Mini Sledgehammer November 2015

Posted on November 16, 2015 by writer

Edward Gutiérrez took home the prizes this month. Congratulations!

The prompts were:
Character: Your high school sweetheart
Action: Removing a hang nail
Setting: Sonora, Mexico
Prop: A hot dog

My Little Fat Boy

The bell rings. It’s the end of second period. The teacher left the edward pic classroom door open for all the kids to walk out single file. The lunchroom isn’t far. I can see Andre through the window that faces out to the street. He’s speed walking toward the lunch line and all the other kids are two steps behind.

Andre loves to eat. just like his dad. I remember when I was his age, I would steal all the other kids’ lunch tickets on pig-in-a-blanket day. My nickname wasn’t El Gordo (the fat man) for nothing. Now Andre is walking the same halls that I did. Anyway I digress. Today I’m here to volunteer at my little fat boy’s school. I need to make up for the all chocolate bars we ate that we were supposed to sell for the school’s annual fundraiser. To be fair we only ate about half, we gave away a bunch to Andre’s cousins.

I’m making my way out of the school office and down the stairs over to the lunchroom. I look and Dre, short for Andre, is putting mustard and ketchup meticulously on his hot dog bun. As I walk closer I can see he has managed to put two weenies on his bun. How’d he get the second one? I think to myself and smile. That’s my boy! just like his papi. When he notices me Dre puts down his ketchup packets, steps off the cafeteria table, runs up and hugs me. What a feeling. “Go eat” I say, “Dre remember, 40 chews for each mouthful” … Yea right.

The joy in my heart quickly fades as I see the assistant principal, Mrs. Vasquez. I know her when she was just Vicky. We go way back, from middle school all the way to high school. We were sweethearts back then. “Come with me” she says. I gesture to Andre and walk up the stairs behind Mrs.Vasquez. We walk in her office. She grabs a hammer, gloves, and a plunger. “Your first task, unclog the boy’s bathroom.” “Thanks” I tell her as I reach for the hammer “no no” she says, “i’ll need this for later.” I think to my puzzled self, WTF? – for later? what’s that supposed to mean? She can’t still be pissed about prom night.

Ten minutes later i’m changing my socks in the maintenance closet. The boys bathroom was tougher than I thought and I’m a mess. I hear footsteps outside the door. Then I hear two knocks and the deadbolt locks. Suddenly I hear in Spanish, “Puto! Eres un Puto! Muerete!” (Whore! you’re a male whore! die!). Aw shit. Prom night, she’s still pissed.

I go for the door and it’s locked. No windows, no crawl spaces anywhere. I gotta open the door. No sense on banging on it, shoot, i’m in the school basement. I reach for the toolbox and think, if I can just pry the door hinges off with the…, damn that witch, no hammer! I look around and see a set of keys behind the furnace. It’s too hot. If I can just shut it off and reach for the keys. I just need the valve key. I look 10 feet up and see a gas valve key on a hangnail pinned to the wall. Shit, no hammer! That’s the last Mexican girl from Sonora I’ll ever cheat on.

***

Dedicated to the memory of my friend Bryan Tinti.

Filed under: Mini Sledgehammers, Uncategorized | Tagged: Edward Gutierrez, free, Mexico, Portland, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

Mini Sledgehammer October 2015

Posted on October 15, 2015 by writer

This month’s Mini Sledgehammer marked a slight changing of the guards. John and Daniel have been leading this fun monthly contest for over a year, and this was John’s last month. Thanks for all you’ve done for us, John! And thanks for continuing to lead us, Daniel!

Ashley Michael Karitis was our very deserving winner this month. Read on for her fantastic story. Congratulations, Ashley!

Prompts:

Character: Custodian

Action: Presidential Debate

Setting: Wedding

Phrase: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

***

The Abridged Memoirs of a Custodian

by Ashley Michael Karitis

Clyde was, in what might be considered, the loneliest of professions.

Each afternoon, he would arrive at the empty aisles of St. Jean’s Parish to tend to the multitude of custodial sins: cobwebs in the gothic arches, splatters on the stained glass (portraying the station of the cross), picking out lint in the oak and maple pews, and vacuuming the animal cracker crumbs left over from the little ones whose parents tried keeping them occupied with said simple carbohydrates.

Lonely these days may have seemed, but lonely, he was not. Clyde was privy to moments that were important enough to call on those far and wide—friends and family, and even those who would need to forgive each other in order to come together for such special gathering.

In his thirty-seven years as a custodian, Clyde had attended more weddings, funerals, christenings, and masses than all of the priests combined who had rotated in and out over the years.

Special, these moments and gatherings were, but Clyde was still not part of them. He was only an observer, sometimes unwelcome, on the fray, and always behind the scenes. Nobody really wanted to see a spotted-faced, balding man in coveralls on their wedding day. Yet, he was the unseen enabler, for one flick of a switch and the christening of Patrick Joseph or The March of the Brides would come to a crashing halt.

Clyde could recount every type of wedding you could possibly have under the roof of God’s House: painfully planned nuptials to ensure family legacies; unions to provide for an unexpected baby bump; marriages that had taken place during custodial hours, out of sight of forbidding parents. He had seen groom and bride spat with each other as though they were in a presidential debate, sometimes ending with a slap in the face and a “Why didn’t you tell me!?” Never assuming, Clyde dutifully clean up the flower petals, rice, and extra paper programs.

Usually, the tense, happy, or excited couples would return to the parish with a new babe to be doused with holy water, draped in a stale lacey gown. Clyde would set up the bath and rearrange the potted seasonal flowers—just so the mothers would feel extra special—and afterward he would mop up the excess drops of bath water that speckled the altar.

Through all these celebrations, Clyde never feared, avoided, or felt sad about the funerals that came and went every week. How could a funeral be any less important than a wedding or christening? How could he feel sad for the dead, and for those that came to celebrate and memorialize their person’s life?

For Clyde, being a custodian had been his own ritual, just as these events in St. Jean’s had been rituals. It was a ritual of living vicariously, and letting the joys and sorrows of others brim over into his world.

***

Ashley was raised in Bend, OR. She is a documentary filmmaker based in Portland, OR that dabbles in travel writing. She is currently working on her first compilation of short stories.

Filed under: Mini Sledgehammers, Uncategorized | Tagged: Ashley Michael Karitis, Custodian, free, Portland, Presidential debate, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

“My Trip to Canada” by Eva Sylwester

Posted on July 29, 2015 by writer

My Trip to Canada

Eva Sylwester

The first time in my life a balcony rail really stood out to me was when I went to Vancouver, Canada. Coming over the border from the United States, it’s jarring that the font on the road sign changes. More importantly, the speed limits are in kilometers rather than miles. Otherwise, you’re just on a highway for a while. When you get to the exit for Knight Street, though, you get your first view of a densely inhabited area. They have Chevron gas stations, but the font on the logo looks different, and the numbers on the signs don’t make any sense because they’re in liters rather than gallons. The row houses have these weird balconies where the bars bow outward toward the bottom. On the balconies I took for granted back home, I guess the bars were straight.

On South Park, the Canadians look obviously different from us, like their heads are split in half somehow. Of course, in real life, that’s not the case. Outwardly so many things are the same that the minor differences, like the traffic lights that flash rather than hold a solid green, stand out. At the Blaine, Washington, border crossing, there’s a monument claiming that the two countries are “Children of a Common Mother.” I had to think about that to get the reference, but wow, that’s actually true.

Who would want to be the sibling of the United States of America? We are in the middle of practically every big drama in the world. We are responsible for Walmart, the archetypal discount department store, and worse.

A lot of sibling pairs split like that – the loud one and the quiet one, the smart one and the athletic one, the good one and the bad one, and so on. Romantic couples or friends can do it too. I was surprised, though, to see that the military surplus store in downtown Vancouver was full of Fire Department New York and New York Police Department shirts, like the quiet one has not enough sense of its own identity apart from the loud one.

If the loud one were not around, would the quiet one, liberated from its role in the relationship, soon be singing karaoke?

I went to Canada so I could use my passport before it expired. I went to Canada to prove to myself I could do it. I went to Canada to prove to you, in my head at least, that I could do it. And I did, but that all seemed embarrassingly self-centered once I got there and discovered whoa, this may be another child of the same mother, but it’s its own distinct entity.

My cell phone didn’t work except for Wi-Fi. My Visa card worked, but I didn’t have coins for arcade games. I couldn’t understand the TV weather report because it wasn’t in Fahrenheit. I couldn’t make a phone call, supply myself a coin to play an arcade game, or understand the TV weather report. Being so thwarted in basic things, it was like being a child.

Like a child, I was learning, observing, taking everything in.

I started to see why I was the ex. The photos of you on Facebook singing karaoke with your new group of friends are so foreign to me. Who is this person, separate from me? You look so different, but it’s like I don’t even remember what you actually looked like. You were more a presence, more an idea that we were a unit.

I wish I could have met you like I met Canada, when I left the music off and the windows down after the border crossing to find out if anything sounded or smelled different. When I was walking around in a neighborhood that could have been Portland, I got out of myself enough to notice that the squirrels were black.

Filed under: 2015 Submissions | Tagged: 36 hours, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

Mini Sledgehammer April 2015

Posted on April 20, 2015 by writer

Julia Himmelstein is back with another amazing story!

***

Character: The cowgirl
Action: Watching British television
Setting: the factory
Prop: A milk jug

***

Untitled

by Julia Himmelstein

It had been a while since the cowgirl had been around. He had been watching for her, shyly, spending lapses of evenings by the kitchen sink, washing the same four dishes, while peering out the window. It wasn’t really her looks that got to him, just the fact that she was so incredibly out of place. The first time, he had wondered if this was a mistaken Halloween costume, a drunken party guest in the wrong part of town. Their eyes had met as he sat on his front stoop, tongue-tied. The fringes on her leather vest rustled in the light breeze, and she made a funny clicking noise with her boots, as though commanding an invisible horse. Long after she was gone, he thought he could hear the click-clack of her boots on the pavement.

They saw each other every few nights after that, she always wearing gingham and leather, and he always staring, dumbfounded. “Just say something to her, man,” he muttered to himself, channeling one of his high school buddies that surely would have had the balls to talk to her, and probably say something incredibly rude. But those friends were long gone, off to work in the factories that made pointless gadgets for white folks. It was just him now, him and his four dishes and the cat Theo. He couldn’t remember the last time he had talked to a human, let alone see one in real life. He used to have video chats with his sister, but that was before the internet cut out. Now when he wanted to see people he popped in one of the British Television discs that he had found in a closet when he first moved in.

He found himself dreaming about her at night. In his dreams, she was close enough that he could see her freckles, and smell her breath. It smelled funny, like something old. Sometimes she would even smile.

He hadn’t always been such a loner. He too, had tried the factory life, first for a manufacturer of milk jugs and then for a tech company. He grew listless and bored, and had enough near misses with large machinery that he was let go. With a sigh, he moved to the empty country, finding an abandoned trailer on a field to call home.

The cowgirl usually walked past around dusk. There was something about the way she looked, like a hungry child, that made him feel protective and tentative at the same time. She always went the same direction, and always looked at him, brief and hard, before leaving.

He started to worry when he hadn’t seen her in a week. He wondered if she had met someone that actually spoke to her. Maybe she even found a horse. Did she have a home, or a family? What did her voice sound like?

He awoke late one night to hear the click-clack of her boots. As if in a dream, he walked through the dark trailer and stepped outside into the moonlight, knowing she would be there. She stared at him with her usual look. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

***

Julia Himmelstein lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches, smiles, listens, and wonders. She delights in hugs from friends, children’s smiles, and fresh baked cookies (or any food, really).

Filed under: Mini Sledgehammers | Tagged: Blackbird Wine, fiction, free, Julia Himmelstein, Mini Sledgehammer, Portland, prizes, writing contest | Leave a comment »

Mini Sledgehammer February 2015

Posted on February 17, 2015 by writer

Another great turnout! Thanks for the support, 2015 writers!

***

Character: The least respected person
Action: Acting
Setting: The farm
Prop: Chandelier

***

The Old Chandelier

by Alyssa Shelton

I

Some of his first memories were just twinklings; iridescent, tiny movements of light dancing off of and with one another to some music that couldn’t actually be heard.

He often wondered if his mother had left the bassinet in the foyer with the fore thinking that he would be entertained by the subtle moving shadows cast on the wall by the chandelier in the entryway of their rundown old house.

More likely, however, was that she simply set him down as quickly as she could after returning home from whatever monotonous chore or errand she’d just stumbled through.

He also wondered if those bits of light had played any role in his growing desire to become the world’s greatest actor.

He could see it all so clearly: the common farm boy turned movie star! How he would wow and dazzle, shock and surprise on the golden screen. Finally, the other boys would envy him and wish they had been kinder all those years in school. “Look at him now!” they would say as he moved weightlessly across the stages of Hollywood and Broadway. The girls would regret mocking him and sending him those humiliating fake love letters, not that he had wanted them anyway…

“Eugene! Get your sorry ass downstairs and get to herding, sonofa…”

He was ripped from yet another daydream, forced back to the pathetic reality of life on a sheep farm. While he craved glamour, production, and scripts he was drowning in wool, shit, and dust.

He made his way toward the dilapidated staircase, running his hands along the cracked and fading wallpaper with fat baby angels sitting atop yellowed clouds. His mother called them cherubs, and his father asked her why the hell she couldn’t just call them what they were: fat baby angels.

As he began to descend down the steps, he paused midway to admire the one remnant of a once impressive and sprawling plantation; his great grandfather’s chandelier. Eugene was always taken by its out of place elegance, and his mind began to wander again as it was wont to do…

“Why don’t you just take your drunk ass out of this here house and let us be!”

Slap!

The memories always ended with that terrible sound that they’d all grown so accustomed to.

“Damnit Eugene, quit starin’ at that damned light and get outside!” He quickly ran down the stairs and out to the pasture.

II

Once his work was done, he retreated to the old barn. Here he could be himself: the famed Gene! The most highly sought after actor in the whole country. And from such humble beginnings!

Not long now and his neighbor and friend, Johnny, would join him in the barn. Together they would continue writing and rehearsing their next play, The Farmer’s Wife, the coming-of-age tale of a misunderstood gal on her way to Hollywood. They could both identify.

Johnny came and they wrote, laughed, argued and fucked. They just got to thinking it might be time to call it a night when the barn door slammed open and Eugene’s father burst inside, looking horrified but not surprised.

The next sequence of events would remain a blur to all who tried to recall it. Johnny took off out the back of the barn naked.

Boom. Boom. Two shotgun shots that hit nothing but the balmy summer air. In the meantime, Eugene’s father had caught him by the back of the neck and began to drag him toward the house.

Nearly at the doorstep, Eugene broke free by throwing a wild punch in his father’s face. He made it just into the foyer as another boom! canceled out all other sounds.

As he crumpled to the floor amidst his mother’s and sister’s screams, his mind wandered back to those early twinkling memories. As the blood left his body and his breathing slowed, he once again watched the lights dance along the ceiling and the walls.

***

Alyssa Shelton co-owns a branding and web design agency called Roger That in Portland, OR. When she’s not copywriting for her clients you can find her attempting recipes that never turn out quite right.

Filed under: Mini Sledgehammers | Tagged: Alyssa Shelton, Blackbird Wine, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

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