Previous Apollo Awards entries for your reference or entertainment!
Voting is closed. Thank you to everyone who participated in last year's Apollo Awards, and congratulations to the winners! Stay tuned for information for 2024!
Contest presented b...
Content Warning: Sally died (character death), so grief and all that, but it's not that sad. Plus some anxiety and self-annoyance I am projecting on Estelle because we don't know much of her.
Leo's mother died in a fire. Frank's died fighting. And now? Now, Sally Jackson had drowned.
If she was being honest, Estelle hadn't been prepared for her mom to die. Yes, Sally had breast cancer, but from what the doctors said, she was still expected to have a few more years left to live. Paul and her even moved to Canada to get less expensive health care. And yet, for some unknown reason, the fates seemed determined not to let her live another year. Or at least, it was easier to blame them.
Three weeks ago, Estelle had received a phone call from her dad. It was a Monday, she remembered, which was the first real sign that something was wrong: their weekly calls were scheduled on Fridays, and Fridays only. This helped her cope with the anxiety video calls still gave her sometimes.
The second sign that something wasn't right was Paul's red eyes and the dried tears on his cheeks. The last time she'd seen him cry, they'd found out Sally had cancer. Needless to say, this wasn't heading anywhere good.
Sure enough, Paul had then proceeded to explain how, while hiking near the Saint Lawrence River (which he called by its French name, fleuve Saint-Laurent), her mother had tripped, fallen a few meters down into the water and, heavied down by her winter clothes, frozen by the ice-cold water, weakened by age and cancer, failed to come back up. It took him quite a while, because he kept getting emotional. His daughter didn't know how to comfort him.
Throughout Paul's story, Estelle had simply suppressed a pained smile. She would've cried, should've cried, she knew, but her shock reaction, as she liked to call it, had always been to smile, and so, once she hung up, her eyes were still perfectly dry.
As much as Estelle did NOT want to go to Sally's funeral home and consequently face the fact that her mother was very much dead, she couldn't wait to see Percy, Paul, Annabeth and everyone else. Percy and Annabeth had moved to Canada with Paul and Sally to stay close to them. The relatively low-priced (but still good) education system probably didn't hurt either.
