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by Brad Summerhill 1998 Short Story Contest Honorable Mention A coming-of-age story about a man who had retreated from the pressures of corporate life and fatherhood to the mountains only to discover how to become a father to his teenage son. |
Early that morning, suspended in air, Richard Sojun stared into an icy breeze as the sun's first blue rays lit a crown of jagged rock along the rim of the bowl above him. The ski lift had stopped, and he swung back and forth, the sunlight shortening the shadows beneath the high Sierra ridge. His young friend Norman usually directed the action, setting markers to herd the mountain traffic, but he had left Richard alone this morning to do his own work. Richard took inventory of the landscape, looking for hazards in the untracked snow. A pair of sapling lodgepoles, one of the usual spots to mark, had disappeared, a bulge where the snow tented them over. It was difficult to tell what might pose danger. First, he had to mark the hazards in the gulley beneath him and then across part of the mountainside's steep face. |
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| The Titanic & the Iceberg We share, in a way, a capsule of immiscible love. I have not the sort of bones one takes home to the table for Christmas Dinner. To meet the meat of stampeding hooves dialing in judgment from a touch-tone phone. “She has only one leg?” Aghast. Gassed. Out of kindness, curtain silence falls. I drink pity for breakfast and vomit its remains with will. Drop my single foot as a stick in the ground-- drive it hard to stake a tent of grace, which vacillates from weak to worse. I have stacks of stories, all horrific: they’ve grafted and drafted and whittled my limbs until there is barely room for another knife. What lies beneath these leather scars are daisies crushed, sand dollar dreams and the chalk of fury lathered by the wild call of proving my worth. Tender bubbles beneath my skin have not been touched, because. I’ve been tripped, duped, tied by stares and stairs. I climb them, when I can, in the darkness of backs turned, so my limp is leveled by the pageant of their silk ballet. Bubbles proceed to fly, but only where it is safe and that is in your arms. Ours is not greeting card love-- with stickers of poise on ballroom floors. But a smacking, sacred kind: dodging the sting of defeat; two hummingbirds tapping out sweet spots of plain brown-wrapper tragic times. by Janet I. Buck |
Angry Sandals dear friend this life has been a quest for self-worth and redemption. at times I mock the notion of redemption but hypcrites need not remind me poverty and hardship are dangerous excuses to support actions that rob the heart and delay potential. anger -- even righteous is an unstable and limited fuel promising a brilliant short ride before the long walk begins on blistering feet unaccustomed, untrained and unaware of the full impact of a jagged journey once shielded by angry sandals. by Mark Antony Rossi |
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by Bonnie ZoBell 1998 Short Story Contest Honorable Mention A woman's amusing journey of disappointment and anxiety on the path
to finding true love. |
. . . Willy and I have each spent more years alone than we care to admit. Oh, we’ve had exes, plenty of exes. Willy’s most recent are Donna, Darlene, and Anne. Donna’s the one from Flagstaff who makes frequent business trips. Since she and her husband no longer have sex, she and Willy do, or at least did until I came along. Then there’s Darlene, a little kinky in the lovemaking department. She’s the one Willy calls Queen of the Vibrators, who pretends to have only physical needs. She seemed like the perfect diversion three years ago until a woman named Anne broke his heart. Anne hurt. Willy, who is thirty-four, never offers her name in our conversations, ever. And he’s told Darlene all fifteen times she’s called since I moved back from Boston that he’s seeing me. No, he tells her, he doesn’t want to get together, not even for a movie, not even for a cup of coffee, especially not on her birthday. (more ...) |
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| LA County Jail Processing Comments When the Glendale PD ushered me into LA County, they told me I could pay my bail with my ATM and that I'd be out in under an hour. They must have had a good laugh later on over that one. bastards. I saw four medical personal (because of my meds) during my processing period which lasted 14 FUCKING HOURS during which time I was stuck in a holding cell about the size of a decent bathroom along with 26 other people, one of whom had live AIDS and TB. I, of course, got to sit next to him. When I finally saw the psychiatrist, He stated that he was worried about The redundancy of some of the pills I was on. This from a jail shrink. Look, hotshot - if you were any fucking good, you'd have your own damn practice and wouldn't be doing this now. I know more about meds than you do, and my Yale educated psychiatrist CERTIANLY knows more than you, so just shut the fuck up and dole out the drugs. You know what? The whole time I was in LA County - the infamous Twin Towers - I never got any of my meds or any food or any sleep, unless you count sleeping with one eye open as restful. They actually denied me my migraine medication and gave me fucking Tylenol! My migraine medication was considered too expensive! Really? Well, compare that $8 pill to the $750,000 lawsuit you'll be getting and then start thinking about cost/benefit ratios, motherfuckers! by Scott Holstad |
DEATH IN TEXAS The cold unrest of my soul is marked by a pale reminder; a distant place where old blood seeps from crusted wounds coloring other realities with a tint of tragedy. When I turn full face towards it, I see something of mine from yesterday: The cold of late November, and the sin-guilt oppression so fertile within a boy. With steady hands I joined the gunsight and the deer. Squeezing the trigger, she dropped in the same instant. I crossed to her body, and was forever separated from the child I was, when the doe, still alive raised her head, rested it against my chest, and looked at me as if she could predict my coming torment. It was a while before I breathed again. And, I, less than I was before, slit her throat. by David Ritchie |
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With Love, From Johnny's Burger Barn by Gayla Chaney 1998 Short Story Contest Honorable Mention A woman learns from her father that nobody has the right to know
everything about somebody else's life, regardless of how close they are. |
I have often considered myself the happenstance of a drunken night of centripetal collision. I don't think that is necessarily sad or even unromantic. It is what it is. Still, as my parents' only offspring, I sometimes want to render a different inter-pretation of their brief union. For despite their divorce, my parents never permanently separated. Not really. Not while they were both living, not when there was a potential crisis looming anywhere in my mother's life, which happened often. My mother thought only my father could rescue her from the messes she found herself in. They couldn't take each other on a daily basis, but for the more dramatic moments in life, they clung to each other, even when they were with other lovers or spouses. (more ...) |
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