Tefilla Contest Winner

The runner up submission, by Alona Stewart - responding to "מודים אנחנו לך... על ניסך שבכל עמנו":

She's sitting at her desk, slumped against the wood surface, the lesson barely registering in her mind. She laments silently that there's nothing interesting going on, nothing spectacular, nothing noteworthy, nothing at all.
A bird flies by, buoyed up despite the still air, its wings creating support to hold it up on nothing.
She yawns.
When she does, her lungs contract, forcing a breath out, and it passes into the room, creating tiny disturbances in the air all around, a chain reaction. It stirs a few hairs lying over her face, but they soon settle back into place, pulled by the forces that are even now dragging everything in the room towards the center of the earth, holding everyone down.
She tucks the hair behind her ear, her muscles stretching and moving her bones, blood vessels, skin, everything. She's running low on energy, like the kind that let her move her hand, and her brain reminded her body that it was almost time for some food.
Her stomach growls.
She sighs. Fourteen more minutes and then she's free, and lunch was waiting. She looks at the clock for a few seconds, watching the hands move, excruciatingly slow. She doesn't realize what a strange thing time is, something that exists but doesn't exist, isn't something that we can see or touch- it isn't even really there.
The walls, the floor, the desks, her classmates, her- may seem still, but are all moving constantly, every second, made up of tiny particles vibrating too fast to see or feel. They are made up of millions of them, little pieces coming together to make a whole, and although the air hangs with heaviness there are even tinier particles moving frenziedly around inside them. Despite the thickness of the mood, the heaviness- they are mostly empty space.
And yet, still…
There's nothing interesting going on.