Terrain.org fiction in this issue:
  

Song of the Turkey Vulture
by GE Tallant, with Audio
2011 Fiction Contest Winner

Cara knew the secrets: a certain tilt to the vine, distance from the mother plant, an early need for phosphorus. She hand-pollinated in May; her fruit was set by June. Now it was October and two dozen giant pumpkins waited in her fields, as surprising and tympanic as pregnant bellies. Two dozen was record and most of them were sold. Designers drove all the way from Atlanta to buy her pumpkins. She’d had one on the gold-domed capitol’s steps, another on the lawn of the governor’s mansion.

Driveaway
by Erica Olsen
2011 Fiction Contest Finalist

This was in San Francisco in 1999. I’d left Salt Lake without my belongings. At the Catholic thrift shops on Sutter I’d found some shirts and pants in my size, and a pair of shoes that were still shaped like someone else’s feet. Only later did it occur to me that these clothes had probably belonged to some young man who had died, and I was walking around the city dressed as his ghost.

Controlled Burn
by K. L. Barron
2011 Fiction Contest Finalist

Kenley's Watch
by Malka Davis
2011 Fiction Contest Finalist

Diné Bikeyah (Navajo Reservation)
by Lorie Adair

Neighboring on the Air
by Caroline Patterson

Ditch Lilies
by Werner A. Low

He confessed that he’d also tried to bring in some purple lady slippers, and a couple clumps of wood violets that were actually — he loved the irony in this — cadmium yellow, but neither of them had made it, either, and he’d come to think that maybe that was just as well. He knew where all the wildflowers were in the Reservation, and when they would be out — for example, that the hepatica and blood root flowered early, before the canopy leafed them into shade.