Fiction Fantastic 2025 Winning Story: “Roses” by Ivy Olszewski

The story below is a winner from our Fiction Fantastic Young Writers Contest, open to all youth in Lane County. For more information on this contest, including how to enter, visit here. Support this program with a donation.

You can purchase this story in the 2025 Winners Anthology, Echoes of the Future.

“Roses” by Ivy Olszewski, Ridgeline Montessori Public Charter School

Honorable Mention, Elementary Level, 2025

Roses

by Ivy Olszewski

Ridgeline Montessori Public Charter School

It was a cold, stormy night in Fledging. Sophie stared out the window, longing for a cup of steamy hot chocolate. That would complete her perfect night. She walked over to her bed and flopped down on the soft cushions to read a book.

But as she crawled under the covers to read, the bed creaked loudly. Then creaked again. Sophie froze. That couldn’t be right. Her bed never creaked. It was a bad time to have an active imagination. She mentally shook her head and sighed. It was probably nothing. She grabbed her book and started to read. After she had gotten to page 326, it did it again. She steeled herself and gingerly slipped her hand down the side of her bed, feeling for a pencil, a hair clip, or something that could cause that noise. Nothing. She tried again, but still, nothing. She started to read her book once again. At page 382, her bed groaned again. She rolled her eyes and this time shoved her hand down the side of the wall. Nothing except a pool of liquid. As she brought her hand back up, she screamed.

Her hand was covered in blood.

Kiera put down her book and sighed. Nothing would ever compare to the book she had lost when she was little. She had loved scary stories ever since she was a little kid, but her favorite story was one she had lost on a camping trip many years back. The Grim Reaper’s Dog. He was a pure white dog, basically the opposite of what people would imagine. The only noticeable difference from any other dog was that he had no eyes. Just black, empty sockets. He held a crimson rose in his mouth, and if he offered that rose to you, your time was up. It didn’t exactly scare her, but the thought of the dog sweetly offering that single red rose to her sent chills down her spine.

Nothing was as good as that book, and when she tried to find anything, it resulted in a fail. Nothing lived up to its expectations. Every day, she would try to find it in her school library, but she had no luck. She suspected that it had been discontinued. But one day at school was different. Kiera saw an oh-so-familiar title in her middle school library. A strange feeling came over her, the feeling of meeting an old friend after many years. She tentatively slipped the book from its resting place and tried to hold in her excitement. She didn’t even tell her best friend Daisy because she didn’t need to know. The jittery feeling stayed over her for the rest of the day, from the moment she checked out The Grim Reaper’s Dog. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now that she had the book. She was–

“Kiera? Kiera? Hello, are you alive?” Daisy said impatiently, interrupting Kiera’s thoughts. “The bell rang.”

“Oh. I, I didn’t hear.” Kiera said, standing up.

“Clearly.”

As she was coming home from school, a flash of white caught her eye. She glanced to the side and saw the fluffy white tail of a poodle disappearing around the corner. She remembered the story of The Grim Reaper’s Dog and knew she shouldn’t follow it. But that was just a story, wasn’t it?

And it was.

Until a strange force started pulling her towards it, against her will. And against all her instincts, she walked around the corner.

There she saw, waiting for her, and only her, a little white poodle holding a rose in its mouth. She gasped, and turned to run away, but then she saw. The poodle had beautiful eyes, one blue and one brown. Kiera breathed a sigh of relief and held out a hand to the poodle.

“Hey, buddy, are you lost? Here, lemme see.” And Kiera knelt down. Huh. there was no collar. “OK, do you wanna come home with me? I can ask around.” She took out her phone and snapped a few pictures of the dog. I’ll print them out later, she thought.

But later, she never did.

As she was leading the dog across the crosswalk, she stopped on the other side. The dog wasn’t next to her. She looked over her shoulder, and saw that the dog was on the other side of the street.

“Hey, boy! Come! I should probably call you something. How about Larry? Yeah. Hey, Larry! Come on!” Kiera patted her legs like she did for her own dog, Rover. Larry only smiled in his sinister way.

Suddenly, a car rushed past, and when she looked across the street again, all that remained was a wisp of smoke. At first, she just stared in confusion at the empty space that the dog had been in. Eventually, she realized that she had no idea where she was. She was lost. She did have an emergency credit card, so she decided to call a taxi. Ten minutes later, she was sitting in a bright yellow car.

As soon as she got home, she ran to the door and let herself in. As soon as she stepped foot inside, her parents rushed toward her.

“Honey, where have you been? I thought you were just walking home from school?” her mom asked worriedly.

Before she could say anything else, Kiera simply said, “I’m OK, Mom, I just found a dog, and it didn’t have a collar. So I was going to take it to our house to call the local animal shelter, and I guess I got lost. And you know that emergency credit card that I have? I called a taxi. I’m sorry, I guess I should’ve called you instead.”

Her mom smiled and said, “Yes, you should’ve called me. But I’m just glad you are OK.”

But the thing was, she wasn’t.

For the first few days, she was fine. But on Saturday, she caught a little cold. Not bad enough to stay home from school, just a stuffy nose, a sore throat. She thought it would taper off by the end of the weekend. She just played video games, ate instant ramen, did the normal things for a middle schooler to do on the weekend. But the next Monday, she woke up with a fever.

“Mom? Can I stay home from school today? I feel really hot and my throat hurts.”

Her mom replied, “OK, Kiera, let me take your temp.” And her mom got the thermometer. It turned out she had a fever of 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit. She thought it would get better by the end of the day, but it stayed the same, going up to 100.7. On Tuesday, she woke up and it was 102.8. Her parents started to get a little worried about her. The only good thing that happened that day was that she won Mario Kart on hard difficulty five times in a row.

The next day she was 105.0. Her mom and dad took her to the hospital so they could check on her, and asked the doctors what was wrong. They asked for some alone time with Kiera and came out looking confused.

“It’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before. She said she was having hallucinations. About a small white poodle? But the sickness. Our machines are not detecting anything wrong with her. Yet she is delirious, coughing, and burning hot.”

Her parents came in and saw their daughter strapped to a bunch of machines. That was too much. The doctors said to come in in another couple of days, to see the second test results. Little did they know, they were in for a surprise.

And not a good one.

When they came in and were escorted to the office, the doctors did not look happy.

“I’m sorry, we’re not sure your daughter’s going to make it, she is at a fever of 109.3,” the nurse said after stalling with coffee, cookies, and conversation.

Kiera’s mom sucked in a breath and replied, “Do as much as you can. Anything.”

Kiera’s parents stayed with her night and day, until one morning, they found her sitting up with clear eyes and a fever of only 100.0. Her parents were overjoyed to see her healthy and happy, taking care of her excessively for more than a little while.

And all that happened in two weeks.

Long after, Kiera was married to a very sweet man and had three children, one aged three, and two identical twins who were six. She and her husband had very good jobs, Kiera a teacher and her husband a CEO. But something still felt a little off.

One night, on a Thursday, she woke up feeling a little bit strange. Not necessarily bad, just a little . . . off. She didn’t know it, but that was the exact feeling of exhilaration that she had felt all those years ago when she had found the book. She was strangely thirsty, so she walked downstairs to get some water. She shivered in the suddenly frigid air. Wait. Cold air? It was summer. Goosebumps ran up her arms up to her spine, and she felt a sense of foreboding. Something was up the stairs, in her bedroom, waiting for her. She shook the strange feeling off and finished her water. But just then, she saw a book on the counter. And not just any book. The Grim Reaper’s Dog. She didn’t own that book. She had left it at her parents’ house, forgetting to give it back to her school when she moved out. And yet, she felt a tingly feeling pulling her, a will that was not her own, pulling her towards the book and up the stairs. Just like she had felt all those years ago when she was in middle school. As if she had been hallucinating, like when she was twelve, the book disappeared. So, as if in a dream, she walked up the stairs and softly pushed open the door.

There, at the end of her bed she shared with her husband, was the not-so-little-anymore white poodle, holding a red rose in his mouth. The only difference was his eyes. Large pitch-black caverns stretched across his face, pulling her in, hypnotizing her. And tilting his head, he sweetly offered that blood-red rose to her.

Sophie screamed silently, staring at her trembling hand enveloped in deep crimson transparent substance. She stumbled backwards, her shallow breath coming in gasps. She tried to scream again, but her words fell away from her. She held her breath and peeked under her bed. A minuscule hole, as black as night with no stars, was under Sophie’s bed.

She attempted to swat at it, but her finger pushed into the floor, into that black hole growing larger ever so slightly. It began growing faster and faster, until it spread across the floor as fast and black as a shadow. Sophie scrambled up and stared, unbelieving of what was right in front of her. It ever so carefully slid under her, and she fell, fell, fell, into the black void of time. No one even heard her scream.