GUY RAZ, host: A lot can happen in three minutes. You've shown us that time and again during our Three Minute Fiction writing contest. In just three minutes, lives begin and end, love is found and lost, empires rise and fall, even the imaginary empires of childhood.</s>SEAN PHILLIPS(ph): He told me to get out of the mud. I told him that I would never leave my kingdom. He demanded that I put the hose away. I told him that I would not settle for a birdbath when I needed a moat. He told me that I was wasting water. I couldn't tell him to stop dickering, that there were lives at stake. Even though my warriors were winning the imaginary battle, the here and now slowly began its siege.</s>GUY RAZ, host: That's a passage from "Ripening" by Andrew Morris of Delhi, New York. It was read by our Sean Phillips. "Ripening" is one of the nearly 4,000 original short stories you submitted during this round of Three Minute Fiction. Each of those stories had to include four words: plant, button, trick and fly.</s>GUY RAZ, host: To see how Andrew Morris used those words and to see what happens when ogres invade, go to our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction, and that's Three Minute Fiction all spelled out, no spaces. We're posting some of our favorite stories there, and soon our judge, novelist Ann Patchett, will pick a winning story and read it on the air.
So much can happen in just three minutes. Lives and love can be lost. Empires can rise and fall. At least they do in "Ripening," one of the nearly 4,000 original short stories listeners sent in during this round of our Three-Minute Fiction contest.