Another Dose of Ego

I just finished reading the short story by the first-place winner for the recent contest I've been agonizing about. And maybe I'm just a sore loser, because - roles reversed - that's how I'd see this, but seriously. How I managed to fall short of the first and second-place authors is beyond me. This is exactly what happened last year, how their story had the designated subject as an after-thought to the narrative. The wedding dress in this story could have been absolutely any object, and was as necessary to the plot as an elephant on a unicycle. There was even one part with three sentences immediately following one another describing a character all with exactly the same sentence structure! That's the literary equivalent of writing in elementary. I seriously don't get it.

But, hey. Different people like different stories, I suppose. The judges were clearly looking for something that they found in this story and not in mine. All I can do is sit back and wonder.