The most awaited moment of our contest has arrived; we now know which stories were chosen by the jury for this first edition of #mirandoalcielo. It has been difficult to decide among all your science fiction tales, or our present, in which eclipses, the sun, the moon, astronomy, and space travel have been the protagonists.
The winner of the #mirandoalcielo short-story contest, organized by Zenda and sponsored by Iberdrola, is Judith Esteban, awarded 1,000 euros. The two finalists of the competition, in which more than four hundred stories have participated, are Javier Ignacio Gallardo Torras and Laura Furones Fragoso, who will receive 500 euros each. The jury evaluated the literary quality and originality of the submitted texts.
The jury has consisted of Juan Gómez-Jurado, Espido Freire, Paula Izquierdo and Leandro Pérez.
Next we reproduce the three awarded tales. You can consult the prize rules at this link. Thanks to everyone for taking part.
WINNER
UNTITLED
JUDITH ESTEBAN
The first one who called was a German, in February of last year. He asked if we had rooms for August 12, 2026, and I told him that if he wanted I could also reserve it for my granddaughter’s wedding, which hasn’t been born yet. I had to explain it twice. I hung up, searched on my son’s computer, and spent the afternoon sitting there.
Nobody comes here. Here, in August, the village fills with those who left, empties on September fifteenth, and that’s all. We are one hundred and forty in winter. We have six rooms upstairs because my father-in-law built them in 1978 thinking about some reservoirs that were never built.
All six were booked in three days.
Then came everything else: a lady from Barcelona who rented the Herrero house for twelve hundred euros, the town council people who painted the fronton, the guy from the Palencia astronomical association who came in March to see “the site” and spent half an hour looking at the hill with a face that was a joy to behold. We ordered four hundred cardboard glasses. I bought cups. My brother-in-law brought two tall fridges and placed them behind the bar, blocking the passage, and they’re still there.
Last night a hundred and sixty people who aren’t from here slept here. In shops, in cars, in the Miguelón field, which charged five euros per vehicle and didn’t give so much as a receipt. There was a Japanese couple. There was a van from Toulouse with an antenna on top. There was a man alone, older, with a telescope in a metal box that he set up on the square with the calm of a watchmaker, not speaking to anyone.
By ten in the morning there wasn’t a soul left and the sky was a pale white.
Not black. White. With a hazy sky that would be wet in three days, which here never matters because what matters is whether it rains. At the bar, two guys with their phones checked three different pages and spoke in percentages. Sixty. Eighty. Forty.
—The sky has to clear —one said, with his hands pressed together.
I served a hundred-odd coffees, I don’t know how many beers, sixty subs. My daughter in the kitchen. My daughter-in-law on the terrace. At eleven-thirty the ice ran out and I sent the kid to Villalba for more; he came back with seven bags and the news that in Villalba it was also cloudy.
The telescope man didn’t ask for anything all morning. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking up, and he wasn’t angry. He looked at it as one looks at a patient.
At seven twenty in the evening the whole square stood up. Nobody told them to. Four hundred people on their feet, with the black cardboard in hand, very polite, staring at a sky the color of a sheet.
And then, it began.
I stood at the door, with the cloth over my shoulder. The first thing was the light, which turned strange, not dark yet, but dirty. Then the air, which came from nowhere and made the skin on my arm prickle as if a chicken were being plucked, and I, sixty-one years in this town, knew where the winds come from here.
Everything fell silent. The birds, who at that hour make a racket, fell silent all at once, as if someone had closed a door. My sister’s chickens went inside on their own. The Herreros’ dog hid under a car and didn’t come out.
And night fell.
Not the nine-thirty night, no. A night at four in the morning, with the streetlights turning on by themselves around the square because they have a brain, and the cold creeping up from the ground, and four hundred people in complete silence.
You could see nothing up there. A gray cap. Neither sun, nor crown, nor those stars the Palencia guy talked about.
No one left.
There they stood the two minutes, still, in the middle of a darkness they couldn’t look at, and I, at the door, could see the backs of their necks and thought how much this looked like a Mass. The Japanese man had the camera hanging, off, the woman from Barcelona cried, and he didn’t. The telescope man didn’t touch the telescope.
Then it returned, suddenly, dirty light again, the temperature, the birds all making their usual racket at once.
And the square applauded.
That is something I don’t know how to explain to my son, who saw it on the Internet from Valladolid, in a Zamora site where the sky was clear; he told me, mom, what a shame, with all the trouble you’ve gone through. They applauded. Four hundred people applauding a sky covered by a cloud.
Then, of course, the bar came into play.
It filled up in four minutes and we stayed until two. And that’s when the part about the clear sky began. That if in the middle a gap opened near the tower. That if ten seconds, fifteen. One man from Ponferrada swore he’d seen the entire ring and drew it on a napkin. His wife said no, he was looking at the ground. There were loud debates until dawn and a lot of beers were sold.
I didn’t see it. I was looking at them.
The telescope man was the last to leave. He lowered the device from the square, put it away piece by piece with the same calm, and walked in to pay for the water he hadn’t drunk. I told him he was welcome, what a task, that he’d come from so far for nothing.
And he told me no.
That he had already seen it three times, in Chile and in two places I didn’t recognize, and that what he hadn’t seen before was a whole town on its feet watching a cloud.
He paid. Left a tip. And left.
***
FINALISTS
THE DAY THE PORT UNLEASHED
JAVIER IGNACIO GALLARDO TORRAS
The first one to notice was Chispa, because his shoes came undone.
We were on the pier waiting for the eclipse, half a dozen men with cardboard glasses and faces that didn’t trust the manufacturer. Chispa looked at his loose laces, tied them again, and before he could stand up, they were already loose again.
—These glasses have something odd —he said.
—Well, until I put them on, the laces were in place.
At eight twenty there came the first strike.
The prow of the Maribel separated from the pontoon and collided with the neighboring boat. The mooring line was still intact, but the guide’s rope had simply come apart. Not broken: undone. The cord lay there, with that calm things have after causing a problem.
We ran to secure the boat.
—Make another knot —yelled Manolo.
I did.
It came undone.
We tried a lashing. It lasted four seconds. Then a double sheet bend, a slipknot and something the Chispa invented that wouldn’t have held a still boat.
By then, the moorings on the half-dock began to loosen.
Boats moved slowly, like customers leaving a terrace without paying. First the San Telmo, then the María Luisa, then two small recreational dinghies whose owners only came in August and who nodded with their chins.
—The fenders! —someone shouted.
The fenders also fell into the water. They had been tied with knots.
In the harbor, almost everything was tied with knots.
The nets opened on the ground and released boxes, buoys and three octopuses that Genaro’s fish market had ready for the next day. The La Escama bar’s awning collapsed onto the tables. Don Justo’s glasses’ cord came loose, and mine’s hood cord slipped, though that was the least of it: it was August and I didn’t even know why I was wearing a sweatshirt.
The Sun grew thinner and thinner.
—This is for the Moon —Manolo said.
—Don’t be ridiculous —I answered—. I thought it was for the town hall.
We called the Coastguard.
—All the moorings are coming undone —I said.
—Because of the wind?
—Because of the eclipse.
There was a pause.
—Repeat that.
—That not a single knot can hold.
—What kind of knots?
I looked at the cords in the water and at the Chispa with his shoes undone again.
—The ones you tie—
The woman from the Coast Guard drew a deep breath to refrain from saying something that might be recorded.
—Use alternative securing methods.
—Good that we called. That tying them up hadn’t occurred to us.
He hung up after advising us to stay calm, which is what you say in an office when calm isn’t tying boats.
Rogelio, the mechanic, was the one who found the solution. He wasn’t a sailor, but he could tell a rope from a pipe, and that afternoon that counted as expertise already.
He lifted the stern rope of the Estrella del Norte. The rope ended in a loop, with the end spliced.
—This hasn’t come undone.
—That’ll be a good knot —the Chispa said.
—It isn’t a knot.
—It has the shape of a knot.
—And you look like a sailor. Let’s not draw conclusions from appearances.
Rogelio threaded the loop through a cleat. It held.
There we understood the rule: the eclipse unraveled knots, but it respected everything else. Splices, shackles, carabiners, chains, ties, seams. Even duct tape, which doesn’t need permission from physics to work.
We emptied the warehouse.
We secured the boats with chain from the bollard, spare shackles, and two seatbelts Rogelio took from a van that had hadn’t passed the ITV in five years. For the small vessels we used tow straps. The Chispa proposed gluing a dinghy to the pier with silicone.
We didn’t allow it.
—Well, don’t say I didn’t give ideas later.
The entire port began to work without tying a single knot. One discovers how dependent you are on knots when you can’t close a trash bag, fasten an apron, or hang an octopus without it slipping away.
In the bar, Maruja fastened the awning to the railing with wire and pliers.
—When this passes, how do I remove it? —she asked.
—By cutting it.
—That’s what I’d thought.
By eight thirty, the Moon completely covered the Sun.
The port went dark. The boats stopped shining and the water turned black, as if there was more depth underneath than necessary. For a few seconds there was only the sound of tightened shackles and the Chispa cursing because his shoe laces had come undone again.
We all looked up.
Manolo took off his glasses.
—Pretty, isn’t it.
—Yes.
—But not very practical.
The light returned slowly. As soon as the first edge of the Sun appeared, I grabbed a piece of rope and tied a figure of eight. I pulled hard.
It did not undo.
We began swapping chains and straps for normal moorings. We recovered the fenders, picked up the nets and returned the octopuses to the fish market. One had crawled into a water boot and didn’t want to come out until Genaro offered him a better one.
In the end only the Maribel remained, still held by a seatbelt.
—Leave it —its captain said—. It’s never felt safer.
Since that day, in the port’s warehouse there’s a red box with shackles, straps, carabiners, wire, ties, and a silicone gun that the Chispa slipped in without anyone noticing.
On the lid we wrote:
«FOR ECLIPSES AND OTHER SKY MALFUNCTIONS».
Below, Rogelio added with a marker:
«NO KNOTS ALLOWED».
The Chispa read the notice, took two ties and tied his shoes with them.
—Now let whoever wants the knots come undone.
*
DISTANCES
LAURA FURONES FRAGOSO
The precise term was “metric expansion of space,” but that night she discovered the phenomenon without technicalities. She had laid on her back at the top of that hill reachable from her stone house by a neglected path. The darkness of the sky had given her a dizziness, and she had stretched out her hand to rest it on her father’s warm, somewhat sweaty chest, lying next to her.
It was him, her father, who broke the silence and pulled them back from their reverie. He called her by name, Román, as he always did when he was about to tell him something of transcendence. That something usually had to do with the universe, a fascination that he transmitted to his son as an intangible inheritance, with the conviction that he was bequeathing to the child the greatest possible treasure. That’s why he dosed every little bit of information he offered. And although he knew that learning at that age came through patient repetition, he never shared the same story with Román twice. Instead, he trusted a kind of natural selection of the lessons he was teaching him: he knew that some would generate such astonishment that they would surface at the right moment.
Almost fifty years later, Román and his father were together again and the hill kept watch over a moonless night. They sheltered from the cold in the stone house, and Román cleared the table while his father lay down in bed, tucked his body under a thick blanket, and closed his eyes. Before sleep, and with all the disdain that his dwindling energy allowed him, he hissed at him:
—What a waste of life, my son.
That sentence, the culmination of his days for years, continued to paralyze Román. Everything happened in the same way: a prick in the throat, the reflux of an acid secreted by some unknown organ, and the pressure of the jaw against his worn teeth. His father’s disappointment returned him to childhood, filling him with shame and leaving him with no resources to digest his emotions. At some moment in that confusion he realized he wasn’t breathing and, with a deep breath, tried to rise above the offense.
His routines repeated day after day with such measured cadence that there seemed to be no room for anything new. Only the passage of time wore away everything slowly. But something must have happened at that moment, something imperceptible or invisible or inexplicable, because, instead of feeling the usual burning in his throat, Román’s mind offered him what his father had told him that night long ago, as if re-discovering it again:
“Galaxies don’t move away from each other because they travel through space; rather, it is space itself that expands and separates them.”
When he heard that for the first time he was eight years old, and he still remembered his disbelief, as well as the shiver that ran through his small body, a sensation strangely similar to the feeling of peeing in winter. His father had kept a balloon and a marker in his pocket. He took them out, marked two points on the uninflated balloon, and after letting Román check the short distance between them, began inflating it. That was all. Román didn’t ask anything; his father didn’t elaborate the idea any further. They remained silent again until the cold began to bite their bare fingers and they walked back home.
Approaching sixty, the sentence returned to his consciousness with the solidity and strangeness of an unknown object. He remembered the balloon and the points that moved away from each other, condemned to separation.
Metric expansion of space. Román entered his father’s room, picked up his slippers, restrained the impulse to kiss him, and turned off the table lamp.