For our February Book of the Month, we featured Darkness Becomes Her and the sequel A Beautiful Evil by Kelly Keaton. Both books feature the significant influence of Greek mythology, so for our writing contest we asked you to write your own modernized twist on a classic myth!
Our two winners will each receive a set of finished copies of Darkness Becomes Her and A Beautiful Evil courtesy of Simon & Schuster!
Here are the winners & their stories:
Amy Cheng, a story inspired by Pandora:
It is an otherwise ordinary Tuesday evening when the worst storm of the century hits London. Three hundred people are wounded, five killed, eighteen trams are derailed, and, most importantly, all communications are knocked out.
Penelope Dorian is thirty-five, a successful businesswoman, and entirely dependent on her phone. She has never been married and has no current paramour, but she has one son and, being the youngest of seven children, enough nieces and nephews to never be wanting in the company of the young. She believes in creationism on Sundays, reincarnation on Wednesdays, and evolution on the remaining days; Fridays are board meetings and pub nights, Saturdays are Oxfam volunteer hours and country club gossip, Tuesdays and Thursdays are biweekly celebrations of insomnia. Simply put, she does not have time for young Jonathan Dorian, nor for the academic emails that used to show up in her email inbox but now are redirected into the junk folder: Back to School Night? No, there’s a board meeting. Open House? Sorry, but wages must be reorganized. A-levels? Textbooks are in the study room. Graduation? Here, take a hundred quid and buy yourself a gown and cap. Birthday? What birthday?
So when authorities finally reach Penelope Dorian to tell her that little Johnny is in the hospital, she goes. What else can she do? He is dying, and she is a miracle worker. She, of course, takes her threads.
Wonder Threads are what launched Ms. Dorian into fame. There are eight: red for love, yellow for happiness, green for nature, blue for peace, purple for wealth, brown for truth, black for authority, and white for hope. All who have bought it claim that the quality of their lives has improved.
At the hospital, a sterile white monster that bleach has scrubbed clean on both inside and outside, her stilettos click and click and click through six floors until she is in her son’s room. There are ducklings prancing on the wall, as though the hospital personnel has not quite realized that her son is seventeen, not seven. Penelope Dorian is not breathing hard, which one nurse will late observe as “disturbing.” Another will call it “inhuman.”
At any rate, it is clear Penelope Dorian is here to stay. She lays her threads down on her son’s crisp, white blankets. This is not the first time these threads have been laid on her son. The first time was when he was two. Then, there had been seven threads. All of them but white.
“Wake up now,” Penelope Dorian tells her son.
A single white thread is enough to wake her son, weave the broken parts of his body together, neat and simple. Jonathan opens his eyes. They are as dark as the bruises under his eyes and the shadows carved in his cheeks. He looks at his mother with his father’s eyes.
The first time Penelope Dorian laid these threads down, she forgot hope. She left it in the box in her car.
And you must understand that hope is a killer.
Jonathan looks at his mother, and he tells her, “I want to die.”
Natalie Richards, a story inspired by Orpheus in the Underworld:
“Eurydice, you’re up.”
Eurydice groaned, rubbing her bleary eyes, “Come on, really?” She squinted up at Hades, “I got one just two months ago. When did Orpheus become a popular name again?”
Hades just grinned and left. But then, he could afford to. He wasn’t the one who had to walk up miles and miles of a dark, twisting Stair behind some idiot who would take her in reach of freedom only to lose his nerve and look back, causing her to fall back until the next Orpheus came along. Not that the Underworld was so bad, she reminded herself as she climbed out of bed and dug for her clothes. She hadn’t worn her chiton casually since the invention of blue jeans, but it was tradition that she must wear the clothes of her time for the Stair. Very impractical if you asked her, which of course nobody did.
Twenty minutes later she made her way to the audience chamber. Unlike the rest of the Underworld, which was actually rather cheerful, the audience chamber was precisely as gloomy as one might expect. Hades and Persephone sat still as statues on thrones that Persephone had often complained were even more uncomfortable than they looked and flattened one’s posterior.
“Behold, the Lady Eurydice,” Hades intoned in a sepulchral voice.
Ignoring Hades’ prepared speech, Eurydice turned to see who the Moirae had dragged in this time. The sisters had decreed that she would be freed from the Underworld by Orpheus, and when that moronic musician had failed, they had scrambled to repair their mistake by sending Orpheus after Orpheus to her.
This one wasn’t so bad, she decided after looking at him for a moment. He was certainly better than the last one, who had been bald and much too old. This one was at least pleasant to look upon and close to her age, but he did have a strange-looking neck. Also, he wasn’t wearing the moody black so often donned by his predecessors, but instead jeans and practical boots.
Hades’ spiel finally wound down and there was a long silence before Orpheus #983 simply nodded and started off on the path, Eurydice trailing behind with a yawn. She could climb the Stair in her sleep. Watching Orpheus, she saw no hesitation in his step, but confidence was to be expected at the beginning. She leaned closer to see what was wrong with his neck, laughed. He had wound a bandage around it so he couldn’t look back without fully turning, but that wasn’t what made her laugh. Written on the back in bold red were the words ‘Follow Me!’ accompanied by a cheerful smiley face. Eurydice found herself smiling; this one was clever. Cheeky, but clever.
The miles passed quicker than she would have believed possible, and she felt her hope growing with every step, and her breath caught with surprise when she saw a flicker of light ahead. They rounded a corner and she found herself staring at the sky. And then Orpheus took that final step.
Thanks to both our winners & everyone who entered the contest! More writing contest winners will be announced soon.
Novel Novice 
Yay! Thank you so much. 🙂