[*Anya*]

Example of a finalist entry:

The Short, Happy Life of Frances’ Comb
by Scott Stavrou

Frances’ comb was an old comb and he used it alone. He had not combed his hair for eighty-four days and to hunt for hair was getting harder all the time. When he had been younger, in the days before he got older, the hair had been as plentiful as the fish in the Gulf Stream. The comb used to be just a small part of his fine arsenal of hair care products. Before the comb had proved its solitary worth he had used it in tandem with the sleek Remington small-caliber blow dryer and a fine vent brush made by the Italians that practically forced the hair into submission. If you were lucky enough to have had strong hair and a powerful arsenal of truly excellent hair care products, you used them all and even took them with you for the aficionado of grooming knows that hair care is a moveable feast, and if you were lucky enough to have had brave hair as a young man, then it stayed with you forever. Sometimes.
The hair line, Frances noted, could also be a moveable feast, one that of late had been retreating back away from his forehead even faster than the Italians retreated from the Austrians. Ah, they were fine chaps, those Italians, even in retreat. Frances thought about the Italians while he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror late that morning in the hours that came just before the afternoon and after the night. His reflection stared back at him. Main thing a reflection did. Stared right back at you. He noticed that it was the same reflection that had stared back at him last night from the clean, well-lighted windows of Harry’s Bar & American Grill.
“Damn insolent reflection,” Frances said aloud. The reflection mouthed the words with him but made no sound.
“Damn insolent silent reflection,” he said.
His freshly washed hair stood on end, having barely survived the morning attack of the strong, relentless Shower Massage jet-spray. Certain of the finer strands swayed like the shorter grasses of the Serengeti. There were bright shiny patches of skin showing through the fine strands of hair just as if they had been mowed down by a stampeding herd of wildebeest.
Only the hair hadn’t been ravaged by wildebeest, not quite, really. Rather.
“Male pattern baldness,” Frances thought aloud, even though there was no one to hear him other than his reflection and his now useless comb.
“They say it is the fault of the mother. Damn insolent mother.”
Many things had been her fault, like the playing of the cello. But it was better not to think about that now. Now was the time for the running of the comb through the hair and not to think about the retreating hairline or the Italians or even the one he called Mother. Even though the comb was his only remaining weapon, it was a good, clean comb with strong lines and well-made tines.
Picking up his comb he made the first pass at the hair, going in boldly and strongly in the manner of Belmonte moving in for a kill after the picador had finished his work. Certain strands of the hair gave themselves fully to the attack and ended up captured in the strong, true tines of the comb. Frances knew that there was nothing to be done for those imprisoned behind the enemy tines of the comb. Being caught was the same as death, worse, really, in a way, because then you had to clean the comb and you got that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, the way you do when you know that your hair is done for and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. There was the hair club for men, but there was no glory in that and you weren’t really fooling anyone, not even your reflection.
So you did the only thing a man could do, you used the comb to arrange the hair to cover as much of the scalp as possible, but gracefully.
And you knew that truly, like the earth and like living in Paris, the hairline did move.