“Trespassing” by Julia Edda Pape—Our December 2025 Gold Medal Winner
Julia Pape is our first place winner from the contest posted in our December 2025 issue and her story will be published in the March 2026 edition. Congratulations, Julia!
What the judges had to say:
“I loved the premise the story is founded on. It starts strong and kept my interest to the end.”
“This story did a great job of describing the setting, using vivid details that brought the abandoned school to life in my mind, especially playing on my own memories of what my old school looked like.”
“The structural control is exceptional—the author built three complete emotional arcs simultaneously and trusted us to piece together what we were actually watching unfold.”
Meet Julia
Julia Edda Pape lives in Toronto with her cats. She loves to write stories and drink coffee.
Trespassing
an excerpt of Julia’s winning story
People did this often. Sometimes it was old art club members dropping by to check if their pencil sketches were still pinned to hallway cork boards; sometimes it was former theatre nerds returning to try on that costume they wore in the grade nine Fall show where they brought the house down as Juliet; sometimes it was now haggard teen athletes with torn ACLs and dashed dreams coming to admire the awards in the trophy case.
These two were a bit harder to put my finger on.
It was a woman and a man, presumably a couple, though one that was past the point of holding hands casually or kissing for no reason. They crawled through the window by the principal’s office without checking the front door (which was, in fact, unlocked) first. The woman entered before the man, letting in a gust of cool, early spring air which rustled the student-made printer paper posters still plastered on the brick walls of the hallway. She did not turn to see if he followed.
She called out, “Anybody here?”
Of course, nobody was. The school had closed over twenty years ago.
They did it slowly, stopping enrolment one September and watching as the student body dwindled to the final
graduating class. I was already here, of course. Though she wouldn’t know that.
For some time, they had alarms set up to call police on any trespassers, but they had since
given up on that — budgetary reasons. Now, I only enjoyed short gaps of solitude between visits
from reminiscers.
“Where should we go first?” the man asked, jumping down from the window edge gracelessly. He took a cup of pencils down with him and fumbled to clean it all up, apparently not yet aware enough of the cobwebs and dust to realize that tidying was a lost cause.
“Take me to the first place you noticed me,” she said.
He looked dumbfounded, “I don’t think I remember exactly.”
“Fine,” she said. “Where we had our first kiss then. Do you remember that?”
She waited for him to lead the way.
…
to read the rest of the story, order your copy of the March 2026 issue.
