A literary winner!

Okay, a runner-up, actually -- but I feel like a winner!

My 600-word story, "Poetry At Six," is one of two runners-up in NPR's Three Minute Fiction contest, selected from 3,600 entries. The judge, James Wood, is literary critic at The New Yorker. Whew!

The two requirements for the entries: No more than 600 words, and the first line must be "The nurse left work at five o'clock."

The link to The Woman's Belly Book is evident but subtle. The poetic foot, the iamb, that shares the story's center relates to "limping Iambe" (also known as Baubo, the Belly Goddess) in the Greek legend of Demeter and Persephone and in the Eleusinian Rites as well.

And then there's the "speckled bowl," of course.

"Poetry At Six" is posted here and you can hear about the contest itself here.

(If you activate the audio on that page, you can hear James Wood talk about my story a bit; that part isn't included in the written excerpt online.)

Fun!