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Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize

We Who Survived The Sky

They say, although you never really know how reliable 'they' are, that over five million people go missing every year and are never heard from again. Is that worldwide? America only? I never cared enough to pay attention, because as far as I was concerned, it had nothing to do with me. No one I know has ever disappeared, and the odds say that no one I ever know ever will. There's more people who live in New York City than that, and I've never even been to New York City, much less lived there. I don't know anyone who has. Besides. There's so many more pressing matters to think about. I never have the sort of free time I need to think that, really, I'm playing a lottery with crappy odds I didn't ask to play in. Every single person I know is another entry every year, and first prize is ending up among those people that lose someone who never reappears. Sooner or later, there's a lot of people who win the grand prize jackpot they didn't know they were competing for. At seventeen the state of Oregon doesn't think I'm ready for the cut-throat world of scratch tickets and guessing lottery numbers. Turns out there's some lotteries out there that you don't need to play to win. Some people see their numbers on the television, some people have to wrestle them back from enthusiastic shop owners, and then some people take the scenic route from the bus stop and run into a wall of light and weightlessness halfway home. I grew up in a little town in the Pacific Northwest that's never been in any movies, and I hit the jackpot at seventeen years old.
Amesaya · 45.6K Views

Ghost Of The Slopes

At 15, Takeshi Morin was the future of alpine skiing. 16 Now, he’s just a ghost, a shell of his former self, can he make a swift return to the competitive scene. Born in the heart of the French Alps to a Japanese mother and French father, Takeshi Laurent Morin was raised on snow and speed. A prodigy in alpine skiing—slalom, giant slalom, downhill—he was ranked number one in the world for his age. His destiny was carved into the mountain itself. But when his mother, a world champion skier, dies in a tragic training accident, everything unravels. Days later, his father takes his own life, leaving Takeshi behind in a silence too heavy to bear. Stricken with grief and guilt, he withdraws from competition. What once felt like freedom on skis becomes suffocating. He drops from the national circuit, isolates himself in the mountains, and devotes himself to caring for his grandmother, the last remaining piece of his fractured family. But even that slips away when a heated outburst leads to her sudden death—another loss he believes he caused. Takeshi quits skiing for good. Though he remains one of the most gifted alpine racers on the planet, the sport has become a graveyard of memories he can’t outrun. When he’s sent to live in Japan with his aunt—a stern but kind headmistress of an elite international school for winter athletes—Takeshi is thrown into a new world of rigid schedules, elite training, and old rivals. The school operates across five countries, with each branch competing every year. Takeshi is to enrol in the Japanese branch, with its winter campus nestled in the mountains of Nagano. It's built to shape champions in alpine and freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and more. It’s everything he once wanted—except now, he wants nothing to do with it. Forced into competition, Takeshi is haunted by the very mountains he must conquer. As the international interschool alpine circuit approaches, hosted by the French branch in the very region where he grew up and classmates from his past reappear on rival teams, he must confront the trauma, guilt, and pressure. They have buried his love of skiing. To heal, he’ll have to descend into the past—before he can climb back toward the future. Set against the icy precision and breakneck speed of elite alpine skiing, Ghost of the Slopes is a powerful coming-of-age story about loss, survival, and rediscovering who you are when everything you loved is gone.
FateLikeNoneOther · 11.1K Views
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