Defenestrationism.net

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,
we do this three times a year.

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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The Judges have voted, the Fans have voted—
in only one day, on MLK Day (US), January 20th,
the winners will be announced.

In the meantime, scroll down for the poem
“Unethical Monogamy” by Chantelle Tibbs
and be sure to come through on Wednesday for
“Dedication to Keats” by Sarah Guppy

Keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature,
we do this three times a year.

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by Chantelle Tibbs

I walk the tightest of ropes
My feet slip gripping a winding cord
Which makes its way up and around my neck
Toes twist in unnatural ways
To stay the course slammed into me 
Since the mere thought I could ever one day flower

Tighter it squeezes
Every excuse to continue the squeeze 
“No daughter of mine…”
“But I love you…”
“If you loved me you wouldn’t…”
Be me. 

I taste vomit in my throat
The sound of my own bones cracking 
My neck. My body. 
What did she do?
What could I have done
Better.
Nothing.

I crawl the tightest prison wire
It constricts, contorts
I am tiny. I am broken. Dug into.
Penetrated, the irony.
Closing in on my heart
as it watches my demise.

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