The fat mermaid has sung on Vita.mn's second annual story competition. This year we asked for flash stories -- fact or fiction -- with the theme or setting of water. Even though we here in Minnesota are surrounded by lakes, rivers and streams and are constantly floating across them, watching sunsets over them and dipping ourselves into them, the assignment proved something of a challenge. How do you tell a good water story, providing setting and conflict, in fewer than 600 words? Still, we received upwards of 80 entries, many of which succeeded brilliantly.

Water is, of course, everywhere and in everything. The stories reflected that diversity. Contestants told tales that ranged from a poetic meditation on the nature of life as seen through the eyes of a fisherman, to a woman getting a jellyfish sting, which requires her boyfriend to pee on her ... purely for medical reasons. There were wizards battling on a Minnesota pier, sticky one-night stands with cruise-ship comedians, large young men in tiny swimsuits, and broken-hearted girls trying to wash old loves away.

This year's $1,000 winner, Kayla Skarbakka's "She Was Drenched and the Nudists Were Coming," is a fantastic example of how to use the flash-fiction form. Skarbakka drops the reader immediately into an uncomfortable interaction between a woman who has fallen from her canoe and a multigenerational threesome of nudists. Although almost nothing is exchanged between the characters, other than a lost paddle, we come to know the woman. Between physical gestures and tiny passages of dialogue, through the woman's thoughts, we hear her wicked sense of humor, we know her humiliation, and we're led to wonder if she is, in fact, the strange one. In a blink, Skarbakka unpacks an entire, complex character.

KAYLA SKARBAKKA

And coming quickly, fighting upstream. Three of them -- dimple-muscled man in front, brown and baggy woman in back, tuft-haired geezer kneeling on the floor and (thank God) hidden below the waist -- working black plastic paddles against the current.

She wrung out her hair. She chewed her lips. She sat on her hands. She drifted toward them.

"Okay?" called the younger man.

So I tipped, she thought. So I was standing. Hahaha, Canoeing 101.

"Fine," she answered.

The binoculars hung from her neck. The cord cut between her boobs. They were too big. Her shirt was too thin. She wished for the second time in five minutes that she had worn a life vest.

"We saw your paddle," the woman said. "We figured someone was in trouble. Dad grabbed it."

The old man held it up. Wooden, grayed, cracked down the blade. His arms had too much skin.

"Are you camped?" the younger man asked.

She crossed her arms across her chest. "Just upriver from you."

She blushed. Surely they didn't notice. Their whole bodies were pink from sun or exertion.

She cupped the binoculars in her hands. Bird watching? she thought. Maybe they wouldn't ask. The water drying on her arms made her shiver.

They drew close. The younger man reached. The canoes jostled as they collided. He pulled her abreast. She stared at her knees.

A horsefly landed on her thigh. So I canoed past your camp, she thought. So what. You weren't even there. She swatted.

The old man grabbed her paddle and rubbed the handle.

"I like the wooden ones better," he said. "More natural." He offered.

For Christ's sake, she thought.

She took.

MAGGIE RYAN SANDFORD

About seven months in, he started saying "Baby Jesus" during sex. The first time was about two weeks after we'd debuted our I-love-you words, and I couldn't help thinking, "I wish you'd brought this up before." I hoped, at first, that he was joking around, or had simply misspoke -- these things happen: I once requested that a young man "slip me the skin," which was, when I later thought about it, embarrassing for both the inaccurate and outdated nature of my terminology.

But he said it again the next time -- "Ohh, Baby Jesus!" -- and, yes: It threw me off my game. Thankfully, the utterance marked, for him, a point of no return, and I faked a big finish so we could both lie down, cool off, and swig some Powerade. As I lay there listening to him gulp and pant, I flipped through scenarios in my head.

He grew up Catholic -- that I knew, but I thought he'd sort of gone the agnostic route by now, and he wasn't yet old enough to revert. It was the "Baby" that I found especially concerning. Sure, I was his "Baby," and "Jesus," alone, is an acceptable expression of intense sensation, but by the second and then third and fourth proclamations, I knew that wasn't how he meant it. Somehow, the finest moments I could muster with the power of my loins were, for him, akin to the holiest of holies: a tiny swaddled Messiah, the precious, pewling infant son of the Lord on High and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

For our six-month anniversary, he took me to a lake I have never seen before, and I thought it might be a good time to ask him about it. He knows that the closest I get to worship is the altar of the Sun God; I grew up in Slidell, Louisiana, where (until a certain crude undersea ejaculation last April) the beaches were a viable destination any day of the week, year round. Growing up, nothing could contain me -- not Southern heat, not high school, not my father's drunken tantrums -- because I could escape to the sea and swim out and away forever.

As I veered toward the water, I hoped he didn't recognize my haste as desperation. I wished the side of the lake would open up, push through the shore in a rush of river, like Moses had parted the land to let the water to pass safely to sea. I felt as though I might faint before I hit the water, and what would I tell him then? I need to talk to you, I'd say, lying on the sand, looking up at him, I don't think this is working out, I --

I kicked off my sandals and splashed into the water, drew enough breath to last me the hours I needed to think, to crawl on the sandy bottom. But as the water hit me, touched every inch of my skin -- the top of my head, my face, the small of my back, my hot, sandy summer feet ... I was soothed. Cooled. Cleansed.

"Baby Jesus," I said, as I floated to the surface, arms wide, facing the sun. "Baby Jesus. Baby Jesus my Lord."

JOHN JODZIO

My best friend Joe looks like Handel and I look like Beethoven. Ladies always ask us if we are them and we tell them hell yes. Man, do we. It is all about the ladies.

Do Beethoven, the partiers said, do Handel.

I sat in the hot water and pretended I was Beethoven. I moved my long hair out of my face and anytime someone asked me something I said "What?" and pointed to my ears.

One of the partiers was a blonde lady named Suzy. She tried to flirt with me by humming "Ode to Joy" but she'd taken too many quaaludes from the quaaludes bowl to remember how it went.

"I know I'm supposed to be deaf, but can you shut the hell up anyway?" I asked.

Just like Beethoven, I don't like blondes.

We are not the best party guests, but we are not the worst either. We always bring a bottle of red wine and if the grocery store is open we bring the footiest smelling cheese they have.

"Is he dead?" one of the people at the party asked me after Joe passed out. "Did Handel just die in the hot tub?"

Sometimes when Joe passes out he looks like he's really dead, but then he will suddenly wake up and punch his hand through a bathroom door or a bay window. He never remembers any of it.

Tonight I'd stolen three purses by the time Joe kicked a hole in the hot tub. I was making out with this brunette named Jessica near the pool and I noticed hot water spilling out around my legs

"Uh-oh," Jessica pointed. "Here comes Tony."

"You have ten seconds to get your classical ass out of here," he said.

After Joe and I get kicked out of parties, we like to go downtown and sit in the park by the river. It used to be a bad part of town, but then the mayor decided to pipe in classical music. Now all the drug dealers have moved on. Tonight, I buy us burgers and fries and slap Joe around until he can hold a decent conversation.

"I am sorry about before," he says. "I am sorry about always."

I stare out at the water, the skyline in back of it.

"There will be other parties," I say. "And other ladies."

ASMAH TAREEN

Just make sure to return the bracelet.

Ameera's fingers glided over the diamonds set in antique silver, unhooking the clasp and then clicking it closed. Turning it in circles on her right wrist, she stared out at the water splashing up on the sand as the sun set over Lake Calhoun. A few remaining sailboats glided by in the distance and every so often, jogging footsteps passed on the path behind her. In the weeks since the parting, Ameera had gone over her mother's sole piece of advice hundreds of times, repulsed at the idea of re-exchanging the gifts given and received. When she brought it up, he had nonchalantly replied, "Keep it, it was a gift." So, she'd sought the counsel of friends, and even a few strangers, and then there was no place to go but back to the lake.

Ten months earlier, on an unseasonably warm September day, Jamal had brought her here. Walking on the beach, he paused and presented her with a silver wrapped box. Everything seemed to be happening exactly as it should. He confidently fastened it around her right wrist. The cool, heavy silver and stones had to be a sign of things to come.

She had miscalculated.

Ameera stumbled to her feet as hot angry tears streamed down her face. She looked back towards the Minneapolis skyline and imagined Jamal in his office overlooking the city, still in his designer suit with his tie now loosened. The young blonde associate would have happily offered to stay late to help close the deal. Perhaps within months, he would be presenting her with an expensive piece of jewelry to purchase a new installment of time-limited companionship. Ameera cringed at the thought that she had considered giving up her firm job to build their life together.

The night before she had cleansed her condo of the cards, ticket stubs, pictures they had taken of themselves with one hand outstretched, dried roses from Valentine's, and even the wedding planning guide they had bought in a giddy moment while browsing at Magers & Quinn.

She undid the clasp a final time, grasped the bracelet and hurled it into the lake. A soft plunk followed by a set of ripples.