Every Day in May (grand prize winner) ✔

May 7th

I already told you we've never met. Instead of saying "no" and leaving it at that, however, I'm going to pretend you posed a slightly different, yet related question-one I can work with a bit more.

We've never met, but we have seen each other. Or rather, I've seen you. You've glanced in my direction. Whether you saw me, really saw me, I can't say.

The Celebration of the Unending Line of Leaders (CULL Day as some of us refer to it in the privacy of our own homes) is marked with a large assembly in the Tower arena. Your father always asks his favored minions-of-the-month and their families to attend the event. The year before, he'd invited his chauffer's cousin, his chief advisor's step-daughter-all sorts of peripheral Loyalists. But not you. Never you.

Until that year. The year we were ten, the Leader decided you could be present for the assembly as long as you passed yourself off as a relative of his steward. If anyone asked, the steward was to say you were a cousin visiting from the south. Perhaps your mother convinced him to allow you to attend, perhaps your teacher told him it would be advantageous if you had the experience. Whatever the reason, it was a rare show of reasonableness that you weren't about to question.

You must have felt eager, never having been allowed in public before. To see such a cherished national event-the anticipation must have been palpable.

You weren't the only one aglow with happiness over the coming celebration.

Every year, a school choir is selected to sing before the Leader. Imagine my classmates' glee when we were told our humble girls' school would receive the honor this time around. I couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement, even though I had every reason to shun such an event. Living in the shadow of the Riots that had taken place the previous summer, we'd had little cause to celebrate.

After weeks of rehearsals CULL Day arrived. The headmistress inspected our high-collared blouses and woolen skirts for the minutest imperfections; we combed our hair back into neatly braided plates held in place by golden ribbons and shined our best pairs of shoes before setting out. That morning, forty-two smiling daughters filed into the Tower to stand before their Father.

I barely remember the songs we sang or the polite claps we received. What I do recall is a boy with honey-blonde hair towards the left-hand side of the stage rising from his seat to peer over the impossibly tall man seated in front of him. Across from the boy poised on an elevated chair sat a beautiful woman with the same golden hair-her eyes fixated first on the boy and then on me.

Words spilled out harmoniously from my tongue as I invoked the Leader's praises, yet for all I cared, the Leader could have been on the moon rather than a few feet away from me. Every note I sang I knew in my heart was for that boy, so anxious to see everything going on around him, and for the woman who held my gaze even after the tears bled down her cheeks to stain her emerald gown.

When the ceremony ended, I searched the stands for you, but you were already gone, blended back into the obscurity of your Tower life as stealthily as your father was able to see to it. I myself went back to my own life, the honor of being chosen for that year's CULL Day choir forgotten the moment your mother's sorrowful eyes left mine in order to search in vain for your own.