In 3rd Place - Author C aka Brian.
In 2nd Place - Author D aka... well we don't know yet - it's either Andrew or Abbie - as for various reasons neither could attend.
And In 1st Place <drum roll> Author G aka John aka me aka The most surprised man in the world.
What can I say - having joined WW in May 2007 straight in to a summer competition which I naively thought I might win, the short story competition has turned into a twice yearly hand-wringing of tortured disappointment. I've always (fatally) tried to cram a 10,000 word story in to the 2,500 word limit, simply because I often let the idea outgrow the limitations and then had to prune viciously, with fatal consequences for my prose. Oddly though, this particular story was even bigger than that, not on the page, but in my head, scurrying around for a month, sucking up words like a black hole might soak up stellar matter. Then, because I am dumb, I left myself one night to crank this monster out into an ever tighter limit, 2000 words. So, I did the only thing I could, I wrote without stopping or thinking and produced 1999 words in two hours, culling, sub-consciously I suppose, before the words hit the page (in the electronic sense), because if they make the page, they scream in protest should you have to snip them off the main branch, promising buds of genius culled for the greater good. So perhaps, if I leave only two hours, I have developed a knack that I have not previously possessed, to make a 2000 word story convey that it is indeed a 10,000 or even a 100,000 word idea but leave the reader satisfied with their view through the keyhole of the room beyond...