Editor’s Note: This piece won first place in the Flash Fiction category of the 2024 City Tech Writer Creative Writing competition, in which students were asked to write a creative response to one entry from the 2023 volume of CTW. Daniel writes of his piece, “This is a response to the entry “Fractals: The shape of Order and Chaos.” Fractals, much like the Fibonacci sequence, are infinite, and you can zoom as far into one as you want, on a graph and it will keep going. The Fibonacci sequence, in contrast, will continue if you keep zooming out of a graph of it. We can see the Fibonacci sequence in a lot of parts of nature, such as the shell of a nautilus.”

I found a shell on the beach today. A nautilus. Does it know what it is, I wonder. I ask the shell, “Do you know Fibonacci?” To my surprise, the shell responds. “Who’s that?” asks my new friend. 

I ask, “How do you not know Fibonacci? You are built in his image.” The shell replies, “This is news to me!” As we keep talking, I explain to the shell the intricacies of its design. How ever lasting it is. And for that the shell says, “Thank you, new friend. I shall guard this knowledge with my life.”