THIRD PLACE

TO WISH UPON A STAR
Ian Thompson
18 years old, California

The purple fringes of a small fire revealed cave paintings, stick-like forms that flickered in and out of existence. Each spent a moment in the light before retreating back into the shadows of an earlier age.

"It began in darkness…" thought the old enigmatically, "in a cave like this where shadows remain measureless to man…"

He sat in the dark, alone with his thoughts. "Here the ancient artist told the darkness of his life…"

Some paintings depicted the sun and trees. Some showed children playing in fields. But these seemed to bore the ancient artist, for such images were relegated to obscure corners. Invariably, the paintings came back to the same familiar scene: the hunt. The kill. A deer stabbed with a crude spear. Blood leaping from its wound to the glee of hordes of half-naked men. Voices of the hunt echoed from the past through these walls: half-screams of delight clamoring for the kill.

The old man sighed. He tried to fill his mind with bright and musical thoughts, but the cave paintings had left an imprint on his soul.

"The hunt never really ended" he thought.

"Spear became sword, pistol, dynamite, machine gun, grenade, germ gas, and finally, atomic bomb. The hunt changed -- no longer did man need to look his enemy in the eyes before ripping his throat out. Now man could kill from the mighty perch of the fighter plane or the cozy office of the politician without hearing the thousand screams or seeing the last expression of a thousand faces. But to the men in charge, the hunt never changed: I won and you lost, I killed and you died. But in the end, everyone died."

"And so a dark peace descended upon the land. Finally, peace. The guns lay silent. There was darkness and silence -- that's all. Man had all but retreated into the dark chasm of time, and brought nature with him. Nothing can survive long in a sea of radiation."

The old man sat silently for a moment -- a remnant a once green and bright-hued world, left in a small cave with a weak fire.

It was a melancholy light to see by: the last fire of man, never to be rekindled. It was ironic and befitting that the last man alive should read the doom of man upon the walls, prophesied by ancestral artists thousands of years before. It was enough to break any man and bring on the spirits of madness. Suddenly the man began to yell, emptying his thoughts into the dark, wildly and incoherently.

Then with his final bit of strength the last man arose from his sleepy hollow. He would not die in darkness. He staggered from the cave and fell to his knees before the sea. Lifting his arms towards the heavens, with his final thought he did something both childish and profound: he wished upon a star.

He wished upon a bright eye of the night to take pity on man, to give humanity a second chance, to sing "Let there be light!" once again in the infant ears of men, to remake man exactly as he was before, in the full glory of his unbridled genius, to let the garden of man grow again under the grace of a faraway star. He wished that the star make but one small change to this garden: to plant the seed of peace within the heart of man.

It ended in darkness.