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by Patty Enrado First Prize - $1000 An elderly Filipina woman tries to justify the actions of her husband over the years, only to discover the hypocrisy of the man's words and actions. |
They say he is going to send me back to the Philippines. |
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by Paul Michel Second Prize - $200 The journey of a missionary priest
into a remote jungle village, and of two |
Angela
Donahue hated the month of August. It wasn’t just that the late summer Pennsylvania
heat made her head feel like a sponge in a tub. August also meant the imminent end of
summer vacation, and thus a return to a third-grade classroom in a fourth-rate elementary
school that seemed more certain each year to be the graveyard of her once promising career
as an educational reformer. Worst of all, August marked bad anniversaries: the deaths of
her father (four years ago), and her mother (the following summer), and the birthday of
her lost brother Gabriel, who left Pennsylvania for a country no one had ever heard of,
and who hadn’t been heard of for nearly six long years. (more ...) |
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by Paul Perry Third Prize - $100 The struggle of a man to cross the
border from Mexico to the United States in the hopes of finding a better life, only to
discover the value of what he had left behind. |
Luis Miguel Acosta crossed the Rio Grande sixteen times before he finally
made it all the way to San Antonio where, he had been told, a hard-working man, willing to
work ten hours a day, six days a week, using a shovel or a wheelbarrow, could make as much
as five hundred dollars a week, two thousand dollars a month, more money than Luis had
made in all of his nineteen years combined, working in the fields near his village.. (more ...) |
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How Died My City, How Died My Soul by Gary Hill Honorable Mention - $50 A man recounts his trials and failings
as a boxer and father, and how it parallels the race riots of East St. Louis in the early
part of the 20th century . |
I grew up in East Saint Louis, Illinois, and I'm proud of
it. I know. I know East Saint Louis is an all-black ghetto with major crimes every day,
over a thousand derelict structures, murders, abandoned cars, trash in five hundred vacant
lots, shootings, stabbings, perfidious racial prejudice, robberies, home of the bloodiest
race riot in USA history, a place where deadly hate and prejudice pierced too deep. I know
the incompetent, gluttonous politicians have robbed the city openly, and with no excuses,
for 200 years, and that the mayors, today and for the past fifty years, have presided over
a long, dragged-out funeral. I know the downtown area looks like a deserted battlefield,
like Beirut after Civil War, with the shops boarded up, with derelict buildings crumbling,
falling down, storm and sewage drains rotted, water lines old, dangerous and not repaired,
shells of gutted structures, empty hulks, burned out buildings, 75% unemployment, broken
glass, with garbage in the streets because of un-enforced sanitation codes, and iron bars
on the few surviving businesses and homes, churches with chain link fences around their
parking lots. I know there’s chromium, arsenic, mercury, selenium, in the soil,
periodic flooding. (more ...) |
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by Neale McDevitt Honorable Mention - $50 After finally getting the girl of his dreams, a man realizes that it's only temporary, and that he's just part of her travels and adventures.
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The night before she left
forever, her smarmy friends staged a dinner party and dubbed it the Last Supper. They had
seen Grace come and go a dozen times before and they were annoyingly adept at the grand
gesture. Some guy I didn’t know hoisted his glass and toasted her sense of adventure.
"I’m not sure how you two hooked up," he smirked over his black-framed
hipster glasses, "Grace is a child of the world, McVie, and you’ve hardly
stepped outside that little neighborhood of yours." Everyone laughed, except me. I took a mouthful of Italian red and let it sit until it bit at my gums. "I’m the fucking lighthouse, dickhead," I finally said long after people had started talking about other things. "I don’t move and I don’t change. The light on the rock." The whole pinch-faced crew stared at me like I was a frozen caveman all thawed out and stinking up their smoked salmon send-off. Everyone except her. Her small hand squeezed my knee under the table. (more ...) |
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by Doug Crandell Honorable Mention - $50 A man confronts his past by reconciling with his father and reconnecting with a former lover.
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I am from the first electrically lighted city in the world - the same town as
Crystal Gayle. Once, for Halloween, I dressed up as her, long brown hair tickling the
ground, but my father ripped me out of the get-up and made me go as ‘a injun
who’d just seen the lights.’ He had my mother use iodine on my legs, arm and
skinny chest and told her to make sure I went like the boy I was; like what he and others
were taught the Indians’ skin must’ve looked like when our town was so strangely
illuminated more than a century ago. The Fort Wayne Gazette called it "the strangest
light ever exhibited in the United States." But even now, I still dream of
Crystal’s hair; it’s all that length. As I stood near the cenotaph that marked the electricity memorial, I was having a hard time remembering why I’d decided to drive the two hours from Indianapolis to come back home. Luminarias bought and arranged by the Future Homemakers of America lined the pea gravel path that circled the huge limestone rock. If I had forgotten any of the town’s history, it was all there for me on the bronze foot plaques, and hand painted signs that surrounded the monument. (more ...) |
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by M.E. Mischcon Honorable Mention - $50 A teenage girl coming of age faces her insecurity and personal doubt by trying to understand what drove her father and mother apart.
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The day dad
left was not really the day he left. No way. He was gone long before that. Being the kid,
hard to say exactly when he started to dematerialize but I do recall when he actually
walked out. December 7, 1995. That was a day of infamy, all right. Come to think of it, that day at our house did resemble Pearl Harbor...minus the palm trees. Around here, December, even early on, is all about ice and snow. But like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed (or, for me, the day Kurt Cobain offed himself) people tend to remember where they were when bad news hit. My grand dad, Papa, told me he was driving to the butcher when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Said he was listening to a Benny Goodman riff when the announcement came through. Stopped his car in the middle of Main Street and was rear ended by someone who was also shocked by the news. Me? I was in Janie Breslin’s finished basement when her little brother, Josh, ran down the steps chanting: "Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head! Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head, Kurt Cobain shot hisself in the head!" (more ...) |
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