Ed Versluis Contest Winners 2011

The results of this year's blind judging are in, and the following are the winners of the 8th annual Ed Versluis Memorial Writing Contest:

Fiction
1st place: "Of a Certain Age" by Stephanie Neuerberg
2nd place: "Beauty is in the Ear of the Beholder" by Christian Chesterman
3rd place: "The Way We Talked" by Zeke Hudson
Honorable mention: "Boxing" by Zeke Hudson; "A Pack" by Jordan Parsons

Poetry
1st place: "pas de fume sans feu" by Trisha Castillo (Congratulations to Trisha for winning first place in poetry
     two years in a row--remember, the judging is blind!)
2nd place: "at the Cantina" by Mo Costello
3rd place: "Crash Test Dummies" by Katherine Taylor
Honorable mention: "pues" and "in the garden, dear" by Mo Costello; "Nebulae" and "Birds" by Zeke Hudson; "Plastic Melts" by Katherine Taylor; "Untitled" by Jordan Parsons

Congratulations! Thank you to everyone who submitted; the submissions were of high quality and clearly demonstrate SOU students' love of language.

First, second, and third place winners receive cash prizes and guaranteed publication in next year's planned Ed Versluis booklet, which will be distributed around campus. The winning pieces are posted below for your reading pleasure.

pas de fume sans feu (First Place - Poetry)

by Trisha Castillo

girl walks across
the minutes
of a song
played once
in a haze
 of smoke and vinyl

she moves like
vintage material
and temple blessings
spun together 

under the flickering glow

 of neon lights

Of a Certain Age (First Place - Fiction)

by Stephanie Neuerberg

We were sitting on the same couch. Later, I would learn that this is what he considered “cuddling.” We were sitting on the couch, his elbow resting on my legs and vice versa and we were just talking. It was nearing four in the morning.

A lot of what was said in that conversation I can’t remember. Something about the bands he liked and a book he was planning on reading went in and out my ears while I just stared at his face. A cat was on the armchair next to us. There were plenty of seats available, but we crammed ourselves lengthwise onto that tiny two-person sofa; elbows, knees, legs, feet, fingers touching.

No wonder he thought we were cuddling.

I am not that kind of girl, I thought when he asked me to spend the night a couple days earlier. I had denied his request, but it was nearing four in the morning and here we were, the gangly twenty-two year old male and the round-faced eighteen-year-old female crushed together on this couch. Talking. I wondered how it would have been different if I had agreed to spend the night.

It was a strange weekend, spent with this man-child who had rescued me from nearly being raped at a party by some drunken asshole from my English class. Partying, for us, was listening to our friend Jake ramble on for hours until three a.m.; breakfast the next morning where he made me laugh so hard I spat water everywhere (the joke wasn’t even funny); and now conversing on his couch in the wee hours of le matin.

Weeks later, he told me I was his best friend. Via the internet, no less, but still his best friend. He told me hilarious jokes, left notes in my mailbox, pulled (artificial) yellow roses out of his backpack to surprise me, burned me a CD of his favorite musician, gave me a world map.

The note that accompanied the CD read as follows: “Everything he’s ever sung, I want to say to you.” Or something like that.

He was older than me.

~

It was the first time I had ever even come close to kissing anyone, and I felt sorry for rejecting him for, what was this? The third time? But there was something not right in the way he was holding me, and the way I heard him practically beg for me to show him even a tiny bit of affection.

We were in his kitchen, arms locked, and if his father had walked in at that moment, it might’ve looked like a romantic scene from a movie: his arms around my waist, me bent as though I was being dipped at the end of a waltz. If only I didn’t have an expression of utter disgust and fear on my face.

My problem began months before as I sulked over losing an amusement park game. We were spinning around to the beginning of the ride, and as I pulled away from him in mock-disappointment, I felt a ghost-like brush against my cheek and realized he had just tried to kiss me.

I remembered that moment now, in his kitchen, after I had just eaten dog food on a dare from his mother. To this day, I remember that moment, along with all the Two Door Cinema Club we listened to that summer, the look on Sheena’s face when I stayed with him instead of going to her graduation party, and the handmade skirt I had been wearing when this happened.

I didn’t want it like this. I reeked of kibble-n-bits and wanted to escape his embrace, and I avoided his eyes as they implored, “Come on.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

I offered my cheek to him, and he planted an awkward kiss on the edge of my jaw bone.

He was the same age as me.

~

I was gazing longingly at the boy I crushed on last year from my solitary seat down the hall when suddenly a thin boy in pinstripes and a shock of perfect hair came into my view. He wasn’t particularly attractive, but was looking at me with such... intensity? I can’t remember exactly. And I was prepared to ignore him, despite recognizing him from auditions earlier that day.

Suddenly he was next to me, shaking my hand, telling me even though I beat him in the contest I won that year, he was okay with it, because I deserved it, and all this information was coming into my ears at such a rapid pace. I was charmed, to say the least.

Later that weekend, as we sat backstage in the dark, I learned that he and I played the same role in that Shakespeare play, we both loved writing, and by the end of the weekend he had dubbed me his nemesis. As the months crept on, and we spoke on the phone nearly every night, I found myself being even more charmed by his strangeness, his quirkiness, his nerdiness, and the fact that even though the call dropped eight times, he still called me back for the ninth.

He emailed me a short story sometime later in which his character fell in love with mine, and although I was dating someone else at the time, it was then I realized I was head over heels too. I started imagining what our wedding was going to be like. He respected me and asked my opinion and said I had beautiful hair. I was in love.

Then, I admitted it. And the compliments stopped. The writing samples I sent him went ignored, although he kept running back to me to critique his college applications. I cut off my hair, and he stopped talking to me. I went for a run, and broke down in sobs at the end of it. There had been someone else. I was heartbroken.

He was younger than me.

at the Cantina (Second Place - Poetry)

by Mo Costello

i wish you could have seen the napkins. at

the cantina. seen

how they were folded.

as if in a song,

a middle aged bartender,

alone at night suddenly

stops what he is doing.

he begins to methodically fold

and refold,

an unassuming pile of thin, white napkins.

it is not enough to simply place each one in

the small, plastic cup

that adorns

each small, wooden, table.

He must,

instead, fold,       corner, to corner,

as if tucking his only girl in at night.

Only to place her in

a small, plastic cup.

by the salt.

at the Cantina.

Beauty is in the Ear of the Beholder (Second Place - Fiction)

by Christian Chesterman

I was four years old when I decided to become a serial killer.  There’s even physical documentation of the event that cemented my decision.  I believe a picture of a young man flying through the air over a populous beach is circulating on the Internet.  I was building a sandcastle at the time.  Four turrets, a portcullis, and two flying buttresses were covered in blood and spinal fluid when he fell.

The young man landed with his neck bending the wrong way not two feet from where I was sitting in the sand.  The cracks and pops of his vertebrae shattering upon impact would reverberate within my head for years.  A beautiful symphony of the fragility of life.  I just wanted to hear it again and again.  What would a snapping femur sound like?  A fractured patella?  An impacted pelvis?  I wanted to know.

As I got older, I learned that what I was doing was morally reprehensible.  Not that it really mattered to me though; I loved it.  By age eight I had killed a toddler, two dogs, and an elderly Vietnamese man named Ming.  Ming had sounded beautiful.  Like the tinkling of antique bells housed in calcium church towers.  It was exhilarating.  Intoxicating.

Of course there were others I had broken, but they had not died.  Nor did they see me because I had worn my brother’s gorilla mask.  I cut out the ears though.  They muffled the sound that I needed to hear.  My ears peeked through the sides and tickled the wind while my face grew sweaty under the latex.   There were pieces about me in the news.  A midget masked killer. A simian psychopath on the rampage.  A sadistic child-sized butcher.  I didn’t like that last one though.  I never cut people up.  I only broke them.  People came apart in such musical ways.  Sockets dislocated with a scrumptious sucking sound.   Lungs collapsed with an airy sigh.  Cartilage crumbled with a susurrus of crackling.  I lived to find new ways to break bodies.  I was an aural explorer in the field of human destruction.  Dogs were good too though.

At age sixteen I was caught.  The police found me halfway through splitting open Ms. Jefferson’s skull with my trusty sledgehammer.  They made the mistake of sending me to juvie.  I found new subjects for my educational procedures on a weekly basis.  Two months later they tried to send me to jail.  I had heard of solitary confinement and knew that I needed to be on the outside in order to learn.  So I killed my guards during transport and left to pursue my studies elsewhere.

I ended up in Dunsmuir, California.  I love it here.  It’s so secluded and forested.  Nobody can catch me.  I work in the retirement home as a caretaker of the dying.  I offer a quicker demise to those who wish to further my aspirations.  I transport the bodies to the morgue and nobody suspects a thing.  Ever since Ming, I’ve had a certain propensity for elderly men. They break so purposefully.

Tonight I am going to try a new method of dismantling.  I have a date to the prom, and his name is Jack Panetti.  His dad owns the local lumber mill.  I heard from Jenna that sex makes everything better.  I can’t wait to see if she’s right.

Crash Test Dummies (Third Place - Poetry)

by Katherine Taylor

Wake up before you and hide the Golden books in the night stand,
wondering when exactly the Swiss extract themselves from bed to

turn the waterfalls back on.
Take me to the mountains in an elevator
and down a wooden slide requiring straddling, not sitting,
so we can lick the same salt as everyone else,
turned black with bacteria and dirty hand-oil;
why weren’t we afraid of diseases?
 
You’ll know where I am by my red bucket hat,
bobbing in the waves at a safe distance
between intermittent construction projects
requiring mainly sand and water,
with a splash of aesthetic spacing and height
and a touch of structural integrity know-how.
By the way, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is 1) not edible, and 2) did not have rails in the late 

     eighties.
 
                           Step on a giant stick and it won’t stay stationary; 

     most likely it will jump up and 

gouge my leg,

but no matter—there are a bazillion ladybugs to catch in
little handines that pudgily encase them until they’re
deposited in a flat-red Ford Escort with squared edges.
Learn not to smear nasal excretions on walls, or
Miss Audrey will yell, “You know bedderendat!”

I’m the only one she calls her daughter,
and for a few years I’m black by day.
 
The middle of the toast is best, all juicy with butter.
I’ll eat the crusts to make you happy and
feel like a good mother.
Just promise me we can get ice cream sandwiches from
the machine that only sells ice cream sandwiches
so they’re sure not to run out.
 

The Way We Talked (Third Place - Fiction)

by Zeke Hudson

I try to invite God into my life every day, but I am never sure if he accepts, or if I would know or not if he did. I’m not religious, and I said some things about God when I was younger that I wouldn’t feel comfortable repeating now, even though I’m agnostic—even if he doesn’t exist. When I invite him in I feel embarrassed, like I’m waving back at someone who’s waving to their friend behind me, and my invitation feels unsure when it should feel confident. Some days I forget to invite him until the better half of the day is over, when I could have used his presence with me earlier. I hope one day God will say “Yes” and I will know.

Now this girl is talking to me as if what we’re saying matters. Her friends, travel, careers, health, it all matters and we remind ourselves and each other of it as often as possible in the way we talk. She is a master of it, and I get excited with her. Yes! Go to Indonesia. Yes! Everyone here will still love you, and your family will still love you. You can even get your dream job there, get married, and raise cultured little babies. And I will be very happy for you and I will think about you late in my life as the girl, now the woman, who succeeded and made her life good.

I saw a video once of a crackhead who knew what love was. He made a sign with his hands, like this, clasping them together, and then he said to the cameraman “I love you. Now isn’t that awful? To know someone loves you?” I remember the way he said awful, like it really was awful, but exquisite, and I said “Yes” to myself, quietly, like talking to God. The videographers were laughing, and then I laughed too, but I didn’t understand his hand sign, and neither did they.

I don’t remember what I said anymore, but she leaned her head against my shoulder, and we stayed like that for an hour. I wondered what I said, or if it was my words at all, or if she was just like me and the videographers, looking for something that comes so easily to others. That made me more scared than anything—that after everything we said that mattered, maybe we didn’t know. Sometimes I thought about picking little berries, and I wondered if I’d be too shy to show them to her and say, “Here, these remind me of you.”

I used to drive at night with music on when I was overwhelmed, because you can’t sing along to the sound of tires and engine. I would climb into the hills as far as I could, until roads ended, or gates barred my passage, and then I would find a side road, an alley, and drive until I didn’t know the words. Roads became damnably familiar. When I got older I started walking, and when I walked alone I was reminded that humans aren’t the only animal that lives in cities. Farther above town, where the stores wink and close, cats become raccoons, deer turn into cougars, and every shadow moves. It is so hard to get lost. But every step away from home felt freer.

Now she’s murmuring about things that could matter. She is sleepy. I think that I could matter, so I put my arm around her and she smiles. Before, when I thought about berries, I knew I only thought of them because I wanted to be considerate, but I didn’t know much else. Now I know what I want. I have my arm around her, and Indonesia is gone, because it’s just the two of us. But I know something’s not perfect, like she’s still thinking about going somewhere even though I’m right there. Or maybe she knows more about me than I want her to.

I visited my friend at college once and got sad. I didn’t know that I was sad until I realized I had been thinking about a girl whom I loved and who would never love me. As my friend and I walked through a park on campus, I looked at the field ahead, and the road, and the roads after it, and I wanted to go, to get lost, to have the strength or the courage to leave, or do anything. So I ran. When my friend caught up, I was lying in the grass, still far from the road. I looked at the stars and wished the sky would go black. “I want the world to end,” I said to my friend, and he helped me up. When people ask me when the last time I cried was, I tell them about that trip, and when I didn’t get past the field.

I still talk with her, sometimes. There’s something there that never left, even though we’re a world apart. It’s good that I see the humor in everything. Even writing this was, in a way, funny, and I know how some parts sound, but that is how life happens. I don’t know if I’ll ever get lost the right way, on purpose, but maybe God exists. I hope that if he does, he’ll tell me whatever he told the crackhead.

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?"

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.