Second Place

 The Nothing

By Lauren Wilczek

This story is about nothing—and that being the case, I suppose you're thinking you have no reason to continue to read any further. After all, It isn't as if I promised you a murder or a tragedy or even a nightmare resurrected in the squinty hours of a restless sleep.

I'm writing about nothing—and believe me it can be downright frightening if you utilize the proper point of view.

For instance, In the beginning there was nothing…

That's fine by me, except that nothing tends to spread outward, exponentially, like a crazy equation that trips across the black board of a brilliant mathematician. It broadens as it travels across time and space eventually touching everyone in the universe. If you try to erase it, nothing leaves a smudged Milky Way of drab stars hanging loosely in space, each one a hazy question without a proper conclusion. If you ignore it, nothing will float around out there, bump into other people's private galaxies, and screw up the orbits of all the individual planets.

But that's nothing on a grand scale.

I'm talking about nothing as it exists in our world; the nothing that puddles at the bottom of the basement stairs and waits for an unwary seven-year-old to step in it—the nothing that huddles in the corners of the closet at night and breathes soft monster noises at you while you lie shivering under the blankets—the nothing that your mother tells you is there, in the unlit pantry, every time she asks you to fetch a can of peas for her.

I've met nothing at many times in many places and I can vouch for the fact that it is as mysterious and unpalatable as my mother's pea soup. Like a wad of gum chewed free of all flavor, nothing is a bit of gristle that catches, first in one cheek, then the other, refusing to be swallowed.

It's a mean little bastard.

When I was nine years old, I was playing kick-the-can with a pack of kids from our neighborhood when nothing hurtled straight into the face of one of the players and permanently blinded him. One of the kids said it fell out of the sky like a dead comet. I didn't see a thing but I did hear the other kids screaming. Later on, in the hospital, little Bobby told his parents he saw nothing too.

Mr. Rendle, our postman, delivered a pink envelope to the old lady who lived next door to us; the nothing in it made her cry for days. Nobody was safe from it. Nothing tagged along behind my big sister, slipping out whenever my mother asked her what she was doing. It lurked outside my bedroom window, usually after a bad dream, and left a puff of moisture on the glass that looked like a smeared kiss.

As a child, I hunted nothing like the dog it was. I found it curled up at the bottom of my pockets, paddling around inside the last box of my favorite cereal, or dozing in the dust under my bed. Nothing lingered everywhere—even under the bathroom sink where my Dad stocked the toilet tissue. It wasn't hard to find. In fact, I found so much of it I stopped looking for it. That's about the time it decided to look for me.

I remember putting my precious dime, the one my dad gave me for squishing his empty beer cans, into the coin slot of the bubble gum machine only to find that nothing popped out of the chute. I remember Jamey Samson, the boy who hid nothing in a tight fist behind his back and promised to beat me into a pulp if I told anyone he'd been playing with matches. I even remember how nothing clung to my late-afternoon shadow, chasing me through the apple orchard, while I ran myself into vicious side pains and a bout of goose bumps—each big enough to pass for a mosquito bite.

That was the summer nothing got our telephone number and dialed our house almost five times a week. The telephone would siren until my mother finally put down the iron and picked up the receiver. I guess it didn't have much to say because my mother only listened for a few seconds before hanging up. No matter how many times we asked, she never told us what she heard.

By the time I turned fourteen, I was used to nothing and its quirky habits. I kept it company, out in a farmer's field about a mile from our house. I ate bologna sandwiches and sipped lemony ice tea; while it basked sleepily in the sunshine. I fed it bits of myself, like the chapters of my favorite books or the collection of day dreams I forged out of wistful aspirations. Later on, it demanded a richer diet of baseball games, music lessons, household chores or television. Finally, when I turned eighteen, nothing catapulted me into an adventure that lead me through the turbulent years of college, dating, marriage and childbirth.

Which brings me to the present where nothing whirls in the upper corner of my bedroom, thoroughly at home and still hungry. Late at night, it orbits my head like a dead moon. Perhaps, because it has grown so terribly content with things the way they are, it hasn't moved on to another galaxy. Perhaps, because it has developed a taste for my small, inconsequential planets, it continues to dog me, like a spoiled pet seeking a treat.

I only know that it wants to be fed.

This story is about nothing—because that voracious dog is so relentless—because I've often dreaded the moment when, having scraped my soul clean of all feeling, I might have nothing left to say—and because when I tried to write this assignment, nothing came, first, to mind.

Copyright ©1999, 2000 Laurel Wilczek.  All Rights Reserved.

Third Place

Guy Thing

By Jerry Newman

I’m waking up.

Shit.

I fight it, wedging myself against the slippery well of consciousness, knowing what’s coming. The grittiness of eyelids is what I feel first. Then, the other: A bloom, with razored petals of force clawing into my core. I feel it growing, enveloping other cells, amebic, making them its own as it rips through nerves and sinew to get to them.

My hand grabs the switch, pressing out the cowardly morphine to hide behind. The force lessens, but doesn’t go away. The flower continues, camouflaged in my flesh. It eases into the sharp ends of wires, compressed into a tight ball, ready to spring if I let go.

What next? I suppose I should open my eyes. I wonder how many calories it takes. The flower begrudges me the energy. I thought when I was working twelve hour shifts at the foundry, I knew exactly what tired was, thank you very much. And my reward for this? For stepping into this bright, stinging light?

Grays.

Cancer steals color. I know there were colors because, so far it hasn’t bothered with my brain - directly, it’s been content to play with the nerves and cables it’s attached to. I wonder if it’s saving my brain for last. For dessert.

“Good morning sweetheart.” My wife’s voice is fangs snapping through my skull. I turn my head, the pain comes in bursts of strobed light. I want to sleep.

Her face is gray too, now. It was the final thing to lose color. I think my heart was pumping it to her by invisible pipes. I remember it was peach, the eyes were blue, the lips were pink. She’s wearing her hair up. It was brown.

“The doctors said the new treatment is promising.” Lea says it slowly, or maybe that’s how I hear now. If she is doing it on purpose, she must think I’m stupid instead of sick. A muffled, far-away anger comes. Swallowing is a savage rasp against stiff cardboard. My lungs, no longer pink and cheerful balloons, push a drowned, deep smell through my mouth. “No...more.” A thrumming is in my ears. Things lose focus like a finger is pressing onto the lens of my eyes. I close them. I want to sleep.

I think again of my plan. Of wrapping the rubber band, the freedom in the desk, around the switch and my thumb. I was an electrician and know which monitoring cable to unplug so they won’t come to stop it. I have to hoard energy for that, somehow. I want the calm glide into black more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

“Joe, I know you’re so tired baby, please don’t give up.” She is sobbing. I know the blue is surrounded by red. When she takes my hand off of the switch into hers, I don’t get mad. I squeeze that I’m sorry, instead. It makes her feel better. “I don’t want to lose you.”

It started small, this thing that’s making me dry; that’s killing me by inches: I noticed it, or it noticed me, on our vacation at the river. Which still pisses me off. You really should discover things like this when you’re in an uncomfortable place. We’d bought the white stilt-house that winter, cheap because of the floods in 93’. We were in the new bass-boat. Since Lea had finished school and got her job at the hospital, we had more money.

My son, Brian, was looking at me from an angry - “you don’t know shit, you scared old pussy, “- fifteen year old place. Like my dad saw and probably every dad sees.

“Why? I can do it. It’s just water.” This one was over my telling him he couldn’t body ski.

“Water turns into concrete at forty-five miles an hour Brian.”

He looks disgusted. “Is that what getting old is? Being afraid of everything?”

It’s odd that as you age, your concept of old is pushed a set distance from you. At thirty-seven, it’s fifty. At his age, it’s thirty-seven. “Ok, try it.” He jumps into the water.

“Joe, don’t let him do it.” Lea is a beautiful woman who thinks she isn’t. She is wearing a modest, tan one-piece, still wet from her ski-run, clinging to her small curved body, her dark nipples pebbly and hard. After sixteen years, looking at her still makes my flesh rise. I wish Brian weren’t with us. “I’ll take it slow.” I tell her.

At twenty MPH, he’s smiling. He manages through the spray, to do it smugly. I push the throttle forward. Twenty-eight MPH. The smile is tight now.
“That’s enough Joe.” She grabs my arm.

“All he has to do is let go of the rope.” My Marine drill-instructor’s voice rings in my head;

“The hu - man body can withstand in - cread - able torment, maggots. Yew can make your body stainless steel by the apple - la - cation of your will.”

I push the throttle. Thirty-four MPH. The smile is gone. Lea’s fingernails dig into my arm. Let go of the rope, I mouth at him. He doesn’t. Just looks at me with the same hard brown stare I see in the mirror.

I drop the speed to fifteen MPH and he lets go of the rope. He refuses my hand when he climbs on board. His pale, freckled skin is red with deeper red marks dappling it. His orange hair, same color as mine, is sticking up like a cartoon roosters.

“My turn, take the wheel Brian.” I jump into the water.

“What is this guys? We’re supposed to be having fun here, not a contest.” Lea’s voice rises.

I grab the rope and wave them on.

It’s nice at first. The water is a whirlpool. It’s July, hot and humid enough to punch holes in. The Mississippi’s spray feels cool on my face. Brian looks at me. I smile. The water gets harder. My skin starts stinging. I keep smiling, unable to see them now. The water turns solid, a sheet of greenish-blue glass. My body skips across it, bouncing up and down. It feels like the boxing lessons my dad gave me, when he knew his belt stopped working.

From a hidden place I keep smiling, keep my hands from turning the rope loose. When the water gets soft, the beating stops but I feel a grape-sized wrongness, a thready point, dark in my side. I refuse his hand. Lea doesn’t look at me. Brian heads for the pier. It’s harder to breathe.

“How fast did he take it?” I said that night. She was still back- turned angry.

“I didn’t tell him, and I’m not going to tell you. What is it Joe? Some vestigial pride from caveman days? I hate it. It’s not really you, you’re a fine person, it has to come from someplace else, outside of you. Why?”

“It’s a guy thing.” I said. The point felt bigger.

The guy thing made me wait too long before telling anyone that there was something wrong. Stupidity. That’s its real name. I woke up in the hospital after I had passed-out at work, almost falling into a vat of zinc.

“Mr. King, you asked for the truth.” Doctor Fox said. “The node has metastasized, if we’d caught it sooner the prognosis would be promising.”

“I’m fucked huh?”

“Never say never, where there’s life there’s hope...” He closed the door where Lea was waiting in the outer room. “Look Joe, I’m gonna drop the bullshit. You are. Fucked. But you can still live fairly well until the end. You have to fight for it.”

I did. For months with days that were years. Pain gets boring. I’m ready to trade hells for the novelty.

“Dad.” I hear faintly.

“Daddy.” A strong hand squeezes my shoulder, pulling me back up to the grays. My eyes scrape against their sockets as I look at him. I know his face is white, I wonder if the brown is surrounded by red.

“Joe..” Lea is holding my hand. Brian’s face comes close.

“Stainless steel.” He whispers. His face goes away.

I fight the flower for energy. My throat tastes like pennies.

“Desk drawer.”

I hear it pull open.

“What dad? What’s in the drawer?” I move my hand from Leas, missing the touch but needing the switch. It is fighting me. It knows.

“Band.” I hear him moving things around.

“This rubber band?” I shake my head yes. A brittle static fills my ears.

“Shitcan.” I tell him.

“You got it, dude.” I hear him shoot it at something metallic.

“What did he say?” Lea asks.

“He wanted me to throw the rubber band away.”

The bloom shrivels as I hold their hands. There is something different about the ceiling, bright and struggling to be seen. I close my eyes, glad they can’t understand. Sleep comes.

Copyright ©1999, 2000 Jerry Newman.  All Rights Reserved.

Fourth Place

 Me & Charles Manson

By Cynthia Balog

"I don't believe you're leaving 'cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice-cream. I think it's that girl and I think there's pieces of me you've never seen maybe she's just pieces of me you've never seen well all the world is all I am the black of the blackest ocean and that tear in your hand."
-- "Tear in Your Hand", Tori Amos

Ugly . . .

Cucumber slices don't reduce puffiness, that's for sure. Even though the mirror's veiled in post-shower steam, I can see enough luggage under my eyes for a trip to Japan. As I'm waddling down the stairs in my bathrobe, I make a mental note to thank Oprah for that truly wonderful bit of advice, and to save the rest of the veggies in the fridge for dinner.

Guy is sitting at the kitchen table, nose buried in Computer User magazine. Not that he can tell RAM from a raisin, but he's always trying to "better himself", so that for once he won't have to come home smelling like whatever was being delivered to the Save-All that day. He only looks up when I set my waffles down beside him, but he seems more interested in my breakfast than anything else.

"You got any more of those?"

"In the freezer. Want me to make you some?"

"Nah, forget it." He inspects me like I'm an unlabelled bottle of pills found in the back of his medicine cabinet. "Whoa, Laney, is that normal for you to be gaining in your hips?"

I sit down at the table to shield him from the view. "Uh, well, I guess."

Or maybe not.

Ugly . . .Fat . . .

Of course, the three waffles on my plate suddenly become of even more interest to Guy. The second he gets that twinkle in his eye, I know what he's going to say. "Sure you should be having three of those?"

Up until a minute ago, I was. "Want one?"

He reaches over, stabs one with his fork, and releases it on a coffee-stained napkin beside his trusty magazine.

"Must have been a lot of deliveries last night," I say casually.

"I told you. I was with Charlene."

I have a bit of waffle in my mouth, and suddenly, swallowing seems impossible. I spit it into my napkin and say, "Oh."

Finally, he loses interest in my breakfast, and I get some real eye contact. It's the kind of look that would give penguins the chills. "Laney, how many times do I have to explain this? We're not together."

I'm aware of the drip of the kitchen faucet, the whirring of our neighbor's leaf-blower, the ticking of the cat-shaped clock with the roaming eyes. If only those sounds could drown out Guy's babbling. I've heard the lecture so many times, I begin to lip-sync it as he speaks. When he pauses, I say, "I know, but . . ."

"But nothing. I told you when you moved in. You're welcome to live here, but . . ." He buries his nose into the magazine again and sighs. "It just didn't work out, Laney."

"It didn't work out" might mean that I like the same flavor of ice cream as Charles Manson, or that I have teeth like Jeffrey Dahmer, or that Ted Bundy and I share a love for goose-down pillows. Who knows? Because whenever I ask for an explanation, I get a description of the current love of his life, Charlene Dumont. Torture. I bite my tongue and think of Charlene, who happens to have the lofty position of chicken cleaner at the Save-All. I've never met her, but from what I've heard from Guy, mutilating poultry isn't her only talent. She probably shares ice-cream tastes with Princess Di or something, because Guy never fails to let me know how I can't compete. The telephone book in the hallway is constantly open to the Florists page, taunting me, and when he buys her a gift, he always has to parade it in front of me. He says he just wants my opinion, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out what he's really doing.

"You didn't give it a chance," I say into my chest, staring at my belly, which has swelled almost to the point where I can't stand to look at it anymore.

Ugly. . .Fat . . .Pregnant . . .

He winces. "You know that's not true. I gave it every chance. I want what's best for that baby, but you and I . . . together, as a couple . . . it's explosive. You know that. You have to know that."

A few fireworks, here and there. That's a good thing, according to Sally Jessy Raphael. As I'm about to point this out, he holds up a finger.

"Don't even mention fireworks, Laney. For the last time, I don't care what you've learned from your damn talk shows. You want to have this baby, even though you have no family, no job, no money, no place to live. I've told you how crazy I think you are, but I can't make you do anything. I will help you take care of it. That's more than a lot of guys would do. Got it?"

He's giving me that look, brows arched, pupils like pinpoints, mouth a thin, perfectly straight line. People would say he's handsome, almost too movie-star perfect to be found lugging crates in the back of a Save-All. I'd have to agree; after all, all my time in summer school was earned because I'd spent a little too much time drooling over the "unreachable" Guy McCormick instead of
studying. I had enough romantic fantasies of him to last several lifetimes, so when we finally did get together, I thought it would be forever.

Ugly . . .Fat . . . Pregnant . . . Stupid . . .

"You look sick. Have you been outside lately?"

"Not for awhile."

"That can't be good for the baby."

I shrug. I don't know, since I missed the last doctor's appointment. Maybe the one before it, too. For some reason, Montel's offerings always seemed much more exciting. If Guy was so interested in the baby's welfare, he could have taken me to the doctor's office. Something tells me that his idea of "being there" for the baby isn't going to win him "Father of the Year."

His idea of a real relationship, too, is pretty distorted. He made the mistake of telling me the one thing he really loved about Charlene. He said that one night, after they'd finished making love, she whispered in his ear, "Honey, do you ever think about how many other couples on Earth were making love at the same time we were?" He said that she always has thoughts like that. Really deep thoughts. As if he expects me to make dinner conversation like, "Do you ever think about how many people on Earth were eating corn on the cob at the same time we were?" Please.

There's a screeching from outside, almost like fingernails trailing across a blackboard. A garbage truck. I'm counting back to the last day I checked the calendar when Guy speaks my thoughts. "It's Garbage Day, isn't it?"

Tuesday. It's Tuesday. Shit. Garbage Day.

Before I can pull my stomach out from under the kitchen table, he says, "You forgot again?"

As fast as I can, though I'm not about to break any records, I wrestle together the top of Hefty bag that's overflowing with remnants of last night's lasagna. Struggling with the twist-tie, I drag it outside, down the steps, which are covered with the leaves and morning dew of autumn. My slippers have no traction, but I manage to waddle fast enough, and wave my arms furiously enough, to catch the eye of one scruffy, white-haired trash collector.

He takes the bag from me and winks. "What's a sweet thing like you doing alone on this fine morning?"

I smile at him, wondering which supermodel might be standing nearby. He jogs off, leaving me standing in a halo of sunlight, cast down past the bare branches of the trees. Instead of hurrying back into the house, afraid of which neighbors might behold the pregnant, homely neighbor in the ratty bathrobe, I gather the courage to scan up and down the street. It's empty. Once the truck
pulls around the corner, this perfect silence cushions my ears, and the sunlight embraces me. For a moment, I don't even think of Sally, or Montel, or Oprah, and I don't even care what topic they'll be discussing today. For once, there is nobody else. All that exists is this stillness, this perfect stillness . . . strangely frightening and thrilling, all at once.

Ugly . . . Fat . . . Pregnant . . . Stupid . . . Alone?

Alone. I say the word aloud, savoring the taste of it.

Alone. But no longer lonely.

The screen door creaks open, and Guy's voice shatters the silence. "Hey, what's up? You forget your way back?"

I don't bother to answer because I'm caught up in some really deep thoughts. Like where, in Guy's disaster of a basement, I might be able to find my suitcase.

Copyright ©1999, 2000 Cynthia Balog.  All Rights Reserved.

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