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by M. E. Mishcon First Prize - $1000 |
 Things break. When they do, no matter how old or neglected, it is unexpected. For instance, the fact that this city is crumbling like old cake comes as a shock. No one pays attention to a decaying road until you rattle over its lunar surface. It seems that, suddenly, storefronts are empty where vendors used to wait years for a lease. Finally, there is no AUTOMAT. For me it starts with a rip with the base of the sofa. Not even a rip, per se, more with fraying. Barely noticeable. Too insignificant to do anything about, really, except take it in stride. |
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by William Roth Second Prize - $200 |
Hog and Billy
hunched forward on their short stools sorting shrimp from the squirming pile of sea life
in the middle of the afterdeck. The damp, early morning chill had settled again. It
wrapped around Hog like a wet, woolen blanket, swelling his neck glands, seeping into his
joints to make them ache. He wore his rain slicker. His chest and arms felt suffocated,
clammy beneath the rubber, but he kept the slicker on. It was the only thing that held the
dampness out at all. Hog wiped his nose on his wrist, raked another clump of shells, squid, coral, and sponge down off the pile with his wooden culling paddle. He spread it flat between his legs, began picking out the shrimp. At least they had done better this drag. Maybe one and a half baskets. They had brought up fish too, red snapper, sea bass, even one yellowtail. Yellowtail was worth seventy-five cents a pound. Hog had seen one slide out when he tripped the starboard net-bag. |
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by Christine Watt Third Prize - $50 |
"Ryan,"
I exclaim. "Long time no hear from," he drawls down the phone. Silence. What do you say to your ex after three years? "So how are you?" he asks. "Fine," I giggle, "I suppose." "That’s good." "How about yourself?" A baby cries before he can answer. "Hold on a mo’." Fuzzy noises as he clamps the phone to his chest, I assume. He’s in Maine in winter, he’s wearing a thick sweater, I wonder if it’s one I know. Then I allow that baby’s cry to register and my guts are vacuumed clean out of me. |
The Educating of Penelope Malleable by Lynn Veach Sadler Third Prize - $50 |
She
couldn't avoid taking a class with Dr. Foul-Mouth Sharp-Nose. He was teaching the first
half of the British Novel the only semester she could fit it in, the first of her
senior year. Why him? He was a Pound specialist. A pound-of-flesh man, from what
she’d heard. She sat a little less than half way from the front, listened intently, took such notes as could be taken in his class, and played her standard game of doodling. Doodles increased her powers of concentration. Mostly, she weighed Professor Sharp-Nose in the balances and found him wanting. He winged his "lectures" with calculated irony. While the guys guffawed and other girls tittered, Penelope met his witticisms with a polite and disengaged smile but was smart enough to stay hidden from his view behind the nubiles on the front rows. A stalker-bobber, Sharp-Nose would suddenly plunge down the center aisle or dart around the students at the sides of the room, halt abruptly before a startled Joe College, jab the "Dismal Digit" at him, and demand, "How many bastards did Moll Flanders have?" Penelope, sitting safely in the middle of the row, thought it all too obviously Freudian not to be discounted out of hand, but she kept her pun to herself. Joe gurgled inarticulately while Sharp-Nose exclaimed, "Ah ha!" The class never learned just how many bastards Moll Flanders had. |
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by Jimmy Carl Harris Third Prize - $50 |
"Don’t
you have a bed?" It began with glances over espresso. She laughed when I winked. I laughed at her laughter. We strolled along the quay. She pointed to the gray ladies and I told her about their bloodlines and their particular charms--there, a British destroyer with Sea Darts, there, a French frigate with Exocets, farther out in the harbor, my cruiser with Tomahawks and Harpoons. She said they were sinister sisters, but I let that pass. At noon, she showed me how to dip bread in olive oil. When I asked where we could go next, she ran her fingertips along my forearm and said we could go to her apartment. |
Silver Lamé and Green Tree Frogs by Noelle Wall Third Prize - $50 |
When the
sixties ended—an event we managed to postpone until 1978—after Jake and I had
fled to the Adirondacks to escape disco and shopping malls, and I had fled back again,
alone, to find salvation through indoor toilets and shopping malls; when 1978 rolled
around and Jake blew his brains out after a two week bender, I was left in Schenectady
with a two-and-a-half-year old daughter, and one hell of a bootleg Dead collection.
Exactly six weeks, to the day, after the funeral, my mother called me up from Connecticut
and asked me to go to Puerto Rico with her. "A trip would be good for you," she said, "brighten your outlook." Easy for her: life sucks—take a trip to the Caribbean. I was incredulous, but only for a moment. When I was homeless, sleeping in doorways, she gave me magazine subscriptions. When I was drugged out, flashing in the john, pupils pinned, she sent me Helena Rubenstein make-up. When Sarah was born and we lived in one room with no phone, and I got her baby clothes from Goodwill and stole formula from the Grand Union, tucking it under the mattress of the carriage I salvaged from the side of the road—and when the baby was sleeping in the carriage because we had no crib—my mother sent me a photograph album to keep the pictures in that I couldn’t take because I didn’t have a goddam camera! Of course, I said I’d go. |
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by Dan Huntley Third Place - $50 |
Elgin Lugoff
gazed through the cigarette haze at the customers on the other side of the bar -- waving
bills in the air, hollering drink orders and downing shooters -- and remembered that
morning at the Outer Banks nearly a half-century ago when he first learned to become
invisible. His father had taken him duck-hunting. Beneath a bruise-colored dawn, they floated like ghosts through the mist in a flat-bottom boat to a duck blind on North Carolina's Pamlico Sound. His father rowed, the wooden oars groaning in the oarlocks. They unwrapped the weights and carefully set the decoys on the edge of the marsh. They didn't have a dog and Elgin's job was to float out in his waders in a truck innertube and gather the downed ducks. They had been waiting for about a half-hour when a flock of mallards appeared out of the southwest. The ducks saw the decoys and dropped to about 50 feet on their approach. They cupped their wings and began to circle. Elgin braced himself for the boom of his father's 16-gauge shotgun. But there was only silence. And then the syncopated wing beats just before the dark birds splashed down. |
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by Paula Peterson Third Place - $50 |
Somebody's
ship had come in. Somebody's luck had just turned or, more likely, somebody's hide had
just been saved. Sheriff Jorry McFarlan of Scarborough County, Georgia, was patrolling the
interstate when he spotted the freighter hovering just offshore. He was alone: nowadays he always left his deputies behind to mind the courthouse when he went on patrol. He liked driving for long hours without having to make conversation; only the radio chattered in his ear, reminding him constantly of the territory he had sworn under oath of office to protect. The sheriff raised his binoculars and watched from a small rise by the shoulder of the road. Immediately he understood what was going on. The ocean was tremulous and shining in the autumnal sunlight. The freighter, lightly tethered, bobbed and flirted with the waves. Laden with cheerful, multicolored containers, like a child's building blocks resting one on top of the other, the ship nevertheless carried, mingled among all its boldly legitimate freight, a more ominous and illicit cargo. In a few moments the sheriff saw what he'd expected--the first of the smaller boats scurrying over the waves towards the freighter. They came from the mouth of rivers and nearby harbors, streamlined speed boats with pointed snouts, breezy sailboats, small yachts, even a few motor-powered row boats. He counted thirty-two small craft altogether. |
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