And the winner is...

One of the reasons I continue to run the Friday Challenge is because I continue to learn from doing it. Most of the time the learning is pleasant or amusing. This time, what I mostly learned is that it was probably a mistake for me to have presented the "9/11/2001" challenge in the first place, because I don't yet have the emotional distance to deal with it.

I'm going to skip my usual pattern of critiquing the submissions entry-by-entry. I just can't manage that level of abstraction. Arisia, yours began in a very strong way, but then turned very strange. Al... I'm going to have to ask you to see me after class, young man. Rigel Kent and The Bandit, yours both were quite interesting in that they helped me to see the day and its aftermath through eyes very different from my own. The story that really hit me where I live, though, was Torainfor's entry, "A Day at the Beach." If I were running a literary magazine this is the one I'd publish, even as I'm uncertain whether it's even possible to communicate the feelings to someone who's never sweated out the possibility of deployment or the deployment of a loved one. After I read this one, I had to take a break and go get some fresh air.

That said, I'm going to pick Snowdog's entry as the winner this week, mostly because I feel I have to pick one. It's a good story, well told, and being perhaps a touch more accessible to the average reader than "A Day at the Beach." When it got to the part about the wall of names and photos in Penn Station, I choked.

I'm sorry, folks. It was a mistake for me to have run this challenge in the first place, as I wasn't emotionally prepared to judge the responses. I'll try to avoid doing this again.