Cover Story: Stranger than fiction?

Not even close

Dead armadillos, murder-inducing lottery tickets, mood-altering neckties, grilled quail.

These and a grab bag of other unexpected (and often offbeat) items surfaced among the short stories submitted to our first-ever fiction contest.

When we decided to launch the competition, we weren’t sure exactly what to expect. Would we be swarmed with entries, finding ourselves swimming in a sea of paper like some bizarre Dilbert comic, or would we languish in literary drought?

Would our one stipulation about content — that the story be somehow related to the South — elicit nothing but grits-and-collard-green writing, or, worse yet, meditations on the War of Northern Aggression? While our batch of nearly 200 submissions certainly included some decidedly trite takes on the South (and enough strong-willed, God-fearin’ grandmothers to fill every church in Macon), we also were pleasantly surprised by the variety of subject matter. Our three winners reflect that diversity, and then some.

In “86’d,” first-place winner Kim MacQueen cooks up an excellently understated account of a rivalry between two Charleston restaurants and the emotional toll of a relationship gone sour.

Second-place winner Christopher Bundy all but abandons the Southern connection with his darkly humorous “In Which Sadie Runs Off to India to Find Out What the Big Deal Is.” The sarcastic protagonist will strike a familiar note with any adult child of a ’60s hippie.

“Blessed in the Garden,” the third place winner by Mohit Bhasin, gives a gritty and Gothic lesson on growing up in the rural South, its narrator torn between sexuality and spirituality.

With the diversity of the entrants, our three judges differed greatly on their personal favorites. In order to avoid a Florida-esque fiasco on determining the winners, we asked each judge to numerically rank the finalists in terms of style, story and originality. The winners you see here — and the five finalists that appear only online — represent the high scorers. And as if the thrill of publication were not enough, the three top winners also get an additional reward: $500, $250 and $100, respectively.

?On to the winners ...