Stories in Motion

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2010 Poetry and Flash Fiction winning entries:

Poetry
1. “Cerebral Vascular Accident” by Madelyn Garner
2. “Uptown Raven” by Deb Liggett
3. “Etude in Human Minor Chords” by Joanne Milavec

Cerebral Vascular Accident

by Madelyn Garner

Let’s say your gardens are heady with color
when the first angels arrive like wind drifts
of catalpa blossoms,
wings white as whistler swans.

Let’s say they droop your left eye lid,
perplex your tongue.
And your startled heart?
It does a samba
that leaves you scattered as confetti.

Soon every motion is a great weight
wading in thick water, dazzle of light
eclipsing to black.

Say you wake, feel lucky:
resurrected, face unmarred
by mask or snarl,
ear bones vibrating with the lively news.

Now you know how death works.
How it strikes like lightning
embedding every cell with embers—
body, paper ready to ignite.

Flash Fiction
1. “The Greatest Flash Fiction Story Ever Written” by Matthew McCarty
2. “Driving Home, New Year’s Eve, 2000″ by Brian Kevin
3. “Weary War Paint” by Jason Joyce

The Greatest Flash Fiction Story Ever Written

by Matthew McCarty

Sam Underwood was an undergraduate writing student at Ohio State when she wrote the greatest flash fiction story ever written. The reader cannot question the merits of the assessment, as she has since lost the story, and has been unsuccessful re-creating it. Instead, we offer the students of Professor Malenstein’s third-level short fiction class, who, based on their readings of Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, and Jaffe’s Anti-Twitter, agreed that Sam had conquered the form, at least once.

The story follows a couple that met in the second Gulf War. Both Army nurses, they are split in their opinions on the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, though he accepts his tour as an obligation bound by honor, and she worries about the soldiers, even if she believes that the slogan “support our troops” elicits a tacit approval of the war. She also volunteers at a civilian clinic in Kabul. But this is the backstory. Sam drops us in as the couple finishes surgery after an insurgent attack. Two U.S. soldiers dead, two will need artificial limbs, and five civilians are missing. The couple is having problems, on account of her fear that they are bound only by the need for companionship amid the horror. She doesn’t mention her erotic fantasies associated with explosions. The story finishes as the characters dry their hands.

Sam’s classmates agreed that she had driven a stake through the heart of a too often resurrected trope. Never again could love outlast or endure war, because Sam had written the most satisfying and real account ever given. Her classmate, Johnny Templeton, remarked, “You can’t make this stuff up … but here you have.” The quality of realness the class attributed to her discovery of metaphysical clarity in the visceral experiences of the desert, whereas similar attempts by other authors either dismissed the possibility of metaphysical pain in the face of physical pain or limited the individual’s purpose to a single heroic act. None of Sam’s classmates could deny that her piece so much resembled truth that it had suggested a terminus to the human tendency towards conflict. Some called that point “empathy,” but, put straight like that, the affect was hardly as satisfying.

The students provided Sam with minor notes on tense consistency and word choice. Johnny Templeton felt the story would be even stronger if the characters were gay, arguing that love transcends sexuality, but also that writers must tackle the issues of their day. Lucy Garcia said all war stories glorify war.

Professor Malenstein had once told Sam that the best way to ruin a story was to habitually revise it, and while she appreciated the praise of her classmates, she understood that they were undergraduate writing students, so she decided to let the story sit. The semester ended. She collected her books, stories and notes in the trunk her mom bought, and went home to Toledo. A few years later, after Sam had moved to the mountains to write, and had found that the desire, alone, wasn’t enough, she went looking for the story, hoping to reestablish her urgency, but it was missing. The trunk held only classmates’ stories and the notebook in which she had scribbled a premise, “Two nurses in the Gulf War,” but no story. Even her laptop, the new one on which she thought she had transferred all her files, contained not even a ghost of the file.

She opened a new blank document, trying to recall the greatest flash fiction story every written.

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———————  Past Competitions and Great Reading  ——————-
Winners of the 2009 Conference contest themed Inspiration: What Moves Us. Sponsored with gear prizes by Cloudveil.

1^{st Place}

Two Matches

by Tim Pogue

 Strike a match against a gritty surface and it will ignite a flame, but what do we strike across our psyche that sparks the imagination? The beauty of inspiration is that quite literally anything can be its source; but perhaps what’s even more profound, is that the source itself can inspire different things to different people. A winding, raging river may inspire one man to learn how to kayak, yet inspire another to write an essay on global warming. Seeing a child giggle at a public park could inspire one young couple to start a family, and yet convince another to vow to never have kids. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the source of inspiration is in his mind.

It was 1985 when my best friend and I quit our jobs and left the Midwest for the “good life” of the West Coast. I left a promising career in bartending and my friend left his career as a gas station attendant. We were the same age, graduated from the same high school in the same year, and we both even had the same first name: Tim. We laughed at the same jokes, liked the same brand of beer and sometimes could even finish each other’s sentences. Most of all, we both wanted something better, and we knew it was there, waiting for us in California.

The first stop on our journey was Oregon. We stayed in affordable but comfortable motels as we worked our way down the Oregon coast, enjoying the sun, surfing and meeting girls at the local taverns. Life was good. But we kept heading south and so did our accommodations. Our odyssey took us down the coast of California and by the time we reached Baja, Mexico, we were trading our belongings to local fishermen for our evening meals and sleeping on the beach. This four-month whirlwind was an experience I will cherish and never forget, just as it was for Tim (the other Tim).

We went on the same trip, to the same places, in the same run-down Chevy Tahoe, yet the effect this trip had on each of us was remarkably different. The trip inspired Tim into a life-long love affair with the simple art of discovery through travel. He tried to go back to work for a while, but he hated it. He went back out on the road and he, right now as I’m typing this story, is riding his motorcycle through the mountains of Colorado. And me? The trip inspired me to get a job – a good job! Where Tim found joy and excitement in not knowing where we were going to sleep that night, I found fear and anxiety.

Two Tim’s, like two matches in a matchbook, were struck against the gritty surface of the same four-month adventure. Yet one flame burned for freedom and the other for security. Do we ponder over why, or just find another gritty surface to strike?

2nd Place

Memory As Muse

 by Valley Peters

 Double helix memory

entangled, cocooned, coded

Cancer cell rampant memory

repeating, mutating, killing

Assembly line industrial memory

hammering monotonous faceless

Alibi trap door memory

closed lipped wink secret

Mouth to mouth resuscitated memory

crumpled treasured threadbare

Leaf wind memory

fleeting twirling innocence

Cathedral hush memory

sacred immense prayer

Cinderella step sister memory

malicious conniving empty

Kitchen corner linoleum memory

warped outdated replace

Lush orchid memory

unfolding beauty breath

We tuck them into pockets
Then they spill out upon the page
Lurking coaxing muses roaming
Inspiration… birthed by memory

3rd Place

Untitled, an Excerpt

by Terry Rassmusen

 A colleague stopped me in the hall to share the grisly details of a bear mauling near Moran Junction. The next day, a second colleague shared the tale of a ranting lunatic encountered on the Jenny Lake Trail. When I asked them both why they were sharing these stories, they voiced the same response: because they worry; they know I hike alone.

Until now, I wasn’t about to tell anyone except intimate friends about my obsession. You just can’t go around telling acquaintances that you’re hoping for a face to face with a grizzly. They’re apt to look at you with raised brows, their voices unnaturally maternal, disarmed and alarmed.

Perhaps my bear obsession has outlived its purpose. Diane Ackermann once spoke of the “practical utility of our obsessions.” Perhaps, for all practical purposes, my need to encounter a bear in the flesh has ended. The bear who appeared in a series of dreams sent me off in search of an old, instinctive self, sent me over hundreds of miles of trails. If not for that obsession, I would have missed the good medicine of moose gazing and wolves howling in the Buffalo Valley; of summer’s thigh-high wildflowers around Two Ocean Lake. I would have missed autumn’s full glory in the fiery brilliance of aspens and the salmon hues of lupine, beside the shadows that haunt the dark woods on the Pebble Creek Trail, as well as the drama of a grizzly and eight wolves vying over a bison carcass in the Lamar Valley. I would have missed the adrenalin lift of being bluff charged by mama moose while skiing in the Teton Wilderness, and I would have missed soaking in hot springs after fording Polecat Creek; and I would have missed knowing that, on the trail, I can’t help but sing a decent rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

More importantly, without that bear obsession, I never would have started journaling again, and I never would have rented a “room of my own” at Wiggin’s Fork or written these very pages. Perhaps, in doing so, I’ve finally faced my bear. And how I love her company. Writing at Wiggin’s Fork with bear at my side, I’ve been deliriously happy. Perhaps this is where those bear dreams were leading me all along.

If we live with an obsession long enough, though, it’s more than a little difficult to deconstruct. Recently, an outfitter up at Double Cabin, just a few miles northwest of my cabin, spotted the “largest griz” he’d ever seen in all his years in the backcountry. Admittedly, my heart leapt at this news. At this point, I may only need one more thing from a grizzly: a hair from his throat, a talisman, which, according to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, helps us remember what we have learned. Then again, I have these pages. I honestly don’t know what others will make of this book. I only hope that something in the preceding pages will resonate, that some phrase, image, or sentiment will stir or warm another. Whether I am right in what I say is up to others to decide. Five years from now, I may want to toss out half of what is written here, for I, too, know that truth, like memory, is a slippery, elusive abstraction, subject to revision. For now, however, as I finish the first draft of these essays, I feel as though I have come home, home to myself, and it’s a good place to be.

Tonight, as “I roll up the crumpled skin of the day” to borrow from Virginia Woolf, as Iprepare to leave the cabin at Wiggin’s Fork, I realize — with the greatest degree of gratitude and humility – that I owe not just this book but this newly found inner peace all to the grace of bear.

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The winner for our March 2009 Flash Fiction Contest was Katherine E. Standefer for her story, “Stealthwalkers”. Read this great story below.

Although we were not technically awarding any other places, we extend a hearty hand to the runner up entry, “Ice” by Jo Deurbrouck. Thank you all for submitting. There were almost 90 entries of fine quality, and they were as engaging as they were diverse. Keep up the good work, writers!

Stealthwalkers

by Katherine E. Standefer

We once broke down just outside Rock Springs with a puff of smoke and a shudder. It was hot out. You sat in the sage chewing dry grass ends and I picked at a John Prine song on my father’s smoke-stringed guitar. I am an old woman, you sang. You rubbed your hand over my wooden belly and I knew just what you meant.

Later, after the tow truck came, you dug up twelve crumpled bills and we filled our stomachs with Chinese food and MSG. The buffet was full of oil men and out of state boy scouts. The truckers wobbled in with their too-tight showy jeans and you whispered Just Socks until I had to spit out a mouthful of chicken, laughing. I kissed you hard and we giggled into each others’ mouths.

There was a railroad running out on the edge of town and we walked there with mud heavy on our shoes. In the sky low clouds turned orange and broke for the Colorado border. Look, you said, this is called stealthwalking. This is the quietest way to go. You told me to stand on the middle ground, to walk the wood where it was flat, to not let go of your hand. Then you edged your toes up onto the rail and started stepping. The hills along the track were burnt and purple in shadow and we walked for a long time without saying anything at all, little pieces of mud starting to drop off your soles.

In Gypsum you told me you were leaving. It was the assignment you’d been asking for, you said, and I lay sweaty in bed pounding my fists against your chest. You want a story, I said, here’s your story, and bit your arm hard. You just lay still, looking at the sky, and I think you were already gone. We were both covered in salt that night, stunned by the brightness of the moon through the window. You licked the light from my cheeks. You left a row of purple asters on the hood of my car the day you went.

Let me forget all the shitty TVs in Denver bars I flipped through looking for fuzzy images of men in the desert, men with their notepads tucked up under their shirts. Let me forget resting my forehead on cool porcelain toilets off the Interstate after radio reports of Helicopter Down. What I want to believe is you’re just gone a few more days, just following the Pope across Europe like paparazzi. What I want to believe is you’re just broken down in Rock Springs, and you’ll be home soon.

This becomes my prayer: your right arm out wide, elegant palm holding sky like a tightrope walker. I want to know you’re stealthwalking. I want to know you’re hidden, folded away from battle, palms dry.