This is the first installment of our Open Source Fiction Contest. The idea behind it is that each week readers (that means you, please) will submit the next “chapter” of the story, running somewhere in the 400- to 500-word range. We’ll pick the best we receive and print it in these pages (with attribution, of course). It’s Choose Your Own Adventure, served AV style.
It is fitting that J’Lyn Chapman’s Bear Stories, a sequence of thirty short prose poems, starts where most wilderness tales can’t help but tread—a small, nondescript cabin in the middle of human abandon.