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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Ed Versluis Contest Winners

All right, everyone! The results of our 6+ hours of judging are in, and the winners are:

Fiction
1st place: “The Picture of Violet” by Hannah I. Darling
2nd place: “Mae and the Judge” by Richard Balzer   
3rd place: “A Notebook for Every Town” by Corynn Del Core
Published Honorable Mention:    “Missed Connection” by Jamey Strathman
Unpublished Honorable Mention:  “Air” by Karren Busch
Unpublished Honorable Mention: “Death stopped by for some coffee today” by Katherine Roy
Unpublished Honorable Mention: “The End" and "Nothing Yet”  by Jamey Strathman

Creative Nonfiction
1st place: “Edwards Air Force Base” by Lorene Farnsworth
2nd place: “The Blackberry Man” by Devon Williams
3rd place: “This is Earth’s Body” by Jerred North

Poetry
1st place:     “Dry Spell” by Trisha Castillo
2nd place: “Airplanes” by Zeke Hudson
3rd place: “Several Cries Over Winter in Carlsbad, New Mexico” by Tyler Lacy
Published Honorable Mention: “Entropy” by Zeke Hudson
Unpublished Honorable Mention: "Thoughts at the End of the Year" by Katherine Brafford

Keep in mind that the judging was done blind, without us knowing the authors of the pieces we were reading. Minimal alterations were done to the submissions before publishing them here.

Winners of the 7th Annual Ed Versluis Memorial Writing Contest received cash prizes (1st place - $100, 2nd place - $50) and surprise gifts (3rd place).

There were some extremely impressive, entertaining, and poignant pieces submitted to this contest. If you didn't submit a piece or submitted one that did not win, please send in pieces for next year's contests--and if you don't agree with the results, the solution is to join the club! Details are on the right under "What's Going On?"

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Edwards Air Force Base (First Place - Creative Nonfiction)

by Lorene Farnsworth

I could hear the squeaking of hamster wheels before I even got all the way through the backyard. If I was a stranger and didn’t know they were in cages, I probably wouldn’t have ventured any further than the back door of our house. The cages were multi-colored and Frank had affixed them to the two longer walls of the garage. There were ten across, five vertical, fifty on each wall; which made one hundred blue, green and red hamster cages in all. There were slides and tunnels and little doors, water bottles and feeders hung in every wing and hamster wheels abounded, complete with every one of Mom’s little round compact mirrors, which Frank had mounted on the wall next to every wheel, just in case the jogging hamster needed to check out how tight his buns were getting after a day at the gym. Every cage was connected, so that the hamsters had free run to visit their friends and families. 
 
Frank told us the drugs were to help his back and our mother told us that the drugs were to cure Dad’s chronic ‘hiatal hernias.’ I recently looked up the spelling for hiatal and an online article informed me the condition involves: ‘heartburn, nausea, and regurgitation.’ Smelling a rat, I typed in my father’s physical symptoms at that time and found a far different condition; it looks to me that my father was suffering from what they call, ‘chronic pilonidal abscesses.’ I thought heartburn, nausea and regurgitation didn’t sound at all like something that would require the use of a thick, rubber donut to sit down on in the car. The only thing I can think is that my mother must’ve been uncomfortable with the word ‘abscess.’ I can’t say as I blame her, for it does conjure up some nasty images. Simply put, Dad needed to keep his weight down and every time he didn’t the dread pilonidal abscess would emerge, inevitably followed by the dull, red,

rubber donut and an escalated dose of Frank’s nasty attitude, caused in part by the pharmaceutical amphetamines he was able to obtain from the hospital dispensary where he worked.

Since our father was not one to keep his unhappiness to himself, whenever we saw the rubber donut my sister and I would try to make ourselves scarce, which is not an easy task, living in a military base house. At first, we were glad to see Frank find a drug that helped, but we quickly realized that, although he was losing a lot of weight, and apparently was canker free; amphetamines didn’t seem to have much of a calming effect on him. In fact, he was worse than we had ever seen him. Always in motion, grinding his teeth, sniffing constantly, Frank became more nervous and volatile than ever and we longed for the days when all he had was a butt canker and a foul mood that might go away when the canker did. Ironically the drugs had turned our father’s whole being into one giant, unstable, butt canker. 

Edwards Air Force Base is a place so dismal that it is only surpassed by the Azores and certain parts of Georgia. And that’s where we went to live, after being lulled into a false sense of security by the four, comparatively strife free, years outside of London, England. Edwards is not one of those bases that people are falling all over themselves to live in, not like Germany or England. Everybody wants to live in Germany and England because they speak English and they obligingly sell you cool shit like beer steins and figurines of the Royal Family. 

Diane and I tried to stay outside as much as possible when Frank was raving, but that was hard, because outside sucked. Outside was a desert, with snakes and spiders, all of whom were vying to kill us from minute to minute; outside was 110 degrees, with no shade trees and kids

who hated you because you were new and you talked funny. Outside were Air Force lifers who hurled their infants into the deep end of the pool to toughen them up, outside was country music and guys who greased their hair back with so much goop that it you could smell it cooking in the sun when they walked by. Once, Diane and I watched our 16 year old next door neighbor run out of her house screaming and waving her arms. The front of her ruffled midriff blouse was on fire. I was three years younger than that girl, but I knew as soon as I saw her that she must have leaned over the gas stove when she was cooking. We stood and watched the guy from across the street put her out, taking her down and embracing her from behind, rolling her face first, back and forth into the brittle, yellow lawn. He finally smothered the flames, but she was burned enough for the ambulance to come, so I tried not to laugh at how stupid she was.

There is always a water shortage in the desert and for the four years we lived on base, no one was allowed to water their lawn, and we were even asked to conserve on toilet flushing. The military police patrolled the base, shining their silver, metal flashlights into people’s yards at night, looking for any signs of a suspiciously green lawn. However, my father’s racing metabolism was dead set on procuring an English style country garden in the Mojave Desert. Possessing the boundless energy pharmaceuticals lent him, he went ahead and threw up an eight foot high wood fence around our entire backyard, and Diane and I handed him the nails and tried not to look like we were thinking anything about how fucking crazy he was. The whole project took him only two days since he didn’t have to sleep, or pay attention to any pesky child labor laws, and when it was completed Frank watered his back yard triumphantly, free of any prying eyes- and that’s when the madness started. We began driving up weekly into the mountains to

visit the state parks, where Frank wrenched up small forests worth of conifers and ferns to transplant to our barren backyard, and every morning at three am, he went out back and watered his lawn till dawn. No big deal, he was awake. 

Soon our backyard was an English bower, with bushy foliage and climbing vines and little benches. Our dog, Bobby, named after the Scottish terrier who spent the rest of its life lying 

on top of its master’s grave, (dream on, Frank) lived in a state of the art doghouse, complete with a canopied veranda. The canopy went up after Dad noticed one afternoon that Bobby was getting sun in his eyes as he sat in front of his new doghouse. I suggested sunglasses, but Dad didn’t 

have much of a sense of humor in those days, so I was back to holding nails, helping him build a doghouse veranda canopy. This idyllic life could have continued along indefinitely, barring war or transfers, but for the hamsters.

The hamsters had seemed like a great idea at the time, but I’m sure that’s what the assassin thought when he shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and began World War I. Frank got it into his head that Diane and I needed more responsibility, maybe we had dropped a nail or something, I don’t remember. The gist of it was that he thought the ownership of a couple of small pets might teach us how to take care of something outside our small, slovenly, self-involved little persons. So, sometime in July of 1963, we piled into the car and drove the thirty miles into Bakersfield because we desperately needed two hamsters. The hamsters were cute, we liked them and they liked us, as far as we could tell, and Diane and I actually got to play with them for a few days. We fed them and cleaned their cages and proved all around that we weren’t the little sociopaths that Frank thought we were. Everything was going along well until Dad decided he needed to make the hamsters a built-in cage in the garage. It was done by morning,  

we heard him hammering and cursing long into the night, and the next day when we went out to look at the cage, it was a thing of beauty. 

Frank had outdone himself, it was a rodent theme park, we wished we were small enough to go inside and play with them and as it turned out, shrinking to their size would be the only way we ever would. For the hamsters were in the domain of Frank now. He had enjoyed building the cage for them, he had loved playing with them, and he decided that we could wait a few years to learn responsibility after all. Just like that, our father had repossessed our hamsters. 

Since the cages allowed the hamsters a rich social life, it didn’t take long before there were twelve hamsters, then twenty-five, then sixty-five, and so on, and infinitum was only a matter of time. For each new batch of hamsters we couldn’t play with, Frank built another set of cages, still all connecting, complete with all the cunning little doors, slides and tunnels.  Frank seemed not to be getting the connection between the open access hamster thoroughfare and the exploding hamster population, and he was behaving as if a garage full of hamsters in the Mojave Desert would go unnoticed by the local authorities indefinitely. Near the end of the summer, there were exactly 100 cages in the garage, fifty on each of the long walls, covering every inch of wall from ceiling to floor, ten cages wide, five cages vertically. The hamster count hovered somewhere around 300, depending upon on how many births there were that week. And that’s when the rattlers started coming to call.

Frank’s high fence kept most of the marauding snakes out and he managed to beat to death those hamster-crazed enough to-somehow- jump over an eight foot fence. By then, even Frank had realized the hamsters were getting to be a problem, so he started giving them away to the local kids, who of course began losing them and letting them escape into the desert, doing their part to attract the drooling rattlers to the base faster than greedy old bachelors to a pancake breakfast. 

Soon, everyone in the neighborhood had serious snake problems and everyone knew just who was responsible for it; since ‘their little bastards’ had promptly turned Frank in, and it wasn’t long before the military police came to our door.  The one thing I miss about living in the military is that you’re not allowed to be crazy. Well, you can be a little crazy, but not to the point where your craziness starts spurting out stuff like hamsters and rattlesnakes. The military will shut your crazy ass down, which is what happened to Frank that day. The MPs gave him two choices, which I thought was nice of them, considering. Choice number one was to put his herd of hamsters into the car the next morning, drive them back to the pet store in Bakersfield and drop them off. Or, choice number two was: ‘We will come in and shoot them, one by one, tomorrow evening.’ The next morning, as we were driving into Bakersfield, I was relieved to see that Frank was using his red rubber donut again, so maybe that back medication hadn’t worked out so well for him after all.

Dry Spell (First Place - Poetry)

by Trisha Castillo

we’re back to the
same question again
pulled out from where it
was sleeping in the
backseat of the car
sometimes it’s easier
to talk about things
while staring out the
window at the world
beyond the concrete
but neither of us
know exactly what
to say or how to solve
this problem racing
forward alongside the
yellow painted lines
and so we just focus
on the surroundings
and search for
insight in the fields
and the fruit stands

The Picture of Violet (First Place - Fiction)

by Hannah I. Darling

On my mantel there is a photograph of a woman I have met only once. 
 
She is sitting in the middle of a tall grass field wearing a white sun hat and holding a child in her arms, their backs to the camera and the sun sinking behind the hills. 

On the rare occasion I have company over, I lie and say she is my sister, then promptly change the subject.
 

 
Last night, I was sitting on the floor by the fire, grading paper after paper. The wind was soft as it crawled around the house and the weeks have been snowy. I’ve spent months racing around, keeping too busy.  

I dropped the papers to the ground, exhausted and looked up at the photograph on my mantel. Then, absentmindedly, I pulled out a photo album from the top drawer of this ugly, pale green chest with big white flowers on it. My mother had hand painted it when I was a child, so somewhere along the line it ended up with me.

And the photo album was as old as the chest. Mostly of family vacations, birthdays, bigger events. But toward end there was a picture of my dad sitting on top of a car, writing on a notepad. He was smiling. And it hardly looked like him. He had been quiet most my life, a large distance between him and the world. Like he was only made up of mysterious pieces and no one got to turn them over, see the other side.  

I sat there, flipping through the album. We had lived on the coast of Maine when I was about eight. I didn’t remember much of those years, but I could recall one morning when I woke up to a lot of screaming downstairs.

My two older sisters had snuck out to a party at a senior boy’s house, Billy something. They hadn’t come home until early that morning. Naturally, mom was doing the screaming. What was especially bad was Vivian had came home with only her long jacket on and nothing much underneath, except her wrist brace since she had hurt it at cheerleading. I went downstairs, wanting just to sneak into the kitchen, but mom grabbed me by the arm and told dad to take me down to the beach. I was eager, it was never just the two of us.  

We walked since we lived so close and dad didn’t say much of anything on the way, just chewed on a toothpick, like he routinely did. We got to the water and he sat on the rocks while I ran to the shore. I remember how the beach could make your hair gritty and face all salty in just a couple minutes. 

I sat next to him eventually, and dug my toes and fingers into the sand. He was writing in a little notebook he always carried around.

“What are you doing Dad?” I asked.

“Oh nothing, just jottin’ down some things.”

“Bout what?”

“...this and that, nothing much really.”

I told him I would tell him what I had written in my journal that week if he would tell me what he was jottin’ down. This made him laugh, which surprised me. In my mind it was a pretty good offer.

“Okay, Jack. Well, I’m writing about the laughing man. The laughing man who sits in the sky and swings down midday to give you a tap on the shoulder and tell you to slow it down. And you shouldn’t ignore him Jack, cause he’ll get old someday. Remember he laughs when you say, ‘It has to be now, I want it now.’ He can teach you patience, Jack, but he doesn’t want you to loose your child-ness either.” 

I told him that was a pretty good story about the laughing man and that maybe he should visit mom ‘cause she wasn’t so patient and he laughed again. I told him what I had written wasn’t as good ‘cause it was just about how Vivian had played baseball with me, even though her wrist was hurt. He said that was definitely as good, maybe even better.
 

I let the album fall shut and looked back up to the mantel.


I had gotten the call one afternoon in the spring and since it was a slow season we arranged for a time the next day. I packed my equipment into the truck. 

She had given me directions to her father’s ranch twenty miles away, and as I drove I noticed the last of the snow on the hills and knew the sunlight would be perfect. When I arrived, a dark haired woman was standing under a maple with a young girl, about three years old. She wore a long yellow dress and they were eating a bag of peanuts, the kind with a shell.

“You must be Violet, I’m Jack,” I said.

“Thanks for coming. This is my daughter, Cadence.” I noticed the unusual inflection of her voice and the toddler’s long eyelashes. She dusted the salt off her fingers as she spoke.

“If you want to set up, it may take me a while to round up my father. I want to try and get at least one shot of the whole family.” 

As she went inside with the child, I chose a spot under the maple tree where the peanut shells sprinkled the grass. I remember the smell of sunscreen and soil. Beside the swing on the porch was a pile of books, ruined by weather. I heard Violet turn on the television for Cadence and I got a glimpse of Violet’s father, a tall old man with a mustache, wearing a blackened cowboy hat. And I heard Violet gently try to persuade him to change into a nice shirt for the portraits. I remember the lows and highs of her voice and how I wished to hear her sing or read to her daughter. Her father sat down heavily at the kitchen table.

“Violet, turn on some coffee, will you?” he said.

“Dad, the photographer is waiting outside.”

The man walked outside to where I was standing. 

“Why don’t you come on in here, just for a moment,” he said.

I was confused, but followed him. He pointed to a chair at the table and I sat down.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

She turned to me and apologized.

“Just sit down Violet and give ma a damn minute.”

The man took a loud breath, but spoke just above a whisper.

“I know why you want to take these pictures…‘cause I’m gettin’ old.”

His laugh turned into a bad fit of coughing. 

“...It’s been rough between me and you these last few years, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you...Do you remember that old yellow house your mother and I lived in when you were little?  Do you remember that night one summer when you came into my study because it was so damn hot and you couldn’t sleep? I carried you around outside and you demanded that I point out the constellations since the stars were so bright… And I hummed that Neil Young song into your ear as you got sleepy. You asked me how a river could get blinded, and I told you Blind River was just a place in Canada and it could see just fine.” 

He paused and struggled to clear his throat- perhaps of the dust that collects on a thing never told. It was uncomfortable, like I shouldn’t have been there. He glanced at Cadence who was slouched in front of the TV, toying with a thread from the sofa. And he went on. 

“You had on some sort of candy bracelet and you had only eaten off the purple ones. Somehow, I remember that. It looked too tight, so I stretched it off your wrist and put it in my pocket. We walked back and forth along the driveway for an hour. There was that cricket noise and right there under the big black sky, I couldn’t believe that I was standing in this world with you. Of all the things, how could it be that I got you...

I looked up at the house and saw your mom, sitting in the window, watching us and crying a sort of beautiful cry. What I wanted to tell you Violet, is this hour has been my dearest hour.”  

The farm was quiet and the detergent commercial on the T.V. sounded fuzzy. Violet reached for a tissue. I said nothing, still unsure why the man invited me in. He stood up, abruptly.  

“Ready for my close up, sir,” the man said. 

I followed him outside.

After a few test shots, I had Violet’s father lean against the maple. He didn’t smile, but his eyes had a readiness. And for some reason, I feared this readiness. The peanut shells crunched as he adjusted his stance and the girls came out then. Violet joined her dad with Cadence on her hip and her dark hair flowed over her daughter’s shoulders. She kissed the small girl on the head and briefly squeezed her father’s hand. He nodded and looked out toward the sky.

In Violet’s face, I saw the fragility of a daughter and the instinct of a mother. I thought she wasn’t torn between the two roles, nor confused by them. Just aware of them, maybe for the first time ever.  She gave me a look, maybe of contentment. 

Cadence began to whine and I went to assist Violet with the bottles and toys in her car. In the fuss of the moment, her father limped to the barn and sat down against it, facing the valley and creek below. He removed his cowboy hat and rested it on his face. 

The neighbors strolled over a few minutes later, chatting and bearing cookies. Hellos were exchanged and once the situation was realized, perplexed and hysterical phone calls were made. I remember the maples at the ranch whirring in the wind.  

I watched Violet take a deep breath and close her eyes for a few seconds. She lifted Cadence and shakily walked over to the tall grass field where they sat down. The ambulance’s siren echoed off the hills and somehow Violet kept Cadence calm, facing away and pointing to something in the distance. 

I slipped into the background then, and a heaviness took me. I had been witness to courageous and timely reconciliation that day, as complete and pure as it comes. And this is how I imagined his death…

He took in a breath and felt the dirt driveway under his bare feet that long ago summer night and Violet’s sticky hands around his neck. He listened to his own humming and felt his daughter’s heart beating against his own. And then, he saw Violet’s mother in the window as he breathed out his last breath. 

I stood back for some time and looked out at Violet and her daughter, watching the things that contour a family. Eventually, I took what would be my last shot and packed my equipment into the truck.  
         


Weeks later when I developed Violet’s film, I quit photography and gave all my time to teaching. I looked up the address of the ranch in the phonebook and mailed the photographs to Violet. All, but one.  

The Blackberry Man (Second Place - Creative Nonfiction)

by Devon Williams

When I was young my parents used to visit this old lady Sally, and would often take me to her house with them. I remember driving out to her house deep in the country, wondering to myself why they spent any time with this creepy old lady. As we would pull into Sally’s drive way she would be standing there, arms folded across her flowered muumuu that was sewn from a 1970’s tablecloth, waiting for me to arrive. Waiting to pull me out of the car, squeeze my small cheeks, and threaten me with the blackberry man; this had been her normal routine since my parents started visiting her. 
 
Sally had crinkly leather skin with deep black bags sagging under her cold eyes. The black under her eyes was extenuated by her carelessly placed forest green eye shadow that didn’t do justice for her face. When she would hug me and give me smooches I would be engulfed by the mixture of her sweet pungent perfume and the smell from the pack of cigarettes she had smoked that morning, and every morning 60 years prior. Her thin old lips were smudged with a deep crimson lipstick and felt like old wet paper that was left  out to dry in the sun, as they were pressed against my unwilling cheek. As she cradled me her boneless body would swallow my small frame. Then in her gravelly voice she would half say, half cough, “watch out for the blackberry man," and then chuckle, cough, chuckle, and cough.

I think Sally was married to the blackberry man. The blackberry man had long dark hair that was turning grey, with patches of bald spots near the top of his head. A deep scar ran diagonally from above his eyebrow across his sun withered cheek. I assumed he got this gash from running through the black berry bushes he attended too. His scratch covered arms where covered by his brown flannel that he never changed out of. 
The black berry man got his name because he would throw bad kids over his shoulder, carry their screaming flailing bodies to the edge of the black berry patch and throw them into the waiting bushes. These weren’t average blackberry bushes as they covered a large field, and had been allowed to grow uncontrollably for countless years. In the middle of the patch, laid a spot where all of the thorns and bushes had been flattened down. In this spot laid the bodies of hundreds of other bad kids who had met a similar fate. Either bleeding out from the gashes from the thick razorblade thorns, or starving to death trapped in a cage of poisonous blackberry bushes. 

Although threatened with being hucked into the infamous blackberry bushes; for some reason the blackberry man decided to spare me. Although Sally consistently reminded me of the blackberry bushes I never found myself in the blackberry man’s strong grasp. Instead he stayed in the house during my parents visits, and I never really met the blackberry man. I later found out that her husband wasn’t a blackberry man, and that this monstrous person didn’t exist. The truth is the blackberry man died of cancer within months of my parents visiting Sally. Regardless she continued to threaten me after his death by saying, “Watch out for the blackberry man, he is going to get you, and throw you in the bushes.”

Airplanes (Second Place - Poetry)

by Zeke Hudson

Don't look: there are airplanes everywhere.
If we crossed oceans it was all to get back to the continent--
you know, the one our fathers grew.
Funny how these things come back to haunt us.
The sky is not so filled with buzzing now that the days are darker.
I once reached for your cup but you gave me your hand
and we ran like crickets somewhere into the distance
to escape the roaring overhead.
It's not so much a sickness as a mistake:
and we never called it a war; we called it the hum,

static, background music, something to keep our ears busy.
At the factories, women smiled with white teeth and sooty faces.
You said your mom quit her job there. It was the people.
She said they hummed while they worked.

Mae and the Judge (Second Place - Fiction)

by Richard Balzer

The dusk covered Caddy pulled up to the roadside dinner. Exiting the hold-over from the good old days of good old cars was a man of considerable heft. The Judge himself was a hold-over from the days of the good old boy network; he needed the “land yacht” to get around to survey his “domain.”

He pushed into the dinner in with his typical air of arrogance and self importance. Mae, the waitress, every ready with warm words and a warmer smile picked up a menu and sauntered over towards the Judge. He waived her off with an arrogant flip of his hand and said, “The usual, toast and coffee” and sourly added “and heavy on everything. The last time I was in here the only thing heavy was the burn on the toast and the grounds in the coffee.” Mae simply smiled and went about her task. Mae had just sold the diner last week and was on her way to sweet retirement. She had been verbally abused by the judge for more years than she would want to admit. Since today was the last day she would ever have to put up with this she went about her task without the resentment that had been there during other visits by the self important man.

Her mind worked like it was whipping up butter in the churn on a hot Saturday afternoon. She spread the butter on the toast as thick as lard on a stuck water pump, hoping to speed on the coronary the judge was likely to have at any moment. Next, she piled on the orange marmalade thick enough to keep a bottle fly busy for ten years. Coffee, hot enough to boil a crawdad and sweet enough to encourage an onset of type 2 diabetes completed the judge’s usual. She delivered the order with a smile on her lips as sweet as the coffee, knowing the judge wouldn’t complain as she had followed his instructions like she was an innocent Yankee, caught in the county’s speed trap and fined in his midnight kangaroo court. Mae swayed to the country and blues number that was playing on the broken down radio sitting on the counter by the day old donuts and sat on a stool behind the counter to wait. She wanted to have a good place to watch from and enjoy what was surely to follow.

The thick layer of marmalade slid off the toast and onto the Colonel Sanders' goatee that the judge was so proud of. It dripped off his face and piled onto both his white, three piece, summer only sear sucker suit and the table; the pile growing to resemble cumulous cloud floating by on a lazy summer morning.

Trying to wash down what he had been able to get into his mouth, the judge gulped the hot, sickening sweet coffee, burning his lips and tongue in the process. His pudgy face grew to a beet red that complemented the orange of the marmalade and the white of his goatee nicely. He searched in vain for the napkins that had been intentionally left off the table, looking more like he needed a dip in the public swimming pool.

Mae now stood over him with a wet table rag in one hand, a child’s bib in the other and a satisfied impish grin on her faced and asked, “Melpya.”

This is the Earth's Body (Third Place - Creative Nonfiction)

by Jerred North
 
Though it’s been some hours since I’ve returned from the Geology field trip to Lithia Park earlier this morning, my lungs have still not emptied out the last of the fresh riparian air. While the diaphanous fog still hung low on the blue and green dichromatic mountains, I and my classmates had been parceled into three white vans, which were to tote us from A: Ashland creek, to B: granite quarry, and then C: floodplains. To the tourists in the park who had defied the early sprinkling dew, we must have seemed like a beaded train or a sterile carnival as we surreptitiously braided through the parking lot en route. Although my classmates and I have shared a common appointment for the last eight weeks we couldn’t talk long in the pew-like rows of seats inside the vans without letting slip our ignorance of our fellow’s names. Even still, there was an ebullient vibe of familiarity between us, which I would guess, is because of our having collectively dined on the same course of brain-fodder throughout the term. But also I think because all of us, including the older outlier students, have germinated in American elementary school in which every child has the carrot of a field trip dangled before their eyes. As soon as the van’s doors curtained back – the transformation that took place…if only you could have seen it – it was as if our humors had been swapped out with the scintillating mirth of children on recess. 

On location our professor Jad gesticulated conservatively while his crossed eyes gyrated, one pupil perennially lagging behind the other, between us and the creek, mountains, and valley. He spoke to us in low undulating tones of authority and we absorbed the history of our monolithic specimens with dawning awareness of alien worlds beneath our feet, under our noses. This is earth’s body, a macrocosmic projection of your own. The newest organic skin on top, cropped over in tangled brown and green hair, awns above the deeper folds of tissue. Even the capillary movement of water that splinters into webbed tributaries as it meets the rock with Judo-like fluidity mimics your own sanguine turbidity. We jotted this down furiously on papered clipboards while walking as if we preferred the details more in ink than in nature. More than one of us stubbed a toe. But I admit there is a kind of poetry in raw facts and theories, a lyricism of distilled revelations. Someone sweated for this knowledge so we could gobble it up with our ears and pens, but not I fear, with our hearts. Cleaved from the story of their birth, our over active metabolisms digest the naked data like sugary starch, whooshing it through one end and out the other. Color me curmudgeon but damn it there must be such a thing as ‘too easy.’

In all the recent talk of these unprecedented times and its cresting generation of which I am a hapless member, I notice one similarity between we the I-gen and the ‘others’ before us. We believe, though we know it is not so, that the world has always been how it is now and that it will remain so into the future, like a ship we feel will never come in. I can even see this phenomenon on a personal level churning in the cogs of my own psychology. When the optimism disease throbs feverishly in me I witness it penetrate like the slow deep percolation of rain to my deeper memories and infuse them with my present temperament. It happened today when I smelled the earthy humidity rising from the composting grass, leaves, and mud that lined the steep switchbacks of the quarry trail and was sent spinning back through synaptic wormholes to my time in the Argentinean Andes. That itinerant period of my life flooded into me as a montage of postcards highlighting the pictorially poignant memories: me nestled between shouldering boulders beside Don Del Rosa’s small shanty where the chicks beak for worms in the vegetation alongside the river surging with the recent snow melt: me shielding the sun from my eyes while I hop scotch in flip-flops up the bare mountainside, scanning the many peaks connected with cursive grace for the white horse Paloma and her newborn colt: me at the window of the small crooked mercado with ten pesos in my hand twisting my mouth into the castellano pronunciation for Marlboro and cerveza: me walking that endless serpentine gravel road coiling to higher and higher elevations until the buckbrush thins as if the last patches of hair on a balding head. Like most of my memories, I saw these still-lifes from a third person perspective, as if I were the one snapping the shot, the one telling my Kodak doppelganger ‘cheese’! Yet as I recalled these images, splaying them out with nostalgic iridescence onto my mind’s canvas, soaking in each image for a time until clicking over to the next slide, I felt drawn to reach out to them despite a voice that admonished me: ‘don’t’! You would embrace a lie. An embellished and warm lie. Remember you were so lonely then you sometimes couldn’t sleep, without your friends, family, culture, you were as helpless as hairless Samson – you were anxious for a home, for a glimmer of familiarity in another’s eye, for a friend you could talk to without fear of misunderstanding, ensured in those friendships in which intimate insight cleaves through the bramble of fallacious words. Remember what you would have given for a pillow with a worn groove molded to your head, one saturated with the daydreams and fantasies that leak nightly from your head and pool into the seams? If you remember that, then you will also remember the scars you covered like pornography from the doctors best fit to help you. Yes, the propaganda of individualism was too firmly established on your altar, sacrosanct, metaphysical, that you rejected love’s treatment and marched off alone into the woods to lick your wounds. Bootstraps and all that, or isn’t it so? Yet there those memories were, revitalized under the sun, and I found myself wishing my wormholes weren’t merely synaptic. 

The field trip ended in Ashland’s floodplains. Houses were built there before FEMA began to enforce its zoning laws. Come next flood they will be inundated and torn down. I wonder if they will rebuild? Humans are a tenacious bunch and even when caught in the winds of existential labyrinths we keep on. It may be our sense of humor that saves us; as far as I know we are the only animals who can laugh, although I swear I’ve noticed some dogs grinning when the weather is just right. Monkeys, too, I’m told, can split their sides when the jokester of their herd is on a role. So often I feel my lips tugging up into the seeded shape of a watermelon slice when confronted with pain, and I often wonder if in a world without a macabre blemish if we would need the liquor of laughter at all. This field trip was the last our professor would teach; he was forced out of the ivory tower because the University’s malnourished wallet couldn’t keep him. After he said his last formal words we clapped but I wonder why instead we didn’t laugh.

Before leaving, I squinted my eyes at the greenery for a final impressionistic soak in: white alder, aspen, mahogany, birch, both the bog and water kind, green briar, and golden currant blended together under a halo of pollen. This cacophony of color is the scab over a troubled paleoseismic history. I need only point to the barren tongue shaped grooves carved into the granite slopes where landslides have lacerated the land’s body or the stretch marks in the soil where creeping faults have contorted the ground and you will see how green has since grown to cover these wounds. This is earth’s body, a macrocosm of my own. 

I too once suffered a personal landslide of sorts although I cannot point to its head, that is, the precise moment the surge began. Whether it happened while I slept or in the middle of the day, I honestly don’t know. But after an eon of erosion and foreshocks, the slide had been inevitable. It took only the mainshock of adolescence, the unsettling vision of worlds orbiting my own, to shake the jumble of sedimentary deposits, gospels, palisades, pennies, and superpowers, down in a cascading sluicy charge. Sometime after the dust drifted off into the still wavering air I caught my first sight of the long gash that remained. For years this spot was so sensitive the slightest adjustment would congeal the air in my chest. These pains, as you know, were not volitional. Like poor Prometheus who was chained to his rock and forced to daily suffer the beak of a voracious eagle at his liver, I also was wed to a moratorium of stone. But Prometheus’s troubles are eternal and the bird that, for a time, returned each night to pick open my own closing wound eventually grew bored or died and I healed.

Several Cries Over Winter in Carlsbad, New Mexico (Third Place - Poetry)

by Tyler Lacy

I.
John Gamble in his cell over his bed of coal.
He never believed in Santa Claus
or that murder was wrong. 

II.
Only crows
are plucked off limbs these days. 
I reach out--
a pecan orchard.
Not to the limbs
of the trees, but to the shaking
hands of poor families,
empty buckets. 

III.
seagulls in the desert
parking lot at the Pecos River
and in winter? 

IV.
Patty Sue and Mattie
because they still miss their families
and we still haven't found a cure. 
They roll over in their tight graves
and open their mouths.
The snow will melt with John's coming down. 

V.
Me because they're too young. 

VI.
Mom in the kitchen
trying to cook supper
but really only
but really only
but real lonely
with a Folger's can after all that snow
gone catching melted tears.

A Notebook For Every Town (Third Place - Fiction)

by Corynn Del Core

I told her I had a different notebook for every town, but really, this was the first one. The idea was nice, I don’t know, I thought she’d like it. And she did. 

The place was just like a bar only it was a coffee shop. It must’ve been meant to be a bar originally. I sat at the counter with a glass of water in front of me, no ice in it. I was there to fill in this notebook I had, and then she sat down by me.

Her name was Angela, she said, and I thought just in that second that it probably wasn’t her actual name. It didn’t matter though, and I told her my name was Christine. It isn’t. But what does it matter?

She had a drink that got whipped cream on her upper lip. She licked it off mostly, but there was a gloss of it left on one side and it annoyed me a little. She said, “What’cha writing?” And I told her I liked to travel, and I had a different notebook for every town. When she asked what I meant I told her, “I write down everything about a place, all the people I meet,” and here I showed her in the notebook as I wrote her name down. “Everything goes in the notebook and helps me remember things. Then when I go, I leave it somewhere in whichever town it was.” She asked me, “Why would you leave it? What’s the point, then?” And I told her it helped me remember anyway, and I didn’t want to be bound to that many notebooks.

Of course, really, this was the first one. And I was doing what I said, more or less, but I hadn’t planned on leaving my notebook anywhere and I thought probably six or so pages was enough for a place. But it sounded better the new way. Angela gave me a mixed smile.

I drank some of my water, found it warm as bathwater. I asked her if she lived in this town and she said yes. She was pushing grains of sugar around on the granite counter top, her fingers splayed straight out, sugar collecting under her chipped orange nails. She rubbed away that last trail of whipped cream, and then it was easier to talk with her.

She was there waiting for her friend Jessica who was supposed to meet her, and then they were going somewhere I forget…maybe the movies. She seemed like she wanted to make friends, and I liked that, so I smiled with her. 

She asked me where all I had travelled to, and I had to make some new places up. It didn’t sound good enough to say Spokane and Death Valley, so I added Paris and Cancun and Machu Picchu. Some others too. I was surprised she didn’t ask what I was doing in her little town after all that, but she just told me how interesting it was and said, “But don’t you have a job?” And I said, “I’m a reporter,” before I had thought of a place to work as a reporter for. But she didn’t ask, because she didn’t care or didn’t think of it, or because she knew right off I was lying and didn’t want to bother.

It was close to nine-thirty when she sat down by me, and a half hour later her friend still hadn’t shown up. I asked if she would go call? She said yes and asked to borrow my cell phone, because, could I believe it? she didn’t own one. When I told her I had just lost mine I could see on her face she didn’t believe me and thought I was just a bitch who wouldn’t let her use my phone. I disliked her for a second.   

She said she’d go look for a payphone, and I said Alright, good luck. I kept to my water and my mostly blank notebook wondering if she’d come back in. She didn’t. I decided to go, then. Or, thinking about it now, it seems like I had a feeling something was going on with her, and I left to find her. I must have thought she was in trouble, I guess. 

I was halfway to my car walking with my hands in my coat pockets and my notebook clamped to my side when I saw her in part of a second disappearing out of a circle of street lamp glow and into an alley. I saw her hand and her nail polish, and a whirl of black clothes. I ran after her, into the dark, not thinking.

The contrast from light to dark stole my vision. While my eyes adjusted I listened for her steps but didn’t hear them. I thought, she couldn’t be gone already, it was only two seconds ago she’d disappeared. 

The dark shapes of the alley finally came into focus against the light at the other end. She wasn’t there. 

Then I felt her move, she was behind me somehow. I turned but she was already on me, her arms clamped around me so I couldn’t move. And then she bit me. 

It was just like a movie. She bit my neck hard; her bangs swept against my chin. I rushed sideways and slammed us both against the nearest wall and her grip loosened. My notebook fell. I elbowed her in the belly and ran. I didn’t look back at her, just ran until I got to a 24 hour grocery, and went inside and back through a pair of doors with the round glass windows. I found the staff bathroom and locked myself in, took my hand off my neck. I checked in the mirror. 

I wasn’t bleeding. I thought I felt blood when I was running, but the slickness had just been her spit. Her teeth marks were bright screaming red on my throat, but not oozing at all and they were just normal squares. She wasn’t a real vampire or anything. Just some crazy chick who thought she was. Or maybe she had rabies. 

The way she’d lured me out into the dark though, that argued she was a crazy wannabe vampire. Maybe she watched too many movies and did drugs and cried in the shower or something. I didn’t think if I should call the police or not, it just didn’t occur to me until the next day, and I never did anyway. I washed my neck with hand soap. I pressed my hair down but it wasn’t long enough to hide the bite mark, but I didn’t care much. 

I had to walk back the direction I’d come to get back to my car. It seemed stupid but I couldn’t stop myself from flipping up the collar of my coat and hunching my shoulders. I watched for her in the streets and in the shadows. I looked over my shoulder as I unlocked my car, but she wasn’t there.

Entropy (Honorable Mention - Poetry)

by Zeke Hudson

I wasn’t ready and we had nightly conversations about it.
They all went the same,
like hymns.
I had to escape the holidays,
so I took off one morning to go north
for the city. I drove with
failing brakes and
water like the next flood on my windshield. 
I thought about what it would be like
to lose control.
I thought about taking my foot
off of the pedals,
letting go of the steering wheel, and
trying to relax.
When alone, I doodled people looking away from each other,
imagining different things.
I tore each one out of my notebook
and put them in a folder.
I thought they were pretty like the way
good-byes are pretty.
When she felt like she had to leave,
she told me first,
as if inviting me to come.
I thought inertia won battles.
I didn’t know much about wars;
sometimes I said
that I was a pacifist,
but then I felt like
I was cheating myself out of something,
and I felt like
maybe I wasn’t telling the truth. 
I listened to all the same songs back then.
I heard the hum
of my tires
and followed my headlights around each corner and
every time there was just
more road.

Missed Connections (Honorable Mention - Fiction)

by Jamey Strathman

Feb 15 - WHY NOT 

ME- Shy girl sitting across from you at coffee shop.

YOU- Equally shy boy, well dressed, eating a fruit parfait. Long blond hair, pale, glasses.

I was thinking recently, 'Why not you,' just as a broad, relative term. Why not my neighbor, why not the teenager walking his dog across the street, why not the clerk at my grocery store, why not my old high school crush? People fade in and out of my mind on a near-daily basis. Not only that, actually. They fade in and out of my life. Why not just pick one at random to share the rest of my life with? I look at you and see someone moderately attractive. I could never be afraid of you cheating on me or hurting me. When we both come to terms with the fleeting nature of consciousness, won't we both end up in the same place with any other person? I could be with any other guy, you could be with any other girl.

I work long hours and come home to a dark, empty apartment every night. I'm sure you (you and mostly everyone) know what that feels like. Why not return to you sitting on the couch, reading The New York Times online with a dim light beside you and a gin and tonic on the end-table? Why not you, seated across from me in the kitchen as we eat leafy green salads with too many croƻtons in them, crunching as quietly as we can manage. These specifics seem to hardly matter, but how can they not if our lives are comprised of them?

The “you” in this situation is collective, it is a variable that fills in for the ideal partner. The only thing that makes me apply “you” to you (the blond) is the horrible feeling in my stomach telling me that this is supposed to be how it is, that this is (and isn't EVERYTHING!?) the best part of my life, that since I was born, this is what I've worked towards, and will be working on for years, decades, forever.

So why not you? 

Feb 16 - THE INHERITANCE 

you know who I am. you know why I'm posting this. truth is, I'm tired. they say when you fear your parents, when you loathe them, you become more like them as you age. well, you won. I'm slowly turning into you. I hope you're happy. this is a missed connection of the most understated variety. this is me calling “us” out. it isn't enough for me to know that you love me; I have been operating under that assumption my entire life. I want you to say it. you could have said it when you talked on the phone yesterday. you could have said it when I was in town to visit you and mom last. you could shout it out right now, shout it out so loud that I could hear it no matter where you are right now. I know your voice isn't what it used to be, but I bet you can muster up enough strength. do it. let it happen. scream. scram. cram. ram. am.

you're tired. I'm tired too. we go to bed tired. we wake up tired. we spread jam over our english muffins tired. we commute to work tired. we smoke cigarettes tired. we drink after a long day tired. we go to bed tired. I feel lines being etched into my forehead when I'm smiling. 'I love you' lines. I look into the mirror and see your name filling them. I see my name filling them. your name is my name. it makes sense that I fall just as you do, arms flying in that same predictably unpredictable pattern. 

Feb 16 - THE INVENTION OF PERIPHERAL VISION 

As time passes, as we continue to “ignore” each other, I've been getting these visions. I see you sitting in that same place, eating that fucking salad like you do every day in the courtyard below my office (you're doing it as I type this, actually). I crank open the window in my office just enough so that my head and neck will stick out. I slit my throat. The blood is carried on the wind. You feel the first few drops on your head and look up. This is when the torrent hits you. It douses your suit coat. It peppers your salad. It makes everything a bit more bearable. It has grown increasingly appeasing since I worked out the equation in my head. You lose me, while I only lose myself. 

Mar 20 – RAYMOND 

So I saw the “Everybody Loves Raymond” bumper sticker on your car.  Do you really love him?  As much as I do?  I think Raymond's the best.  The way he always gets angry at his parents, ha ha, I can relate.  I’m glad you love Raymond too.  It’s been really hard to go on without new episodes of that show.  I still don’t really know how to fill that block of time.  I tried sitting around, but that didn’t work out very well, cuz I started thinking about things that I don’t like thinking about.  That’s why I was watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” in the first place!

Raymond’s mom sure likes making food, huh?  See, these are the things I like about that show.  My mom also enjoys feeding me, and when I get full, she tells me, “Joseph, you better finish what’s on your plate,” ha ha.  One time I thought about changing my name to Raymond, not only because I really like the show, but also because Raymond is just a really nice name.  Imagine it:

“Hello, Raymond!”

“Raymond, how have you been?”

“Raymond, quit leaving the toilet seat up!”

“Raymond, I’m leaving you.”

“Would you like fries with that, Raymond?”

“The Roman empire came to ruin when it was overrun by surrounding Barbarian tribes, Raymond.”

But I decided not to.  Too much hassle, and I had just purchased the first two seasons on DVD.  Didn’t leave the house much after that.

So, let’s talk about you.  What’s your favorite episode?  Other than Raymond (of course, ha ha), who is your favorite character?  Have you ever met Raymond in person (I tried, but I guess he didn’t hear me, or he was too far away to acknowledge me or something)?  We can share Ray moments where we accidentally do something that Raymond would do on the show.  Meet me for coffee?  I know this place downtown that looks almost like Raymond’s kitchen.  I’ll take you there, and we can both talk about how much we love Raymond. 
Mar 31 – THE NEWS ISN’T THE SAME WITHOUT YOU 

It’s Tuesday evening.  I’m sitting on my couch with my feet up on the coffee table.  My wife has gone to bed early.  The television is on.  It illuminates the room with a milky glow.  My eyes have dried out, and start stinging if I don’t blink enough.  My watch beeps.  It is now 10:00 and you’re not there. 

Mar 31 – RE: THE INHERITANCE

I remember asking you (this was a few years back) why you kept using.  You looked back at me, held that question in the air for what seemed far too long, and said, “Because nothing is straight.”  I think I know what you meant now.  When I was at the dock a few weeks back, I saw a guard-rail overlooking the river.  How it looked straight from one angle, then when I walked up to it and saw it from another angle, it appeared as an optical illusion.  There was no line.  The guard-rail was round.  And I imagined you standing beside me, saying “Nothing is straight,” with smoke coming out of your mouth.

Do you remember telling me that?  I see it all the time now.  I see it in my strawberry Fanta, which tastes great, but fills out my hips more than I'd like to admit.  I see it in my friends as well, with “casual addictions,” regardless of whether they're healthy or not.  There are excuses being made everywhere.  So, “nothing is straight.”  You used it as a roundabout way of explaining your problem.  Here's what I want to know: does that excuse you from using?  Does that excuse you from leaving?  Does it excuse having to wear ear plugs for the next couple of months when Mom couldn't stop crying in an empty bed?  You should have been there to see that- the bed looked so big without you in it.

Apr 5 - MISSING CONNECTION 

I still text you.

I don't stop thinking about the time we spent spend together.  About all of the things you gave give me.  When we sat sit in your room and cried cry together about those at this moment that have left our lives.  You told tell me, "Zach, don't forget about our time together.  I barely remember my mom, and she was so sweet to me."

I said say, "A long time ago, I read a book.  There are these creatures in it called Tralfamadorians.  They behave a lot like we do, but they have an extra sense.  They can perceive time in a way we cannot.  So when you say that your mom is gone and that she was sweet to you, you aren't entirely right.  Just like when I say, 'I have a dog,' I don't mean that I possess one at this moment in time.  I just mean that somewhere along the strand of my timeline, I possess it.  At the strand we can see, your mom is not alive, just as my dog is not, just like the man who wrote of the Tralfamadorians is not.  These things we speak of have not ceased to exist.  We are just unable to interact with them now," and with that you smiled smile and look at me, and tears fell fall from your face.  You said say thank you.

This is where the weird part comes in.  I know that at the part where you died die, I stopped stop being able to think like I did before.  I started start using past-tense conjugation even though I know that the past is only the past if I want it to be.  I've just been getting this sneaking feeling that I devalue you in some way by just moving on.  The Tralfamadorians have a saying.  It is "So It Goes."  I have to tell myself "So It Goes" at least two or three times a day so I don't break and fall to the ground.

When you were are at the part where you were are clinging to the last moments of your life, I would sit by you and read you the book.  This is the part I see the most clearly now.  You seem so frail and near-death that I can barely look up from the pages at you.  I can see you when I write this.  You force a grin.

I text you, "I miss you," and maybe somewhere six months ago you get my message.  You respond, "I miss you too."  Your name was Carrie.  Your name is Carrie.
  
Apr. 12 – RE:RE: THE INHERITANCE 

this is the last conversation we shared.  i took your parts out because it hurts to read them.

“Look at me.  Why is that so hard for you?  

“Why do you always hide behind this bullshit?

“It's like you can't say something seriously.  You're such a fictional character.  It's like you purposefully go out of your way to make people feel bad about themselves.  Is that your M.O.?  Do you like it when you make me cry?  I can't believe I EVER

“- no, it's not that, it's just that I love you, and I hate to see you pulling this.  You just never seem to care.  

“No, I know you DO care, but I don't like that you're taking advantage of me like this.

“Honestly, yes.  Fucking leave, you know, I don't care.  You're being such a baby.  Leave, I don't fucking care.

“Leave, I DON'T FUCKING CARE.”

i hope you remember the other half.