Our judge was moved by this nicely paced, honest story by Lucy Shapiro. We believe readers will also enjoy its gorgeous imagery and quiet realizations. Discover it today…

Fibonacci’s Daughter

When Kat was small, some years before her father died, she thought it was the way of all fathers to speak about the universe, just as she assumed all grandmothers spoke with a Brooklyn accent. It must be the duty of fathers, she thought, to stay up all night and keep watch of the stars—

Wake up, Katty-love, wake up! The stars are different tonight.

—and that it was the task of mothers to ruin the fun:

“Why are you two up? It’s freezing out here. She has school tomorrow.”

Her father was light. He was light in that he shed himself on everything around him, so that the space he occupied became filled with meaning, its ordinary objects buzzing with the anticipation of being discovered. If she were to hand him an apple, the fruit would be ignited by his eyes. He would look from the apple to her and back again, as though a golden web had formed between them. And he would smile and say Yes. Thank you, and almost laugh, not only amazed by the occurrence but satisfied by it, for he was quite sure that he had conjured both her and the apple.

Some nights at the dinner table her father would write on the napkin that lay beside his plate of cooling food with a marker from her coloring box, his eyes fresh and wet like blades of grass. And in the late evening she would hear his voice coming from the master bedroom, as jaunty and fluttering as a startled flock of starlings, but it was only her mother she saw as Kat peered through the crack in the door; she would be lying on the bed, her eyes following the words of the open book resting on her lap, as though she were alone in the room. And he would say,  “…the spiral I see in my sleep when I wake hangs above me in the stars a vision capture it before it passes by before the universe is in motion it has stopped so that I can see so that I can be the one to bring the light in the beginning there was not nothing there was singularity one vibration and it spiraled out to infinity and zero forever we are this and it is all of us connected in singularity…”

“You need to calm down,” her mother would say to him at last, and he would look at her and nod. Her mother would cry then as she made him breakfast, not hiding her tears, knowing his eyes and his ears and his whole body was light and light cannot see or hear or understand. She would lead him to the bed and give him something that made him sleep for days. Kat would refuse sleep these nights, placing a marble under the fitted sheet—a trick she’d learned from a story—fearing that her father would die in his bed, that her mother would keep him there until he became nothing but bone. When he emerged she crept around him like a cat, unsure it was really him. She would not hug him, because he walked as though he were held together by string. She sat and watched him as he ate, the oak of the table and chairs dead and dull despite his presence.

And when he did die, Kat would say it was from a bolt of lightning and her mother would say it was from a heart attack or some other calamity that is common and ordinary. And after he was gone her mother would hide her tears as she stood at the stove, and together they would cook and eat and argue about the laundry and dishes. And an apple was just an apple. Her mother would vacuum every room each day, the loud drone driving the girl out of the immaculate and dead house and into the woods, where the fiddlehead ferns slowly unfurl, and the clover quiver in the sun—where the great trees and the ground still vibrate with life.

Lucy Shapiro is from the D.C. area, raised in and out of the court rooms where her father argued, and the woods where her mother taught. She has a BA in Creative Writing and French Literature from UC Santa Cruz, where she served as Production Manager for Matchbox Magazine. Her fiction recently appeared in Caustic Frolic. She currently lives in Lexington, VA.