SpeechGeek - Competition Prose - 16 oral interp stories

That night, the narrator returns the favor, walking Sherry into those same woods to bury the gun and finally let go of what's been building inside her. The writing is plainspoken and unsentimental even at its most emotional, trusting small physical details to carry the weight.

Structured as an actual how-to guide, the piece walks the audience through the narrator's own diagnosis with a degenerative neurological disease, reframed wholesale as "turning" into one of the undead — from the tingling in her hands after a college basketball game, through the doctor's confirmation, the anger, and practical tips for breaking the news to family. Real zombie-movie tropes (avoid the "Z-word," resist the urge to groan, keep sticky notes handy) sit right alongside a genuinely moving account of watching her own body change and worrying how her kids will remember her. It's a clever conceit that never loses sight of the real fear underneath the joke, earning its laughs without cheapening the grief.

Determined not to become one of the "counterfeit" people he hated in high school, the narrator shows up to his five-year reunion in wrinkled clothes and old sandals, refusing to perform for a crowd led by his old tormentor Gabe and Gabe's girlfriend — the narrator's own long-ago crush — Stephanie. When nobody at dinner recognizes him at all, the humiliation spirals into a half-dream flashback to childhood, where his grandfather warns him that waiting too long for what he wants only gets him left behind, until Stephanie's voice finally cuts through the crowd and sends the evening into a very public, very awkward moment. It's a funny, self-deprecating piece that turns a string of increasingly cringeworthy setbacks into a genuine, low-key realization about moving on.

The piece opens with the narrator, as a boy, asking his grandmother what "stillborn" means after finding it in his late grandfather's obituary, then drops into her memory of that day decades earlier: a difficult pregnancy, a rush to the hospital with her husband Hank, and the devastating news that the baby didn't survive. Moving between Hank's silent grief, the grandmother's own childhood memory of losing a sister, and finally her brother-in-law's quiet, extraordinary act of climbing a fire escape to bring the baby's body to her one last time, the story builds to the naming of the son she never got to raise. It moves between two grieving family members with real control, letting plainly stated details do the emotional work instead of any authorial commentary.

The narrator, a socially isolated fantasy writer who reserves her wit and confidence for the pages of a journal no one else reads, watches her worst nightmare unfold when her popular tormentor Lacy finds that journal and starts performing its most romantic passages to the whole cafeteria. Rather than melt into the floor, the narrator stands up, calls out Lacy's cruelty directly, and in the process catches a flash of real vulnerability underneath Lacy's meanness — a moment she reads, fluently, in the language of her own dragons-and-castles fiction. It's a sharp, funny piece that takes genre-fantasy narration seriously as a tool for actual self-understanding, turning a familiar public-humiliation setup into something genuinely empowering.

When her name is finally called and she walks through the door without him, he's left alone with the room's judgmental stares and the realization of how much has changed between them in the space of an afternoon. The piece stays tightly inside one guy's conflicted, unresolved feelings without ever pretending there's an easy answer.

Doug spends his nights leaning on Sam's register at an all-night grocery store, trading jokes and easy banter until her mood turns and she opens up, in coded, half-metaphorical language about a childhood oak tree and a sadness she's clearly been guarding for a long time. Doug, still working through his own reasons for walking away from a job spent watching people live or die, recognizes in her a similar instinct to hide, and pushes past his own hesitation to tell her so — risking the easy friendship they've built for something more honest. The dialogue-driven piece builds its central metaphor patiently and pays it off in a quiet, earned final exchange.

The narrator, an oddly formal, black-suited figure who turns out to be Death himself, sits down next to Leslie Lohman on a park bench and lets her flirt her way through guessing his profession while he privately works through a very literal to-do list: Leslie is client number 100 billion, and today is the day she's scheduled to die. A last-minute correction from "the office" reveals the wrong Leslie Lohman was on the docket, buying this one decades she wasn't supposed to have — and rather than walk away clean, the narrator breaks protocol to nudge her toward a longer, gentler life before heading off to his actual appointment. It's a witty, literate monologue that plays bureaucratic deadpan against real warmth, landing its final, quiet act of kindness.

It works better than expected — campers, other counselors, the whole cafeteria buy in — until Harry's carried onto the talent show stage in a cardboard crown and brings the house down. It's warm, self-mocking, and asks a real question underneath the comedy: whether any of it was for Harry, or for the narrator.

Years later, on the drive to their grandmother's funeral, the two revisit the memory and discover they each kept a completely different piece of it, landing on a genuinely lovely, unresolved note about which version of childhood actually happened. The storytelling is warm and specific about a particular fantasy-soaked childhood, and it earns its bittersweet ending honestly.

The story moves without flinching to the discovery of what that cruelty cost, and closes on the narrator's own present-day compulsive hoarding as the only way she's found to keep from losing anything else. It's a devastating piece that never overplays its hand, letting ordinary domestic detail carry almost unbearable weight.

Born with a bone condition that ruled out any rough play, the narrator finds an unexpected outlet in a middle school music class, where the cello becomes the first thing in his life that makes him feel powerful instead of breakable — until a home video of his playing goes viral and turns him into a target for online trolls and, worse, a bully at school named Rusty. After enduring months of escalating harassment, a final confrontation leaves the narrator with a shattered hand that will never fully heal, ending his ability to play for good. Told in a young, conversational voice, the piece is unflinching about what was actually taken from him, closing on a small, aching image of a life reduced to feeling music through the floor instead of playing it.

Ben Bridges spends his Wednesdays at Secret Identities, the run-down comic shop owned by his friend Chuck, escaping a home life split by his parents' divorce and a school life defined by getting shoved around by star athlete Tripp Gibson. After Tripp and his friends destroy a stack of Chuck's comics and humiliate Ben in front of his crush, a guidance counselor's odd request — put on a studio-quality Spider-Man suit and visit a dying eight-year-old through his hospital window — gives Ben an unexpected shot at being the hero he's only ever read about, and an even more unexpected confrontation with the boy's older brother, who turns out to be Tripp himself. The story earns its costume-and-cape premise by grounding every bit of the fantasy in real adolescent loneliness, landing its themes of empathy and growing up without ever losing its sense of humor.

Narrating the club scene as an elaborate, tongue-in-cheek version of Dante's rings of hell, the narrator sorts every guy on the dance floor into a type — Searchers, the Wolfpack, Sweepers, the one lucky Saint — while nursing a hopeless crush on Lucy, the platonic best friend he drives to clubs and watches dance with other men all night. After a blowup with Lucy sends him storming out into the cold alone, he winds up at an all-night coffee shop, still dressed in the ridiculous outfit she picked out for him, and meets someone who actually sees him. It's a genuinely funny, literate piece of self-mockery that earns its extended metaphor and lands on real, unforced hope by the end.

Twenty-three-year-old Trevor comes home to Kentucky to find his grandmother dying, and spends her final days trying to keep a promise to himself not to cry — even as his twin brother Travis, the family's steadier presence, openly does. Weaving between the morning after her death, a tender memory of her last conversation with Trevor about heaven and September 11, and the childhood game of fence-post hopping the brothers used to play, the piece follows Trevor as he works through guilt over having missed the last month of her life and slowly lets his brother back in. It closes with Trevor returning to that same fence as an adult, laughing and crying at once, in a scene that pays off the story's central image without over-explaining it.