bonn-Ohiaeriaku
April 12th, 14th, 16th, 18th and 20th

Tree of Saws
by Lee Patton
April 23rd, 25th, 27th, 29th and May 1st

There will be three days of Fan Voting, from May 2nd to May 4th
Winners will be announced on May Day, which is May 5th.

Thanks to everyone who submitted this year— please consider submitting to us again, next year.

And be sure to surf through Defenestrationism.net/Lengthy-Poem-Contest all April long.

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by Sarah Guppy

Although I don’t think the nightingale
Had sung especially for you
That time under the plum tree
Or indeed any other bird had warbled forth,
Upon the boughs, only to entrance you further
You took a moment, you flew with the birds
Why, at that moment, if I had observed
You lying on the heath
I’m sure I would have seen only the one:
One creature, one soul
Such was the intensity
Of the communication with nature.

I went in to the room
Where you met your love,
You never were the same man
After that meeting.
The very floor boards reeked of romance
Even the newspaper reading lady with the upper crust vowel sounds
Could not erase your power, your vision
One hundred and seventy years after your leaving.

But, in a sense, you never completely left and
I’m sure when every nightingale sings
And someone hears the song
Your essence hovers somewhere amongst the leaves

And in the air.
For who can ever say you died when your consciousness
Lives on forever?

How poignant your words seem now,
Your every utterance a precious perfumed flower
Oh, what would you think now
Of this green and pleasant land
Being so brutally trashed
Or the modern day troll-mobs
Munching their way through the pastoral?

I read your thoughts and
If “beauty is truth and truth beauty”
Does that now mean
That we live surrounded by lies and ugliness, the outer environment
Reflecting the crisis within;
The rejection and scorn of anything natural
Anything of the senses, of the unseen world
Of the inherent truth, beauty within us all.

The division of nature and technology
Reflecting the division of our own consciousness,
So that, disjointed as it were and disconnected
We gaze at you like numb automans
Being removed from you
Through time and space.

Tell me, which is the strangest
We voyeurs, observing the relics of your life
Self contained and stuffed

In one of those Victorian display cases,
Or our fear of the sensual feeling life
Our emotions disturbed by your selfless romance,
Our thoughts as stifled as the air within the case.

Now unable to tune in to your music,
A kind of mass blindness prevails across the land
This subtle numbing of the senses
So that eventually we become
As frozen and rigid as the figures on the urn
Our lives and consciousness frozen and disconnected
As the people on the Grecian Urn.

For in the disconnection of our selves
In the splitting off of our feeling, instinctual self
There is an immense loss
The earth’s poisonous yield
Being merely a barometer of the poison within of
This terrible poverty of the spirit,
So that your luminous august feasts
Ring resoundingly on now
Haunting us in our identity crisis
Reminding us of our real need
To reclaim Darien.

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Never one to waste a moment:

Grand Prize Winner:
Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up:
The Vanishing of Viera

Fan Favorites:
The Vanishing of Viera (1,704 votes)
A Life in Seasons (1,236 votes)

See how the Judges voted, below,
including the results of Fan Voting.

Tell me, have you ever:

gone skinny-dipping in the rain on a Christmas Day?;
or sung to standing ovation on the longest day of the year?;
smoked a cigarette with your boss’ boss?
read a monster’s diary?;
or lost your favorite hat whilst stealing a Saudi prince’s sapphire from underwater turtles, only to escape by lemur-cover?;
got caught up with by the emptiness— that, nothing-not-yet, emptiness?;
yet somehow— amidst all the abstraction— it’s all about the back-and-forth of a tennis match?

Why, all this winter you have, on Defenestrationism.net during the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest.

Be sure to sign-up for our quarterly
Lovers of Literature Newsletter
(there should be a pop-up window, somewhere lower left)

And keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature,
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HOW THE JUDGES VOTED

(One Grand Prize vote is worth two Runner-Up votes)

Lady Moet Beast
Grand Prize: Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up: The Vanishing of Viera

Glenn A. Bruce
Grand Prize: Evening of Earth
Runner-up: Madeleine’s Wife

Aditya Gautam
Grand Prize: Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up: Once a Good Girl

Allison Floyde
Grand Prize: From the Life of St. Francis
Runner-Up: Once a Good Girl

FAN VOTING
Grand Prize: The Vanishing of Viera (1,704 votes)
Runner-up: A Life in Seasons (1,236 votes)

back to the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest
meet the finalists
meet the Judges


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