We are thrilled today to share the winning story of our 2025 Fall Flash Fiction Contest, by Kathryn Kulpa. Tomorrow we will announce the second and third place winners and hear from our judge Kelli Short Borges on her choices.

by Kathryn Kulpa

The day my grandparents eloped, the world cracked open.

The audacity of their love! A suitcase thrown in the back seat, pillows plumped to look like a sleeping girl. Ruby was the opposite of asleep. Half-past sixteen years old. A flapper in a flivver. Sam, her beau. Her parents disapproved of Sam, both of them too young, too flighty. Sam came for her anyway, in “that jalopy,” Sam and Ruby bumping along, and then Ruby felt that topless car come loose from the road like it was fixing to fly, then bang-slam down with a jolt that jittered her teeth. Ruby bit a slice of tongue, tasted blood, a heady cocktail of smoke and salt tang, like somebody’s bathtub bourbon. Not that Ruby had tasted bourbon before, except in Aunt Dora’s pecan pie. Ruby thought of all the drinks she hadn’t tasted, all the places she hadn’t seen, but there wasn’t time to think because Sam caught her around the waist. “You all right, girl?”

Ruby opened her mouth, but only a tiny, surprised puff of air came out as Sam’s hands slipped up to catch her breasts. No: it was Ruby who was slipping. The whole car was sinking, the back end going down, front flying up like one of those tilting rides at the carnival.

“Holy cats!” yelled Sam.

“What’s happening?” Ruby asked, her heart a bat, a butterfly, some fluttery thing flapping desperate wings. Ruby looked behind her and saw a jagged crack had formed in the road behind them where the blacktop had fallen in the middle, like a cake taken out of the oven too soon.

Sam tried to open the door, but it stuck in the asphalt already covering the bottom of the car. “Sinkhole,” Sam told her. “We got to get out now.”

Sam stood up on the front seat, his long legs swaying. Ruby grasped them just below the knee, felt the reassuring solidity of tweed trousers, the ridge of garters. Behind them, the road was a spreading cavity, and Ruby thought of the vast caverns of King Solomon’s mines, underground realms of diamonds and gold guarded by giant skeletons. Ruby craved adventure, stayed up late reading in her lace-canopied bed, and if you’d asked her yesterday she would have said books beat real life all hollow because exciting things only happened in books, but yesterday she wasn’t sitting in a sinking car. Sam looked at her. “Ruby, do you trust me?”

Sam wore round glasses, like Harold Lloyd in the pictures, and he had a sandy, freckled, open look, not exactly a sheik of Araby, as Ruby’s friend Thelma was quick to point out, but Ruby trusted him with her life.

“I do,” Ruby whispered, ending in a shriek as Sam grabbed hold of her and hefted her over the dashboard, so she stood on the top of the car, wobbling, swaying, leaning forward like a drunken hood ornament.

Sam held her steady. “You got to jump,” he said.

Ruby scrabbled forward as best she could, closed her eyes, and leapt, landing with skinned knees and what she’d later learn was a broken wrist on the broken macadam of the road, the old road that lay under the new road with blacktop peeled back, and Ruby crawled forward while that road crumbled behind her. There was a groan of metal and Ruby screamed Sam’s name, reached for him as Sam came flying, the car falling away, Sam slamming into her, knocking her down. Sam kicked, his leg caught under a chunk of road, slipping back, but Ruby grabbed his hands, Ruby held on like hellfire, Ruby saved him. They saved each other, Sam and Ruby crawling, scrabbling, stumbling away from the road-eaten car, the spreading sinkhole. Sam and Ruby leaning against a tree, thumbs out, her broken wrist, his broken ankle, waiting for rescue. Waiting for someone to give them a ride to the preacher where for the second time that day, Ruby said I do.

And all those years later, Grandpa Sam taking off his shoes and socks, rolling up his pants leg (“The girls don’t need to see your leg, Sam!”), but we did, the jagged red scar like a wolf bite. “You know how I got that scar?” Grandpa Sam said. “I got it getting married.”

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash