Yes, this is a “boast post”! I can’t help it…I know it’s my first post but it’s so cool!

I’m excited to announce that I got 4th Place in NYCMidnight’s 2022 250-word microfiction contest! There were over 5000 contestants, so this is a big honor.

If you’ve never participated, the NYCMidnight contests work on prompts and time limits. This particular contest had three rounds. 5,000+ contestants from all over the world took place in the first round and were placed into different groups with about 30 participants per group. The group was given a category (like historical fiction or suspense), an action that you had to work into your story, and a word. You could use that word in any way, and even use a different word as long as it had the first word in it (for example, if the word was “guest” you could use “guesthouse in your submission). Then, they gave you 24 hours to write and turn in your submission.

The top 5 stories were taken from each group and moved to Round 2, which whittled the field down to around 1,000 contestants. The top 5 submissions from each of the Round 2 groups then participated in the Final Round, which had about 125 contestants.

The Final Round didn’t give us a category, but the action we had to use was “collapsing”, and we also had to get the word “stain” in there somewhere. So, here’s what I came up with, and miraculously, out of all those gifted writers in the final heat, my little story came in 4th place:

MAKING MERENGUES

When I’m down, I make meringue cookies. There’s something magical about whipping egg whites and watching them transform from disgusting liquid slime into towering white peaks of heavenly fluff. Miraculous, like an ugly caterpillar morphing into a beautiful butterfly. Makes me feel better about things.

My mother always says life is like a meringue cookie. Make it correctly, it’s wondrous. Make it wrong, it falls flat.

“Always use a stainless-steel bowl to make meringue,” she said once. “If you use plastic, the eggs’ll never fluff into peaks. They’ll just stay eggs.”

She spouted out that nugget of wisdom as we made meringues for my wedding reception. My choice of husband (Dan) was, according to her, a plastic bowl. Our decision not to have kids was another plastic bowl. And me flipping from one job to another constituted an entire cupboard full of inferior crockery. Mom is convinced all my life choices have led to one humongous collapsing meringue.

And as Dan’s car crunches up the driveway, I pull my latest batch of cookies from the oven. They went in big and fluffy but come out flat as pancakes. Drat. I peel one off the tray and eat it anyway.

Dan comes in. “Try this,” I say, popping a deflated cookie into his mouth.

“Mmm,” he says. “Delish.”

I agree. They’re not pretty, nor perfect, but they taste fabulous. Maybe life really is like a meringue cookie. Even when it collapses, you still end up with something worth savoring.