contest runner-up

My grandfather, a young boy in a red coat wandering the deep and snowy Lithuanian woods, found a litter of wolf cubs in a hollowed oak that had been rent by lightning. He placed the abandoned pups in the hood of his coat and carried them home, where he raised them, or he let them go, or he began a new narrative of our family inextricably linked ever after with white and quiet woods, with dogs, with hollowness sometimes filled by something unexpected. Soon after, he moved to Warsaw, where he stayed and where I, eventually, came from.