Student Choice Contest: Winners’ Archive

• September 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

TILDE
By Cassidy Petrus

My brother died before he learned to sleep.  He took one big breath and cried out, then was rushed out of the room, squinting and clawing at the air.  There is a look on our mother’s face, as the child is whisked away, of pain wrapped in pain wrapped in pain.  It is forever embedded on a ribbon of videocassette tape, hidden away in the hope that it never gets viewed.

It isn’t too much to ask of life, to at least let you sleep.  But it couldn’t even give him that.  They laid him up on some table and they cut into him and they tried to help him breathe again, but they couldn’t.  And he struggled against the lack of oxygen as his brain cells died by the thousands.  Then there was nothing left.  And he died with his eyes open, not knowing why it was all so damn hard.

And the doctor had to come back into the room, where my father was holding my mother’s hand, a look on his face of pain wrapped in pain wrapped in pain.  Their foreheads pressed together.  And he had to tell them that their child was dead and there was nothing he could do.  Even though he wanted to so badly.  That he did all he could.  And there is a look on his face, of pain wrapped in pain, right before the forgotten video camera runs out of tape.

Sleeping on a bench isn’t as difficult as people think.  It’s like sleeping in a car or airplane or on a really stiff bed.  You can get used to it.  You just have to hope it doesn’t rain.  The one bad thing is you can never sleep in on a bench.  Something always wakes you up.  Usually, it’s the sun.  Sometimes it’s a car horn or little kids.

I think it’s Thursday as I stumble home.  I hang out in the backyard, behind the shed, and wait for my mom to leave.  I peek around the corner as she puts her coffee on top of the car and opens the door.

“Jason,” she says without turning around.  “Jason, where have you been?”

I pull my head away and wait.  I can hear her turn now.  Her voice gets louder.  Closer.

“Don’t disturb your father.  You know how he gets today.”

I sit with my back against the wood until I hear her door shut.  The car starts up and slowly pulls out of the driveway, rocks popping beneath the tires.

Inside is a chocolate frosted cake, sealed in a clear case.  Nine yellow and white striped candles sloppily bloom from the brown icing.  Upstairs, the door to my dad’s room is closed.  I take a shower and brush my teeth.  I put my ear to his door and can hear the light buzz of the television.  Easy words settling an active mind.

I enter my mom’s room and fish around in her sock drawer until I find her Vicadin.  I dry swallow three and find my room before they kick in.  On the bed I wonder if they celebrate birthdays in heaven.  The thought escapes me as I slip into dreamless sleep.

I wake up to the smell of Italian food.  My dad’s door is still closed, the TV audible in the hall now.  Downstairs, my mom is opening tins of food and setting the table.  The stove clock reads 5:47.

“Can you finish setting this up?  I’m going to get your father.”

I can hear them arguing at his door, sounding like the television.  I’ve lived this moment before.  On Jake’s birthdays.  We all know he’ll never come down.  I start eating without them.  Filling my empty stomach with as much food as I can.  By the time I finish there is silence upstairs.  I know mom is leaning with her forehead against the closed door, whispering to the crack, the way I’ve caught her so many times before.

And even though I’m full, my tastebuds still have a craving.  For something I haven’t had in years.  The cake is barely gonna get eaten anyway.  I’m saving it from going to waste.

She must have heard me cutting it or something, or maybe women’s intuition, because she came down right as I was taking that first bite.  And she yells, not the way she used to, but in that worn down way that time facilitates.  And I’m already making my way to the door anyway.  She doesn’t even have to threaten to kick me out anymore.  We both know it’s implied.  So I grab my jacket and feel a lump in one of the pockets.  And I take out the present that I’d forgotten about.  And while she’s still fulfilling her parental duties I place the package on the table.

“Tell Jake happy birthday for me,” I interrupt.  Then follow her words out the door.

I’m not sure if my parents still have a VCR, but I hope they do.  And I hope they watch the present together.  Lay it to rest.

Daylight Saving Time has made life harder for me.  So has the revolution of the Earth.  When it’s pitch black at six at night it makes life so much more boring.  No one’s tired at six, but there isn’t much else to do but sleep.  You can’t wander like you can when there’s light out.

Grove Street Park is left mostly alone.  There’s a place in back, behind the basketball court, that is pretty out of view from the road.  And if tomorrow is Friday no one should be coming by too early.  I use my arms as a pillow and lay down on the bench.  I wait for the unappreciated gift of sleep.  I close my eyes and try to picture what Jake would look like if he were alive.  But all I can see is myself.

• August 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

Ocean Glass 
by Mercedes M. Yardley

I had convinced myself that he had walked out of the ocean, that he had mysteriously come into being there.  He had been crafted out of sand and bits of shell, helped into a black hoodie and tossed upon the waves until he landed outside of my door.  Sometimes the universe is kind. 

“I think that I needed you,” I said, and we took each other’s hands.  His were made out of broken glass, and they hurt, but I was certain that if I just held on long enough our heat would melt and reform them.  Then they would be whole. 

We lived the part of life that each had been missing.  I ran around with a bright red umbrella and had no scars.  He slept in the rounded, hollow windows of an old Chinese restaurant.  But we met in an orchard that was full of trees and shining things and stars, and we were children. 

The ocean never stills.  One day while I slept, his glass hand slipped out of mine and he floated out with the current.  I walk the shore wondering if the gulls are attracted to his glitter, wondering if he’ll wash up by my feet as broken bottles and mermaid’s tears. 

 

•  July 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

A History of Bloody Point, St. Christopher’s Island (1626)
By Rae Bryant

Three days. Three days now, and still, the river runs red. Pierre dismisses it. ‘A bitter aftertaste,’ he says. I, however, cannot find such remedy to my conscience. In the night, as I lie still, the waves and wind move about me, trade winds, more valuable than all the life upon this island, more valuable than my own. Every soul, expendable in the wake of ships and sails, and now the wood, the canvas, they are soaked in blood, all of them, as red as my hands.

The ships forever carry the dead upon them, fateful and resonant echoes of a once native paradise. I wonder if history will hear them. I wonder if history will hear the recantation of a once noble traveler, now lost in his own damnation. There is none other to take my blame. I led our murderous clan, and there was no escape for the Caribs. No escape, and now their bodies drift in the river, so many of them. I try to tell myself they were savages, just savages, but I no longer can hear my own justifications. 

The women and children still scream in my head, irrevocable, impressed shadows of our crime.

Massacre=indiscriminate killing of a large number, barbarous warfare or persecution.

They did not know sin, only life, only nature. We showed them swords and guns. We showed them lies.

The canyon walls held them like quarry. It was too easy. Tegreman was the last to fall. Strong, he was so very strong, and yet he knelt before us, a chief, as if our swords were his guests. His breath steady, eyes closed. Warrior turned priest, accepting his noble end. He was the noble, not I, and as my sword sliced through his neck, I saw a glimpse of what we once were. When we knelt at his table for supper. Friends and explorers, searching and prodding each other for understanding, but that was before, when we first stepped onto the sand and buried our flag into his island. We struck the post so deep into the sand as if it were the hilt of a sword. It was. The flag waved sharp and cutting in the wind. Our flag does not belong here even now. It is our deadliest weapon, a killer of cultures not of our own.

Chief Tegreman is dead. I tell myself that. I repeat over in my head; he is dead. We killed him. Yet, his eyes follow me everywhere, eyes milky white like cataracts, but he is not blind. No, he sees everything. He sees everything that I am. He knows the demons that lurk within, and he laughs with them. He laughs as he calls me from the canyon, from the rocks.

There is no solace for me now. I have no right to ask it. The solace is his; it is for the vengeful, and he is coming for me. God help me, I know it. We have cursed ourselves, and our children, and theirs after will know the effects of our greed. It is certainly so. If there were but some way to set right our trespasses, our evils on this island, I would give my life for it, for everyone, and be wholly certain in its justice.

If only the river would wash itself clean, wash away the burdens of our actions, of my actions, I might feel some peace. But it is not so. The river, just as my conscience, will wear the bloody imprint of our sins. It will forever be told, that we are the savages.

 

•  June 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

 

 

 

 

 

Why the Sky Is Blue 
Stephen Dorneman

Matt Fischer hesitates in the bathroom, repeatedly washing his hands. On the couch waits Sheryl Williams, one of the undergraduates taking his introductory meteorology course, Why the Sky Is Blue. Sheryl wears too much makeup and too few clothes. An empty bottle of chardonnay rests on the coffee table. 

Ten weeks ago, a hundred students sat listening to Matt walk through the syllabus when Sheryl arrived fifteen minutes late, clunking down the stairs of the cavernous lecture hall to an open front row seat. He remembered she wore fur-topped boots, a pleated plaid skirt, and a white down vest over a fuzzy pink sweater. She spent the rest of that first lecture staring up at him, hands folded on her desk as if she was in church. 

Sheryl never took notes. Matt asked her about that the first time she came to his office, to pick up her mid-term. The class was down to eighty students, and most of them pecked at their laptops or scribbled frantically the entire lecture. 

 “I’m an extreme auditory learner. I have to hear something to understand it. I get my textbooks on tape from Visually Impaired Student Services. It’s great that you’re an extremely oral professor.” She’d gotten a ninety-one on the mid-term. Sheryl smiled at him, pleased with her performance, widening her face within the frame of her short, asymmetrically-cut, dark hair. She wore turquoise designer jeans and a white satin blouse. Matt tried not to stare at the sharply-defined shape of one nipple breaking the curve of her blouse. He wasn’t sure if she was wearing a bra. It was the end of office hours, and as they walked out of Dwight Building together, she asked if he wanted to stop at Kelleher’s for a bite and something to drink. She was considering changing her major from Political Science to a real science, she said, and wanted advice. Matt didn’t believe her, and said no. 

Cheryl quoted Carl Sagan. “’The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars.’ Cosmos, Episode Seven. Come on, I’ll pay.” 

Over cheese fries and diet colas they talked Cosmos, atmospheric tides, classical mechanics, term papers, and ex-boyfriends. Graduate programs, research grants, bargain wines, publication credits, and ex-wives. Hours later, Matt walked Sheryl the two blocks to her dorm and, after an awkward pause, shook her hand good-night. He started looking forward to his lectures more than his research, and wondered whether he’d already committed a violation of ethics, or was only contemplating such a lapse. He wondered if he still had his copy of the Faculty Handbook. 

The next week Sheryl failed to turn in the outline for her term paper. She appeared at his office and asked for an extension, saying she hadn’t been able to get anyone to record the publications she’d found. She showed him the copies she’d made, and Matt offered to read one of the shorter ones to her. 

Sheryl sat poised in the office chair, head tilted slightly to one side, as he read “Urban Form and Thermal Efficiency“ out loud, his voice pitched low as if telling a bed-time story. He gave her a one-week extension, and walked her back to the dorm. He shook her hand, and she pulled him close and kissed him on the cheek. 

She turned in her outline, a compelling synthesis of ideas about urban heat sinks, global warming, and thunderstorm propagation. He approved it, commenting on the freshness of her hypothesis, and asked her if she wanted to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” with him. They’d both already seen it. Sheryl said she was falling behind in her classes and needed the time to study. Matt offered to walk her home, and Sheryl told him she was going to the library. She took his hand and held it against her chest, kissing him on the lips before leaving. Before going to bed he re-read the outline, and thought if the paper met its promise, it wouldn’t take much additional research in order to flesh it out for formal publication in a major journal. 

Two weeks later the papers were due. Sheryl didn’t come to class. Matt waited forty-five minutes past his scheduled office hours, but she didn’t come to see him. Concerned, he walked to her dorm and left a message. 

Late that evening, Sheryl knocked on his door. She was wearing a short black skirt and a sapphire blue camisole top. No coat. Both her nipples poked at him through the sheer fabric. She wasn’t wearing a bra.  She smelled of honeysuckle and alcohol, and carried a nearly-empty bottle of California chardonnay. She wore dark mascara and bright red lipstick, smeared around the edges. Sheryl stood in the doorway, paused somewhere between laughing and crying, and Matt let her in. She kissed him full on the mouth and pressed her body up against his, then offered him the dregs of wine. 

Her paper is unfinished, barely started. A beautifully posed skeleton without muscles or skin. He is up for tenure review next year, and needs at least one more publication on his CV. Matt brushes his hair, fixing his part, and opens the bathroom door. He does not immediately tell her that she has failed his course. 

• May 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

Here, the Big Dipper
by Michelle Tandoc-Pichereau

She loved him the minute she saw his warts. Dark and bumpy, they
graced his pale face like an inversion of stars. She would trace them
with her finger, here the Big Dipper, here Orion, and he would tremble
from the path of her touch. A bloom of crimson would grow from his
nape to his cheeks, and to her, his face then would look like the sky
at sunset, dotted with birds.

At first, he felt awkward, unsure of what exactly pleased her in such
a flaw, but when he sensed neither pity nor derision, he began to
relax. He allowed her little glimpses into other things hidden. The
crooked, brown birthmark around his nipple. A belly button popping out
like a champagne cork. The tip of his penis a shade darker than the
shaft. She examined each oddity with lust and gusto, committing them
to memory with her eyes, her hand, her nose, her tongue. Each
discovery whetted her hunger to know more. Laying her head against his
naked chest, she would listen so closely, even to things he couldn’t
say, and her heart flamed to be the keeper of his secrets.

Those who saw them together couldn’t recognize love. They came up with
reasons—perhaps he was rich, perhaps she was gay, perhaps he was
enduringly selfless in bed. They marked the time until she would come
to her senses, and when that time passed, they couched their surprise
and disappointment by saying wait. That the only thing they had
misjudged was the when and not the what.

She couldn’t care less what anyone thought, and indeed, delighted in
exaggerating her affections to dispel any doubt. But for him, her
unlikely Adonis, what started out as disbelief turned to amazement,
then to sheer joy, then to pride, and finally back again full circle.
He feared, because it was what he had always believed, that everyone
was right. He was too ordinary for someone so luminous, that it was
like forcing the sun into a paper bag.

“How do you know it’s real?” One day, the question. “How could you be
so sure?” But she couldn’t tell him how. It wasn’t in her nature to
ask.

He willed—needed—for this to be enough, but what confidence he found
teetered on a high wire. As he inched his way forward, he couldn’t
help but imagine the agony of a fall. He grew cranky, then suspicious,
then sad. He couldn’t trust her enough to be certain, yet couldn’t
bear the weight of his own uncertainty. Finally, in a sudden bold and
unbearable moment, it was he who decided they should part.

Her heart, plump and innocent, suffered its first cut, but being young
soon learned it could heal itself. And, while not forgetting, soon
learned to love someone else’s flaws. And he, who couldn’t find even
the relief he had sought, walked around like a ghost tracing its
earthly steps. He stared at his reflection in windows and paper cups,
and struggled to recapture that one time in his life when the night
sky was etched onto his startled face.

 

• April 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

Morecambe Bay, Sands Guide
by Chris Hill

Quick-sands. Strangely named for something so sluggish and yielding - a porridge, a saturate. Strange until you realise that quick means life: “The quick and the dead.” And the sands have life, they are active, and they suck the essence from other living things. 

Once, just beyond the boundary of living memory, the sands took a whole cart pulled by four grey mares; ten souls lost, men, women, children, crossing from the fair at Cark. History tells us that within the hour the whole mass had vanished beneath the sifting land. 

The sands are treacherous, it’s true, and what they win they will not readily give up, yet men have been lost out there in that vast expanse for days, and mourned, before turning up vague-eyed and confused along the pebble strewn shore. Once I lost a pony which bolted across the cold, dun plains until it was swallowed by the silence, nothing out there, not even a speck, only to reappear, thinner and quite insane some three weeks later. 

Take a long look across that gulf, imagine that absence of shape or form. The colour of the sands shifts across it’s narrow spectrum, here it is tan, further out taupe, here biscuit or the colour of beech wood; while the water on the sands stands silver or gilt or ash-mirror. Grey sky, featureless or dappled, apprehensive. The pattern of the water changes every day, sure some channels stay the same, but the pools left by the recent tide are as transient as time. 

I have been here 40 years as sands guide in my cottage on the shore. My job is to navigate its narrow paths and passageways like the black ants foraging for food on the endless plateau of my front step. My job is to guide others to safety in this unforgiving world balanced between land and sea. I know this unknowable landscape as well as any man can. And I know why men step out into it, the mirage of the far side of the bay, its whispered pleasures seem so close, so tangible. But once you venture a few hundred yards then you are more lost than you will ever be. 

What sights I have seen. Grey Friars who navigated the sands close to a thousand years ago, far from their home in the Valley of the Deadly Nightshade, sad eyed dogs lost looking for sticks across the centuries. And I have heard the last sentient song of beached whales echoing through time. 

Things harder to comprehend. Shilloths who lead and lure, their faces faceless and their minds a haze. Have I seen them? Couldn’t have, except they stole my shadow, except they stole… Oons at play across the waking sky, a giant snake which leaves its V shaped wake among the standing pools. 

And I wander this flat land that is neither earth nor water, mesmerized as it shimmers, lonely as an oyster, watching my step. 

If it could give something back , this place which sucks life, apart from the flook I tread, the cockles I gather delving iron hard fingers through gritty ice-cream, then I would take my son. 

I remember the final moments, when at last I found him on the plains, up to his neck in sand, the argument he had fled forgotten along with all else but primal terror. 

“Hold still,” I begged him as I stretched my body across the phantom ground and dragged with all my strength. Hold still I told him, though it is against nature not to wriggle and squirm when you’re in death’s grip. And I pulled for my life, for his life. But, in the end, I pulled for nothing. 

“Goodbye,” he said. He was calm when he slipped beneath the surface of the sands. He was still. 

For all it seems compact, for all its unyielding flatness, the sand finds its way into your clothes and clings to your body like your own skin. The warm musty smell of sea and salt and desiccated human faeces, the prickle and abrasion. 

And it seems to me that, no matter how hard you scrub, the smell, the aura of it, will not leave you. You become part of it. It becomes part of you. 

• March 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

The Crypt’s Woman 
by Neal Swain

Every so often, she comes in to tend the bones.

A man of some importance will let her in; he has the key. The contrast of his dress to hers, his vestments snowy white from the fresh efforts of a laundress, his cuffs and collar rich with gold embellishments, is ironic to us: he took the vows of poverty, but she’s the supplicant who, cloaked in tatters, her feet bound in rags, washes the bones. A widow, she wears her hair covered. She always carries a basin with her, pewter half-filled with water, and a scattering of wool cloths. The man is quick to leave; he sees letting her in as a waste of his time, something he would prefer to delegate if he trusted another with the keys. After the oak doors level shut behind him, she works alone with the dead and the church’s riches. Few make it through here save on saints’ days. Undisturbed in her labors, never has she noticed our attentiveness.

No lamps light the room when the woman first comes in. She relies on the sunshine that pierces the thick glaze of candlesmoke and dust that dulls the reds and blues of the mosaic windows standing watch over the thrones and houses of the dead. It warms the place. But the halls are drafty, and as the sun sinks down to hide itself, the chill gets to her; she hunkers lower, though perhaps only from weariness, and she cups and chafes her hands together between each task. Her suffering incites a strangely desirable turmoil in us. At the day’s end, her solitude – broken only by us while she cares for filigreed reliquaries and struggles with the heavy marble castles of kings and bishops - is disrupted by the man of some importance, who, to assure himself that she has not dared to steal treasures from the dead, chastises her for any and all assumed sins.

Sometimes, we hear whispers about her. Those whispers call her the crypt’s woman, its mistress. Cruel jests by the inconsiderate. If her husband lies anywhere, it is in the paupers’ field. For herself, she acts with an egalitarianism not found in the way the dead are put to their rest. She treats each and every bone the same: with a damp cloth she strokes them clean, then buffs them dry and ivory with a dust-streaked cloth. What she gives to the crypt in exchange for meager alms is the care of a nurse. We know this, though we tingle watching every touch. She bears a sacrosanct air and seems beyond all rumor.

No one outside the crypt would find beauty in her. The weight of long years has crippled her body and her flesh seems to slough over her own thin skeleton. The few teeth left to her are black, and the strands of hair that slither past the cover of her veil are tangled like dead roots. We can’t claim sainthood—in an earlier era, we would have judged her like the living do. Now we hunger each time she comes in, each time she progresses from one worthy to the next in the hallowed ranks. Each day brings her closer to us. Once she finishes tending to the kings and princes, the infant heirs, the queens, the solemn bishops and sullen abbots, she will arrive before our little silver case with its glass front panel. She will undo its clasps, studded with jasper and cabochons of green amber, and bring out our knightly bones. We will tremble beneath her hands, so violently that she notices, though she mistakes it for her own palsied tremors, and we cherish the brief thrill as she washes us, and strokes us dry, and guides us back to our bed of pressed old velvet. What life still remains in her! We wish the most sincere things for her, that she will meet with gentler things than we; that she might sneak away with a few jewels pried from their settings on our coffin; that she feels this same soft pleasure of touch. Only when she proceeds to the next naked bones do we, like lovers, seize with jealousy: she’s moved on. She does not anticipate her visits the way we do. We know this, have always known—as do all the rest who lie here. We can do nothing more about it, so we recognize it, though it jars us anew every time. The dead can only accept the living. Still, we hunger for each time she comes to tend our bones.

 

• February 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

Borbála 
by James Tipton

Borbála Bela was a beautiful little girl growing up in her village in rural Hungary. She rose early and she worked hard, holding to the path of duty to help her poor family. But it was a shock when, at age thirteen, she began to develop not only breasts but also a beard - and a heavy one at that - due to some mischief of nature manifesting itself in her otherwise maidenly body.

One of five hungry daughters, her father sold her for what must have seemed to him to be a small fortune to The Vogel Traveling Extravaganza, one of the hundreds of tiny circuses that wandered over Europe and Russia not much more than a century ago. Billed as Borbála the Hun, she was forced, even in winter, to wear a risqué two-piece bathing suit not only to titillate the men but to demonstrate beyond doubt that indeed she was a woman. Each afternoon she would lean out over the male citizenry while the barker tugged hard at her beard, now some ten inches in length.

Around the time of Borbála’s birth, a young boy whose destiny was to become The Great Gottlieb was born in rural Germany, son of the local barber. Helmut Gottlieb, at only eight, was blessed with strength, carrying with ease a calf across his shoulders, or pulling a wagon heavy with hay, up the hill into town. By the age of fifteen, Helmut, with his father’s blessing, joined The Vogel Traveling Extravaganza.

Helmut always arrived just ahead of the circus to paste up posters and pass out flyers. Then, to the delight of the town, he would put a rope between his teeth and pull a wagon, filled with children, to the circus site. In every town he looked without success for a beautiful woman to call his own.

Borbála was only a sideshow attraction, and in fact she spent most of her time peeling vegetables and washing dishes. But after the trapeze act, after the dancing bear, after the dogs jumping through circles of fire, after the clowns, young Helmut strode forth, the Main Attraction, toward the center of the large ring, towing behind him a cannon. Two assistants followed pulling a wooden cart that carried a two-hundred pound cannon ball. Helmut tamped down the powder in the cannon with a long pole wrapped at the end in colorful cotton batting, and then he casually lifted the heavy ball, carried it to the cannon, held it up above his head to amaze the anxious crowd, and dropped it down the cannon’s mouth.

He then walked backward to the performer’s entrance and took a solemn bow. One of the assistants took a torch, touched it to the cannon, and out flew the ball, which Helmut always managed to catch, gracefully, in his bare hands.

Helmut liked to see the bearded lady Borbála several times a week, although he knew she was embarrassed in her immodest attire. He thought to himself, though, that Borbála had at least the figure of the bareback princess who each afternoon, balanced on one foot, rode a horse around and around the circle.

Borbála, whose dreams were shattered the same year she became a woman, thought no decent man would ever look at her, and certainly not The Great Gottlieb, the handsome Helmut, the hero of the circus.

One summer night while Vogel was overseeing the set-up of the big tent a wooden platform fell against him and a rusty nail punctured his thigh. Infection set in, spread, and two weeks later his leg was amputated. The infection continued to spread and in another week Vogel was dead. His young son became the new owner; and this demanding son desired beyond measure the body of the bearded lady. One evening, with Helmut in hearing range, young Vogel ordered Borbála to later come to his tent. He said he could throw a towel over her face.

Helmut stepped into the light and knocked the young Vogel unconscious. With a sobbing Borbála in hand they fled into the night. Two weeks later they were wed, but before the wedding, Helmut’s father, the barber, arrived with a razor, a magic one made by good witches in the Black Forest. Where this razor was used, hair would never grow again. As his father shaved off her beard, Helmut looked at her face, the face of Borbála Bela, not seen since she was a girl. It was the face of the woman he had always wanted to find. To Helmut it was the face of the most beautiful woman in the world.

 

• January 2008 Student Choice Award Winner

I once saw Jesus 
by Ryan Dilbert

I once saw Jesus on the bus.

He had long hair and a following. His voice was strong and pure. He rode the #720 bus just like the rest of us slobs. He sat beside a fat woman sneaking a roast beef sandwich. He sat beside all of us. We were his sheep, the unbathed and the unemployed, the toothless and the couthless.

The bus spoke to us. It told us that a stop was requested and that Wilshire and Veteran was the next stop.

Jesus spoke to us. He told us that he had finally returned.

The bus driver would take you downtown if you gave your money to him. Jesus would take you to heaven if you gave your heart to him. They could both take you home.

Jesus told two fifteen year old pregnant girls that it was not too late to be saved, that all of us have sinned. He also said that they were very attractive and that their breasts were lovely.

He didn’t perform any miracles. He got on in front of Miracle Dry Cleaning Company. He did not turn water into wine, nor did he turn a homeless man’s urine into something that didn’t stink as it trickled down my pant leg.

Jesus had an air about him. He also had a bag about him. It was a plastic bag that said, “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you” in punchy, red letters. Jesus’ bag had two items in it. One of which was the Word of God and the other was a videocassette of “Son In Law” starring Pauly Shore.

Jesus said his friends wrote the book. He also said a friend of a friend once went to a party with Pauly Shore.

I was so glad that sweet Jesus was back.

He could finally revive the religiosity of holidays like Easter and Christmas and prove the nonbelievers wrong. He could tell the Jews to go ahead and switch teams. It was over, they had to admit it. The messiah was right here, sitting on the seats designated for seniors and the disabled.

He was not wearing a crown of thorns. He was wearing a Simpsons T-shirt. It featured Mr. Burns sitting in an ornate chair saying, “release the hounds.” Burns would definitely release the hounds. But what would Jesus do?

He had finally come…to West L.A. And he would be with us mortals for at least a week. I saw his weekly pass. The son of God offered his body and blood to us. He also offered his number to those pregnant girls.

He had come to judge or to save us. He had come to die again so that we could live. He had come back to Earth to make it a little more like heaven. But first he’d have to eat. He got off a few stops later at Fatburger.

 

• December 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

January, 2007 
by Sally Petersen

Packing up after the holidays, I find a cheetah standing calmly in a crèche among the barnyard animals of legend — a sheep, cow and donkey. This is an old manger scene, bought when Christmases and children were new. Little hands always have moved its pieces.

But a sleek, long-tailed cat, all feral beauty and menace? I know at once which granddaughter spiced up the baby’s mundane menagerie with her spotted streak of motion.

And why not, I think. The three astronomers stand there beside shepherds every year, their presence destroying time and space and logic. So let’s leave the cheetah beside the donkey. After all, won’t lions lie down with lambs in his holy land?

I smile to myself as I wrap, and wonder whether the child who left her favorite animal for the baby will remember it next year when she comes from California. She will be four then.

****

Eleven months later local grandchildren help me unpack decorations. The youngest, an energizer bunny of activity, and her brother tenderly place my collection of crèches around the living room. I’ll rearrange them later; now they are lined up in straight rows, respectfully, grade school style.

Tired, the brother wanders away, but the little girl doggedly continues to unwrap pieces from the last box. The old manger scene emerges. Its hay has disappeared except for fragments. Ancient lumps of dry glue adhere to the base of the shed — what was there? The figures are worn from handling. Suddenly her voice squeaks in excitement: Look! A cheetah! The brother runs to look. Two sets of wide smiles. They look to me, their questions unspoken. Is this a mistake? Does it belong?

I nod.

They dart looks of glee and quickly place cheetah beside the donkey. He — she? — almost nudges the manger. Long legs stride, tail lashes.

What energy the cat adds to that static scene. Of course the California girl will notice.

 

• October  2007 Student Choice Award Winner

Black Bird 
by Sherri Hoffman

Those Mackey boys from up the road always teased Howdy. Called him Retard.

Sandra stepped down off the school bus, and before it had even pulled away with a puff of dust, the boys started throwing horse apples at the back of Howdy’s head. Howdy walked alone toward the wooded lane where Sandra knew he lived with his mother, although no one had seen her much since the flu outbreak back before Christmas. Howdy did all the shopping now, brought the brown chicken eggs to the grocery in his mother’s old wicker baskets. Ailing, he said when inquired after her health. His jeans hung low across his narrow hips, and his clean white t-shirt stretched across his broad, straight back, unflinching, even when the Mackey boys switched to small stones.

Stop it, you animals.

Sandra loves the Retard. Sandra loves the Retard.

Sandra called Howdy’s name, but he didn’t turn around. She had to run to catch up.

Howdy! What ya’ doing, Howdy? Can I walk with you?

Howdy slowed, bent forward, held a single finger up to his lips, then spread his hands low and wide. Sandra followed his crouch, holding her skirt down against her bare legs. Sunlight glinted off a filament of fishline stretching into the underbrush.

What is it? Who put this here?

His long, fine fingers lifted the line, held the tension, walked forward as if climbing the invisible thread. A scrabbling in the leaves, thump-thumping in the brush startled Sandra back a step.

Oh! Something’s there. Some animal. Howdy! It’s something!

The fishline looped around the bird’s yellow-stick leg. Its black wings were half-shrugged, half open, its yellow beak open and panting. Howdy called to the bird, soft clicks with his tongue. Sandra crouched closer, close enough to smell the musk of him, his hair, his skin warmed with sun. She leaned in, almost brushing up against the curve of his arm.

It’s beautiful, Howdy. A beautiful bird.

He wound the line around his fingers, cooing soft now. The bird’s yellow eyes were wide and still, its wings drooping. It flapped weakly and hop-hopped one more time. Howdy’s fine, long fingers cradled the bird, folded in the curve of wings, stroked the iridescent black feathers that shimmered like oil.

Howdy turned. His cheekbones were sharp ridges over the equally sharp jaw line, his full, red lips parted just so.

Let me touch it, Howdy. Pet the bird.

Howdy’s eyes were flat, black pools like tar. His right eyelid slanted lower, twitched. His hands held the bird out to her.

Sandra touched the shiny black of the bird’s feathered head. It sagged forward, its neck limp as grass, snapped. She sucked in her breath.

Howdy’s eyes narrowed. He smiled. A casual flick cast the dead black bird away into the bushes.

Sandra backed fast. Howdy’s hand caught her wrist, long bony fingers closing in a vise.

Howdy…

His full lips rounded, clicking soft with his tongue, and his other hand clamped hard over her mouth.

 

• September 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

The Application of Gasoline and Sawdust
by Grá Linnaea

Make it clean. Cut the wire in one quick snip. Let the sharp spike of noise echo off the basement walls, not loud enough to wake the suicidal wife with unusual interests and skills. She can make a bomb out of wax and Drano, wires and fertilizer.

But you love her, don’t you? You sigh and smile, ruffle her hair. Innumerable searches for gas bombs, pipe bombs, all after working a full day in the middle of forty hour weeks.

The bomb in your hands could be a dummy, it could be a decoy so you’ll let down your guard, go to bed, slip into the sheets with her, spoon her to sleep, lose yourself in her soft breasts, waiting for the bomb, the one you didn’t find.

She doesn’t have time to make two. You repeat that to yourself, use it as a mantra as you cut wires.

This bomb is made from lint infused with condensation from cooking gas; mixed with a little soap.

You are becoming an expert on bombs yourself. You could build this. Use a digital watch as the timer. Make the whole house go away. A flash.

Sometimes she makes the bomb easy to find. You get to bed at a decent time. Maybe so the two of you can make love with flaming passion.

Those are the good nights. Other times she cooks a splendid dinner. Maybe because she likes you, because she is having a good night. Or maybe because she wants to slow you down.

There are rules. The bombs are made to go off at 11:23:04 PM. You can always sleep after midnight. At 11:24 you know you haven’t missed one and can get sleep for the coming workday.

11:23:04. November 2nd, 2004. The date of your wedding. It’s coming soon, you know. She’ll have an extra special bomb planned for your and her anniversary. You still have to figure what to get her. Something red, she likes red this year.

You soak the lint in water and rinse it down the sink. The chunky bits, you bury in the backyard. The timer, another of the endless kitchen timers she acquires somehow, you break it into many pieces and place them in separate garbage cans.

 

 

• August 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

Blackout 
by Sean Darnell

So, I was sitting at my computer, banging my head against my desk in repeated efforts to attach a simple word-pad document to an e-mail I was trying to send. It should have been simple enough. Yet, somehow, every effort hit a snag.

Must have been some spyware I’d picked up in my continuing quest for free porn. Such is the price I pay for leisure.

In the background, I could hear a bunch of voices bitching on the radio posing worried conjectures as to what guarantees their banks, their governments, their overlords, could make to them regarding the preservation of their way of life should some sort of unforeseen disaster strike society, decimating all electronic records on which we’ve come to rely:

“What if a solar flare hit us?”

“Nuclear holocaust?”

“What are these corporations doing to ensure the sanctity of those things we need to survive as a civilized society?”

“Is there some hard record out there, in a missile silo or something, that will tell future generations how we build roads, how we trade stocks?”

“Are our mortgages safe?”

“Our debts?”

All this worry over security. It all seemed so much superfluous garbage to me. But, these people were really concerned.

What kind of world have we made for ourselves where these are the things we hold most dear? Nothing more than hot, stinking air. It made me sick to my stomach. I got a knot in my throat. My head felt like it was going to pop.

I didn’t think it actually would.

Abruptly, everything just cut off. My computer screen went black, all the lights in my house died out, and I was consumed in total darkness. I glanced outside and my entire block was the same.

I knew better than to bother scrambling around in the dark, looking for a candle or a flashlight. There weren’t any. Not in my apartment.

There was never really any need. This sort of thing happened all the time, but never for more than a few minutes. Normally, when the power grid had a hiccup, it was taken care of in short order.

So, I sat.

I navel-gazed for a while, unable to actually see the point at which I cast my stare, but confident I was eying the right direction. Had I chosen to focus my attention on the ceiling fan, or the Van Gogh print hanging across the room, I’d have probably been lost.

Once secure in my spatial orientation, my mind began to wander.

I began to wonder… what if this wasn’t a coincidence?

Someone once told me that in every fear there was a hidden wish, that the fear could not exist without it. Sort of like an ourobouros, forever escaping, just to eat its own tail. We built our cities, created nations, raised great empires, all in fear of the dark and of each other.

All that gas had to go somewhere. It had to be passed, eventually. Perhaps, I’d tapped into something much bigger than myself, that moment, inadvertently kicking the cork out of the keg upon which the whole world sat.

Do you believe in the collective subconscious? Lay-lines? That whole Gaia theory?

What if the lights had all gone out, everywhere, at that very moment? It would be interesting, I thought, if anything more complex than a disposable lighter were suddenly rendered inert. How would we survive? To what lengths would I be prepared to go?

It would only be a matter of time before the grocery stores were looted and their stocks consumed. Within a year, we’d run out of supplies to gather, which would leave hunting as the only means for an individual’s survival.

Being a city boy, I’d never hunted in my life. Hell, I rarely ever saw so much as a squirrel or pigeon, anymore. There was always the zoo as an immediate option, I thought, but someone bigger, stronger, and better armed would, undoubtably, have already thought of that before I’d gathered the desperate conviction and wherewithal to feast on an endangered species. I’d be slaughtered on sight.

The thought of cannibalism came to mind, but was quickly dismissed. Not completely, however, as I sort of tucked it under my cap for safekeeping. ‘Only as a last resort,’ you know? I know better to ever say ‘never’ about anything, especially on the subject of self-preservation.

I could gather a rag-tag clan of like minded survivors-types and get by on strength of numbers, alone, I supposed… but I’m no leader. If I had that kind of charisma, I sure as Hell wouldn’t be sitting there, alone, on a Saturday night, pondering the apocalypse. Besides, I’d seen enough zombie movies to know the dangers, very well, of so many exasperated, clashing egos trying to share the same space. That sort of pack mentality is a recipe for trouble.

When the power finally cut back on, the first thing I saw was a cockroach, scuttling across the carpet to my right. Without pause, I leapt to and crushed the little bastard with the heel of my shoe. He never saw it coming. ‘Survive that,’ I said, and went off to bed.

 

• July 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

Birds at the Bon Odori Festival
Jill Johnson

August delivers a fresh sun and sky as the four of us prance in cotton, hand-me-down kimonos. Our flat, round fans chop the air in jagged choreography. We can’t feel our clumsiness until after the dance when we sit at the edge of the grass, outside the temple, to watch our older sisters, and then our mothers, perform the dance with small, restrained movements, humble grace. The silk fan spreads like a monarch’s wings, curves coyly in front of the body, eyes cast down. The head turns shyly toward the shoulder, and the fan lifts in time to shield the telltale tracings of a smile. We are as silent as the men. But, being young, our attention flickers back to the summer day, the swollen sun and breathless sky where we see flocks of birds, in turn, rise from a single oak tree to sweep and carve the air before lighting on limbs to view the next flock. For the first time, we become aware of chirping as the birds observe each other practicing maneuvers, preparing for their autumn flight. The shadows of birds flutter over grass. They dance with shadows of our mothers’ fans, and we practice with our own crude fans, we four girls, perched as we are on the edge.

• June 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

The World of Beer
Jackie Shannon-Hollis

Amstel. He starts with an Amstel then works his way around the world. Becks, Saporo, Pilsner Urquell, Guinness Stout, Negra Modelo. Not in any order, just jumps around the world. Like his Claudine. Traveling her way out there.

“Bugiganga, baby.” That’s what he says when the girl behind the bar brings his fourth beer. Czech Republic.

“Whatever.” The girl wipes the ring his last beer left. Her big hoop earrings skim her bare shoulders.

He lifts that beer and toast its brown light. “Let’s get bugigangaed.” That’s the one word he remembers from Claudine’s Portuguese tapes. It’s the only one he asked her to explain. They were in the car, him driving and her with her head phones on. Claudine saying those Portuguese words, with their big r’s and g’s. She pulled the headphones off and said it slow, like he was stupid. “Boo-gee-gan-ga.” Made each syllable a small country of its own. “Boo-gee-gan-ga. It’s the junk, kn ickknacks, like in the stores of beach towns.”

There was a car ahead of them that day, with one of those yellow ribbons slapped on its rear: Support our Troops. Claudine made a loop with her finger. Like that ribbon. “The pink ribbons like that,” she said. “You know. The ones for breast cancer?” She cocked two fingers into quotes. “My group says they should say ’support our breasts.’” Claudine touched her chest. “What’s left of them.” He didn’t laugh. But she did.

The bar girl’s breasts drop and curve. The way they move, she’s got no bra on.

“Deckel my ass,” he says. His chin is down, almost in the beer from Ireland.

“Tickle your ass?” The way the girl says it, he doesn’t even have to look in the mirror behind the bar to see what she sees. Hair crept back, belly crept forward, some kind of sweat on his face that he can’t seem to wash off.

“Deckel,” Into the beer. “Deckel.” Another of Claudine’s words. Not foreign, just fancy. Like the journal that had the torn edged pages.

He’d flipped the pages, like a magazine, and stopped where Claudine had her list: Before I Die. “How much you pay for this thing?” That’s when she told him about deckeled edges on handmade paper. When did she get to know that? When did she start to care about such a thing?

Claudine used to be the kind of girl who would go to the store and get cigarettes and a six pack. One pack for her, one for him. When she couldn’t get pregnant, long after the doctors said it wouldn’t happen, long after he’d given up, she’d have him stop at the store on the way home. One time he got tired of waiting in the car and went in. She was in the medicine row. He watched her through the curved glass mirror at the end of the aisle. She spent twenty minutes picking out a pregnancy test. Read each box all the way through. She put the box on the counter and asked the cashier for a lottery ticket. He waited for her by the door, with the things he’d already bought. Six pack and some Marlboros. After Claudine got the lottery ticket, she saw him with his bag. Didn’t even try to hide what she’d bought. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “One way or another.” She dropped her stuff in his bag. Took out the Marlboros.

The day the doctor told her the breast had to go, Claudine went into the bedroom and shut the door with a soft click that didn’t ask him to follow. He waited there, by the door, until dark. He left the light off when he went in and laid down next to her. She was on her back. It was with his hands that he found her arms, folded across her chest. Each hand holding a breast. Tears, like quiet waterfalls, down the sides of her face.

It wasn’t the breast or the cancer that took her away. It was more like he got cut out in that surgery. All those women around her after. “It made me see,” she said. “What’s important. Not wasting time.” She didn’t look at him then, just kept packing her things. “To do the things you want to do.” He was nowhere on her deckeled list.

 

• May 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

Success
Rebekah Matthews

Bethany and I had lived in our new house for only a few months when I first noticed a groundhog running around our backyard. This was during autumn, when it was almost always windy. In order to cover our mortgage, Bethany worked a lot then, late evenings and sometimes weekends. I had just been laid off. We were both scared. When Bethany was late coming home from work, I sat quietly on the back porch, seated on the ground because we didn’t have any chairs, my legs tucked underneath me, and I watched the groundhog dart across the lawn for shelter. Back and forth. He was tiny and brown and dirty, his face a lighter shade of brown, and his mouth was always turned down so he looked like he was frowning. Once in a while I threw him carrots. He got fat. I told Bethany about him.

“You feed him carrots?” she said, slamming the door to the porch. “Where is it?” She paced back and forth through our back yard. I followed her, apologizing. She said, “You know, he’s going to stay, now, and dig fucking holes all over our yard. You better hope he doesn’t make the porch foundation collapse. Where is he?” The backyard was empty and silent, the shadows from the tall trees making big black shapes, like space.

“He’s gone,” I said. “You probably scared him away.”

“Unbelievable.” She ran her hand through her hair, which was cropped short, close to her ears, because she didn’t want to take the time to fix it. She started kicking the grass with the toe of her left sneaker, searching for holes.

“What?” I asked.” Who cares? I thought he’d be like a sort of pet for us.”

She found a few small holes, with piles of mud lying next to them in tiny mounds like pieces of dog shit. She muttered, “If it wasn’t illegal, I’d get a gun and shoot it. They’re parasites. They’re going to ruin our home. This is our home, and we have to fight for it.”

The next day, she ordered a slingshot on ebay, and it arrived a week later. Then it was Bethany, this time, who sat on the back porch, waiting quietly. Even when she came home past 8:00, she’d head outside to the porch. Sometimes I brought her a glass of wine, then tried to dissuade her. I never succeeded. She shot stones at the groundhog, whenever she saw him run by, but she never hit him. Her aim wasn’t good enough. She never succeeded, either. Still, she grasped her sling shot, sullen and determined, holding on until winter.

Then winter came, and the sky became dark much earlier. It got too cold to sit out on the porch. The groundhog disappeared.

 

* 

Two years later, Bethany and I are sitting on the porch, on our bench swing, and her head is on my lap and I’m playing with her hair, which is long now, past her shoulders. Our friends tell us we seem happy together, that with Bethany I’ve become more responsible, more grown-up, and that with me Bethany has become calmer, more open. This morning, I spilled coffee on our newly finished kitchen table, and she didn’t get angry, but rather shrugged, and tossed me the roll of paper towels.

It’s spring time. The sky is clear and black, and it is too early in the evening for stars to appear. We have our shoes off. Bethany taps her feet against the floor and asks, “Jen, do you remember a few years ago-that little groundhog, who I tried to kill with my slingshot? Which I think I even got on ebay?”

“Groundhog?” I ask, quietly pulling my hand away from her hair. “No, I don’t really remember.”

I lie to her because I miss the whole stupid fiasco, though I could never explain why, except to say that I miss her, even though I’m sitting right next to her. I’m attached most to who we were when we were at our worst-when I was stupid and she was mean, when we fought in different ways, but for the same thing-when she and I shared an unspoken uneasy feeling, vague and panicking and determined, much like holding on.

 

• April 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

A Necklace of Daisies and Faith
Petra McQueen

We were standing on the roundabout, waiting for a gap in the traffic, when she said, “Let go of me.”

I thought she wanted to cross on her own but she seemed a little doddery so I held on.

“I said, ‘Let go’!” The harshness in her voice startled me. I dropped her arm and crossed the road hoping she’d follow. A stream of traffic flew off Junction 29 trapping me in the middle of the road. I turned back and saw that the old woman was sitting on a packing crate.

Horns blared as I dodged a Volvo to run to her. “You can’t stay here,” I said. A series of lorries thundered past. I raised my voice. “It’s too dangerous!”

“Young lady. I am not deaf.”

She sat upright, immovable, dressed in cashmere and pearls and surrounded by litter thrown from car windows. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to carry on as usual, as though there wasn’t a lady sitting where only the desperate had sat before. I lay on the grass and counted my money. There was enough for a packet of fags so, timing it right this time, I ran across the road to the garage.

The man wouldn’t let me into his shop anymore but he would serve me through the little hatch at the side.

“Ten silk-cut, please, and – ” I thought about what the old lady might like, “Some Werther’s Originals.” I’d seen an advert for them in town. The man said nothing, as usual, but posted the goods through.

When I got back, the old lady was sipping a cup of tea from a thermos. As I got nearer she drained the cup and put it into a large picnic hamper. She must have carried it from the boot of her car marooned on the other side of the island. I crouched on the grass and offered her the Werther’s Originals but she turned up her nose and said, “Oh, I never eat sweets at bed-time.”

I was alarmed. “You’re not thinking of staying here are you?”

She was silent and did not look at me.

“If it’s the traffic you’re worried about,” I said, “I can get you across no problem.”

She fished in her basket and got out a car rug. She spread it across her knees and looked as though she was day-tripping in the countryside.

“It gets dangerous here at night, you know?” I said.

“Will you be quiet,” she said. “I’m enjoying the view.”

All I could see were cars blurring past and the motorway bridge. It was getting dark. I’d have to ring for help, to get someone to take her home.

I crossed to the petrol station again but when I asked the man to ring the police he waved me away. I could have walked along the motorway to the emergency phone-box but I didn’t want to leave my new friend alone.

That night I slept at her feet and I woke in the morning to the smell of hot coffee. It was nice. I wanted to sit with her all day but I thought, if she was going to stay, I’d better earn some money for us.

When I got back, I thought she’d left. Her car had gone and I didn’t know it had been stolen by Jimmy Mac and his crew. I felt sadness tug at me. But she was there, only further to the centre, where the scrub camouflages any movement. She’d cleared the ground: broken bottles, plastic bags and old needles had been placed in a neat pile. In the centre, she had built a fire ready to be lit, and next to it there were two packing crates with little cushions on them, made from folded-up blankets. By her side, there was a kettle and a frying pan.

“It’s time for tea,” she said.

And that’s how it all started. The best days of my life. Each day I came home to a proper meal and in time we’d made a shelter made from willow branches. In the spring the house sprouted leaves. There was a rag rug to wipe your feet on and candles made from beeswax to keep the midges off. She gave me her pearls to sell for we did not need such things. We were happy as we were. She was a miracle maker, a saint, a mother. When she passed away, I wept for forty days and nights until I had no tears left and I was a desiccated shell of a woman. In my grief, I tore down our house with my bare hands and scattered rubbish across the barren ground. I buried her where we had been happiest, on the roundabout, beneath the scrub.

And now I’m here, where it never rains and there is a bed in each cell. It’s ten-thirty now and soon the lights will cut out and the darkness will come. I hold your letter in my hand and tonight I will sleep with it, and in the morning perhaps I shall know what to say.

You ask me to tell the truth. You want me to say that I dragged your mother out of her car and into the scrub. You want me to say that I slashed at her neck and watched the pearls drop like frozen tears before I scooped them into my pocket. You want me to say I sold her car for a line of speed. You want me to say I kept her prisoner, mutilated her and buried her in a shallow grave. You say that only when I confess these terrible things you will be able to sleep at night.

But which would you prefer? A woman who screamed for her pearls, begging not to die? Or a mother who danced in the moonlight, kept fireflies to light the way, caught the stars in a net, and strung a necklace made from daisies and faith?

 

• March 2007 Student Choice Award Winner

Tree.
R.F. Marazas

He slipped into the backseat of her car while she was getting ready upstairs. Dusk covered the house and circular driveway. He wore black down to his sneakers. He lay on the floor, uncomfortable on the hump, hoping she wouldn’t notice him when she got in.

She hurried, aware of nothing but her anticipation. Through the closing darkness she drove across Route 59, to the campus side of town. Behind the college the dead end street was quiet. She passed the tree and the house, u-turning at the street end. She parked between the house and the tree, facing back the way she came.

He counted to ten after the door slam, and raised his head slowly to the bottom of the window. She was mounting the porch steps just as the porch light went on. The door swung open. He backed away in the same instant he recognized Olivia’s face. The door closed. He got out, watching the house, hunching his shoulders to make himself smaller. He moved to the side of the house where the tree stood. He looked up at a darkened window on the second floor just as a light went on.

She followed Olivia up the narrow stairs. In the bedroom she paused at the doorway as Olivia turned on the lamp. Unable to stop herself, she moved forward at the beckoning hand gesture. The kiss took her breath away.

He climbed the tree. Its branches curled in every direction, blocking out the side of the house, reaching up above the roof. He grasped a thick lower branch and swung his feet up to hook it, then hauled himself up. The branch held his weight and he climbed higher, angling toward the house. When he reached window level he saw pale, naked flesh.

She watched as Olivia stepped back and opened her robe and let it fall to the floor. Her legs were rubbery. With the next kiss she felt herself collapse against Olivia’s body. She felt the heat of flesh right through her clothes. She heard the rustling of the tree outside the partly open window.

He straddled the branch, inching forward, shoving smaller branches out of the way. Leaves blocked his view, then parted. It was like watching a flickering film go in and out of focus. He bent forward and down close to the bark, and pulled himself closer to the window. He glued his eyes to her, ignoring Olivia.

She stared into Olivia’s eyes as Olivia unbuttoned her blouse. When it opened she delighted at Olivia’s gasp seeing she wore no bra. She closed her eyes as Olivia trailed kisses downward. The tree rustled louder in time to the beating of her heart. When the crack boomed she jumped back. Olivia, kneeling, fell on her face.

He lay between the house and the tree. Its gnarled roots bulged above ground and dug into his back. Screaming pain in his legs muffled the discomfort. Light from the lamppost was a floating haze in the surrounding darkness. He couldn’t move.

She stood over him, hand to her mouth, eyes wide. Her blouse was out of her skirt, buttons fastened in the wrong buttonholes. “Please. Call an ambulance. Please.”

He saw through waves of pain his sister looking down at him, and behind her Olivia clutching her robe tighter. Olivia turned and hurried back to the house.

She wondered how she would explain this to him.

He hoped she wouldn’t notice his erection.