She tied for first last week, but this week she took the whole prize. It was a runaway victory and it’s not hard to see why. Aisling Weaver, @AislingWeaver is such a talented writer and I’m so glad she found us. The things she creates in five minutes are stunningly beautiful and this week’s entry gave me chills.

So congratulations, Aisling!

Here’s her winning entry:

That Night

The strangest things etch into your memory. The smell of burnt plastic, slick oily residue of smoke, the rafters turned to crazed charcoal reaching through the wreckage like grasping fingers.

All that remained of my life. All that remained of my home.

Somewhere in the crowd they waited for me; wife and child smudged dark as coal miners. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the smoldering pile of ruin. How had it started? I knew they’d tell us tomorrow, tell the insurance inspectors, searching for signs of foul play.

Didn’t they know I would’ve rather died than harm that house?

Reduced to detritus now there used to be a century of memories absorbed into those walls. My greatgrandfather’s chisel marks long erased from the beams by fire, my grandfather’s, mother’s, and daughter’s lines on the kitchen doorway, the path of their growth from child to adult, gone.

I wouldn’t get to watch those marks climb as Serena grew up. Wouldn’t get to mark my grandchildren.

Would never hand on the legacy of my family.

All of it lost. Reduced to blackness on a black night in the middle of winter. A night, that night, I knew I would never forget.