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Weekly Contest #233
Disclaimer: According to the 11th Tradition, "[Alcoholics Anonymous'] public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion." As discussed in this story, AA is for narrative purposes only. This story contains pertinent profanity. *** December 31 I am about to do something incredibly stupid. I am about to quit cold turkey. This is incredibly stupid because I have been drunk for over a year, and I have been a drunk since I started high school, and everyone knows the dangers of quitting without detox for the chronically imp...
Weekly Contest #231
It was finally here, the day they’d all been waiting for: our eighth grade end-of-year field trip. The sun was shining and the birds were singing, and the school bus was agog with excited chatter. They were so excited. I tried to be. I was dimly eager about our trip to Darien Lakes amusement park, simply because I’d never been to one, an amusement park, that is, but I was more focused on the water slides and bouncy houses and the ferris wheel, and the ring tosses and balloon popping ---I could win Sharon an enormous Panda...
Weekly Contest #230
Doink! “Honey, I thought we agreed: no phones, right?”“Right, sorry.” She starts rooting through her bag.Breathe. This spring-break vacation is what you’ve worked for; this has been your focus since your first semester results, a 7% increase from last year’s end-of-course performance but still, pitifully, only 24% proficient. Breathe. Last year, you did not hold this position, so administration should be thrilled with the increase; but still, that nag: the State’s prediction of student growth, for “educator accountability,” yielded a -3.I ma...
Weekly Contest #228
My favorite breakfast as a child was Quaker instant grits and fried eggs, an unusual fare for a Western New Yorker. None of my friends had heard of grits. (“What’s a grit?” I now hear Joe Pesci ask in My Cousin Vinny.) I don’t know how I explained grits to my friends, if I even tried. I’m certain it included butter, though. My mother went to the University of Mississippi and it was there, I suppose, that she became acquainted with grits. (It certainly wasn’t from Caracas, Venezuela, where she spent her formative years.) Mom’s saying “gr...
Weekly Contest #227
What do you know of loneliness? How familiar are you with the hollow emptiness that holds hands with abandonment, of that crippling ache as numbing as the chill that seeps through the thin windows, that causes the bubble-wrap insulation to crinkle with each frosty breath of December? The beer cans line the wall of the cracked closet in which I now huddle in the far corner; crouched like Gollum, my precious, my nocturnal eyes like saucers in this mineshaft that spans the length of the bedroom without a bed, my radar ears attuned to all foreig...
Weekly Contest #221
This story contains profanity, alleged pedophilia, and sexual insinuations.I see you, all snuggly; your legs in spoons, your forearm parting those breasts that caught your eye at the church’s Mardi Gras and reverse raffle, when your head nodded with each step that she bounced towards us —us, parents of two, ‘til death do we part— as we refilled our plastic party cups from the half-barrel keg on the muddied church lawn. Having smoked a joint in the parking lot, we were in full flight and everything was funny, especially when you’d renamed St....
Weekly Contest #220
My grandparents’ house was on the crest of the Sandia Mountains, and from their house, as a kid, I would venture out with my Batman utility belt to solve that episode’s conflict, which was never anything more than poking termite hills, examining alien footprints with my magnifying glass, and confronting my nemeses—the cactus, the cholla, the prickly pear—with my lightsaber as I collected desert artifacts for lab analysis. “Murdock to base, over,” I reported into my handheld. “Base. Go ahead, Murdock “ “Found something that definitely...
Weekly Contest #219
There is this place called Too Late where nobody seems to know you but where everyone talks about you, whispering behind hands in the grocery aisle and church pew, turning slightly with sideways glance, tsk-tsk that’s him. The judge hit his gavel and Fate smiled, told you so: you have just become the other guy. Janis said that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” and man was she right, I’d come so far, might be going to hell in a bucket babe, but at least I’m enjoying the ride. Impervious to cold, immune to morés, ignora...
Weekly Contest #218
The walls are alive with zipping current, the refrigerator hums its third-shift duties, the floorboards moan from the day’s trample of little feet and purposeful strides. Be silent! he had yelled when I’d asked about the smell, and I shut my mouth. I can be silent. This house, though, that had once helped nurture the first-time homeowners as we grimaced through the undigested milk and Gerber’s reflux that was commented upon by our coworkers, enjoy it while it lasts; that had once heard delighted squeals, that had once absorbed the pound...
Weekly Contest #209
Days old cat asparagus pee, dank gas-station bathroom, fast-food grease on hot asphalt by the steaming dumpster with the grey, sun soaked and blistering meat and congealing dairy desserts: all the smells of “indigent” precede him as he climbs into my car, more like falls into, and I reflexively lean towards my door to avoid contact. He wears a heavy burlap-sack puffer coat despite the intense morning heat. The seams of the plastic grocery-store bags set by his heavy, lace-less shoes are splitting open from cast-asides, shirts and socks it se...
Weekly Contest #208
I was on the floor building a rocket ship with Legos when I heard my parents’ whispered voices. Mommy was sniffle-crying and Daddy was saying there, there now, everything will be okay. What does okay mean, anyhow? When Mommy tells me to change my clothes into something more “proper,” or to clean up my toys, or to go back and flush the toilet, or that it’s bath time, and I say, “Okay,” everything is fine: I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. But during recess at the school picnic table the other day, I had beaten Alexander in arm wrest...
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