Second place, prose: 'Stars' by Amiya Kishore
The story begins with my aunt, my father's sister. A face I can only see in photographs and in mirrors: the third child of seven, the second daughter.
Running through streets paved with century-old gravel, jasmine-adorned braids swinging as she flitted between townspeople's gossip, insistent vendors, and mindless tourists as if she were dancing at the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris instead of handling errands for her sister. Her mother's cry echoes out, Don't ruin your dress!
One day holding a bundle of squirming fleece that would come to be my father, singing to him a gentle lullaby of larks and minnows - a bittersweet memory accompanying him through most sleepless nights spent staring at the lunar halo his sister was named after.
She met a man whose face she had always seen in the stars, whom she gave her heart to; he kept it safe within his pocket, even as missiles bombarded overhead and his vessel was swallowed up into the earth, written off on a crumpled piece of paper as an unfortunate casualty - leaving her to fill the empty space in her chest with bottle after bottle until she packed up and left to a place where death could not part them.
Then comes my uncle, my mother's brother - her only brother. Born smiling and shrieking and laughing, emanating light and warmth in a dingy hospital room while the windows frosted over.
The little baby then transformed into an intelligent young man whose eyes reflected the heavens above, searching for answers beyond black frames. He bought his first telescope with money drenched in the sweat of three summers at an autoshop; rusty and somewhat faulty, but still able to see Andromeda chained to the rocks before Perseus comes to save her - his favorite constellation.
The stars in his eyes grew brighter with age, almost blinding in the nights spent tinkering with the telescope, adding modifications to a dying relic that would be preserved long enough to instill his passion in me.
Soon, a gray-haired professor with a wife and three children, driving alone at night through winding mountainside roads. I like to think he had his eyes up to the skies as always, looking at the glimmer of stars instead of the oncoming headlights, and as he painted the pavement a dark coat that would never wash away, he could still see Andromeda and Perseus as they beckoned him to join them.
And then, there's my grandfather. Although, I suppose he's not really my grandfather. Years after my father's father was laid to rest, his mother married another man who could dance almost as well as her late husband had done.
We share no blood, but in him I can see the same curve of a smirk on chapped lips and crows feet around eyes that never cease to crinkle that I've seen in the water's reflection on the summer days spent teaching me how to fish, how to cast a line, how to not let go of the fishing rod.
Strong tan arms from years working under a relentless sun and calloused fingers pointed upward, explaining how to navigate through the seas - a skill his own grandfather had taught him. You're never truly lost as long as you can look up, he liked to say.
After a while, he didn't talk much anymore: barely conscious, a pale husk laying on a twin bed under flickering lights, breathing through a tube. But, he was always listening. I'd tell him the stories of constellations spun by my uncle, of how Cassiopeia sacrificed her own daughter to monsters, of how Scorpius forever pursues Orion across the night sky, chasing him across the hemispheres but never catching him.
Eventually, he stopped listening, too. On the day I couldn't hear the whistle of his wheezing breath through the tube anymore, I opened the window and let in the stars so he could find his way home.
At last, we come to me. Born in the cold air of February under the unblinking eyes of Aquarius, neck craned to the sky and remaining that way like others before me: my aunt saw the face of her beloved, my uncle saw the answers to his questions of creation, and my grandfather saw a map spread out neatly in the sky.
But me, I see the jasmine that my aunt wore in her hair, the black rimmed glasses my uncle never took off, and the crows feet of a smile that still never ceases.