SECOND PLACE

Love is just a word, but I use it. On a train platform, I watched as raindrops filled a lonely Coca-Cola bottle on the edge. The deluge spilled as travelers began their long commute into the mundane. The clean smell of rain was drowned out by the steam rising from the city, from rivers of waste surfacing from below. In the humidity, I felt like nothing. And then I saw her sucking on a candy cane in the middle of April, wearing a Fishbone T-shirt, dry. She smiled, and I was happy. I really hadn’t been waiting for that train in vain.

Will Doherty, 32, has a bachelor of arts in English literature and writing from the University of Nevada, Reno. His love of writing grew out of a love for books. He says his mother would periodically make him do book reports as a child in lieu of punishment. “I was also lucky enough to meet Theodor ‘Dr. Seuss’ Geisel at his office in La Jolla, Calif., in 1987,” Doherty said. “He showed me a stack of hundreds of rejection notices that he had received earlier in his life, some for works that are [now] engrained in the fabric of our lives. … It is that devotion to something personally worthwhile, something human, that compels me to keep submitting my work to the likes of The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly and Esquire.”