“Untitled” by Peter D’Auria

Posted on August 21, 2013 by writer

Prompts:
An animal trainer
Cornfields
Doughnuts
“Don’t eat that!”
Spending $4
Owls

***

Untitled

By Peter D’Auria

When we asked him what he wanted for his funeral service, my uncle Frank made only one request. We had clustered at the side of his hospital bed in a little knot, my mother, father, and I, and my mother explained how the doctor had said in his delicate doctor-way that it was maybe time to start thinking about the funeral arrangements.

“All I want at the service,” my uncle said, scratching his patchy-bald head, “is for Sean to say a few words.”

“Are you serious?” said my mother.

“Oh no,” said my father. “No no no.”

Uncle Frank shrugged in his hospital gown. “Look. You can stick me in whatever cemetery you want. Burn me, bury me, both, I don’t care. Just let Sean give a little speech.”

“Even if we wanted to do it,” said my mother, “which, for the record, we don’t, there’s absolutely no way they’d allow that.”

“Sorry,” said my uncle. “That’s my dying wish.”

On the drive back to our house, I asked my parents, “Who is Sean?”

Sean, my parents explained, was Uncle Frank’s African Grey parrot, whom he had in his possession when he returned from his yearlong trip to Japan twenty-five years ago. “Parrots live a long time,” said my mother.

“Why does he want a parrot to speak at his funeral?” I asked.

“Beats the heck outta me,” said my father.

“Frank’s always been a little…off,” said my mother.

Ashburn was a small town of about 5,000 people, wrapped on all sides by cornfields and soybeans; it was the kind of town where you grow up knowing everyone in your graduating class, in many cases knowing them a little bit more than you would like. I’d had the same best friends since elementary school, the same crushes since middle school, and the same

Uncle Frank lived across the state, outside of Norwood, but they had transferred him up north because of the oncology department at the Cleveland Clinic.

Except for a yearlong period during which he had gone AWOL in Japan, returning 20 pounds lighter without notice, Uncle Frank had worked with animals his whole life: at a pet store, as a trainer (briefly) at Cirque du Soleil, at the Audubon Society tending wounded birds. My uncle had, over the course of his lifetime, owned (“kept” might be a better word) six hundred and three animals. The first of these had been Harrison, the turtle, whom my uncle had rescued when he saw the reptile about to cross a busy road, an endeavor during which it would have been surely smashed into shards.

“I was in middle school when he brought Harrison home,” my mother told me. “I remember he taught it to shake hands.”

“No way,” I’d said.

“I kid you not,” my mother said.

As Uncle Frank’s only living family, we inherited everything when he died a few days later. He had passed away in his sleep, the nurse told us, very peacefully. The next day my parents drove the pickup down to Norwood and came back with the bed filled with his possessions. Sean rode in the backseat, his square cage covered by a cloth. “I’m hopeful,” my mother said to me, “that the funeral won’t be a disaster after all. Sean didn’t say anything the whole trip.”

I was excited to meet Sean, and to hear what he could say. In his own way, he was sort of regal, with an upright posture and a red tail like a cape. But when I introduced myself, he just bobbed his head and remained silent.

“Can you say anything?” I asked him. “Do you speak English?” Sean just scratched his head with a scaly foot and blinked his little yellow eyes.

“I bet he doesn’t even know how to say anything,” my father said, watching my attempts, “and Frank is just making some joke.”

The funeral was held in Ashburn, my parents reasoning that even if it was held in Norwood, nobody would show up anyway. Including the priest and us, there were only seven people at the funeral (eight if you counted Sean, who spent most of the service in a covered cage by the doughnuts and cookies). We had opted for a modest open casket service. Aladdin’s Bakery, on Buttercup road, had provided refreshments.

It all went smoothly. The priest, who seemed bored, gave a little speech about grief and comfort. My mother went up to the podium and said that Frank had been a man of great kindness and generosity, especially to animals. When she had finished talking, she paused for a moment and I wondered if she was going to adjourn the service then and there and ignore Frank’s wishes. But she leaned down to the microphone again.

“As per Frank’s last request,” she said, nodding to me, “there is someone else who is going to say a few words.”

I brought the covered cage up the aisle, through a wave of murmuring and stifled laughter, and set it on the podium. My mother, a strange look on her face, pulled the cloth off and opened the door.

The audience watched in silence as Sean hopped to the doorway of his cage, looked around, and fluttered onto the podium. I wondered briefly if he was going to fly away. But instead he shuffled up to the microphone. My mother reached over and bent the adjustable microphone neck down towards his beak.

We watched. The audience watched. The whole room was silent.

Sean bobbed his head up and down, and then—

“Rain all this week,” he said. “Rain, rain, rain.”

Prior to his illness, we had heard from Uncle Frank maybe twice a year, through short, businesslike phone calls, and we saw him practically never. I do remember one occasion, though, many many years ago, when we passed through Norwood returning from a road trip and spent the night at his house. I guess that he must have had Sean at that time but I don’t remember seeing him. Frank was working at that point for the Audubon Society and had three injured great horned owls living in his shed. I remembered that my parents, exhausted from driving, had fallen asleep immediately, but I was wide-awake after doing nothing but stare at the passing cornfields all day. Frank had taken me outside to see the owls, which were perched like little statues in the shed, and he had taught me how to mimic their calls. We spent half an hour calling them up at the stars until my father had yelled for us to shut up.

On the way back from the funeral, while Sean, his cage covered again, sat next to me in the backseat, my father said, “You know, I think that was a great success.”

“Frank shouldn’t have let Sean watch the weather report,” said my mother.

“I’m just glad he didn’t teach him how to swear,” said my father.
Sean remained silent for another week (during which, contrary to his prediction, no rain fell) until one morning when he started to speak Japanese. We were sitting down to breakfast when Sean rattled off a long stream of unintelligible syllables.

“Parrot’s broke,” my father said, pointing a thumb towards Sean’s cage.

Sean said it again.

“Quiet, Sean,” my mother said.

“Wait, say it again,” I said.

Sean bobbed his head and repeated himself.

“I think that’s Japanese,” I said.

We went still, spoons of oatmeal halfway to our mouths. Sean rattled off the syllables.

“I’ll be damned,” said my father. “That must be the weather for Japan.”

Sean’s bilingualism was excellent news because it gave me an excuse to invite Lauren Yukimura, who had moved from Japan in the fifth grade and who was hands-down the most beautiful girl in school, over to my house to translate. I intercepted her at lunch the next day, as she was on her way to sit with her friends, all of whom were nearly as beautiful as she was.

“Hey, hey, Lauren,” I said.

Lauren turned and got a strange expression on her face, not unlike the one my mother had had when she uncovered Sean’s cage at the funeral. “Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a favor?” I said.

“What kind of favor?”

“Can you translate something from Japanese for me?”

Lauren frowned. “Well. Okay.” She looked down at her brown paper lunch bag. “I guess. Do you have it with you?”

“Uh, no. It’s…” I explained the situation.

There was a long pause while she stared at me.

“Are you serious?” she said.

“I am. Really.”

“You’re not gonna do something creepy when I get to your house.”

“No! God. I just wanna know what it’s saying.”

She gave me that look again. “All right. Can we do a week from today?”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Perfect.”

“I’m only doing this cause I’ve never seen a parrot before,” she said.

That night I came downstairs for a midnight snack to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table. Sean was there too, outside of his cage, shuffling on the tablecloth and pecking at crumbs.

“Mom?” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “Just spending some quality time with Sean here.”

I pulled a cookie from the jar and poured a glass of milk. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all,” said my mother. “Sean is not really a great conversationalist.” Sean bobbed his head and bit a chunk out of my cookie.

“Hey, don’t eat that!” I said. “You’ll give me bird flu or something.”

Sean cocked his head at me and repeated his Japanese phrase.

“Did Uncle Frank speak Japanese?” I asked.

My mother shrugged. “I don’t know. We were never close.”

“How come he went to Japan for a year and didn’t talk to anyone?”

My mother shrugged again. “That’s Frank for you. Any more of those cookies?”

The next morning the cage door was open and I panicked for a moment before I saw that Sean was sitting on my father’s shoulder.

“There’s a bird on your shoulder,” I told him.

“Yep,” my father said. “I think he likes it.”

“Rain all this week,” said Sean.

“Have you gotten anything else out of him?” I asked.

“Just the weather forecast,” said my father. “And his little haiku.”

I went to the fridge to get the milk. When I got back my father was feeding him little bits of toast from the palm of his hand. “Toast,” my father said loudly. “Sean, toast.”

“Rain, rain, rain,” said Sean.

We started the laborious process of going through Frank’s things. At first it seemed to offer clues to the mysteries of Frank’s life. But eventually it became clear that the clues pointed to one thing: Frank’s life had been as mundane as everybody else’s. He had owned a surprising amount of faded furniture and boring clothing and a few framed pictures of landscapes. I kept expecting a samurai sword, or an ancient Japanese scroll, but they never appeared.

“There’s gotta be something missing,” I said.

“This is it,” my father said. “Sorry.”

“We’ll figure it out when Lauren comes over,” I said.

We discovered that Sean liked most human foods, except for peanut butter, which caused him to shake his head back and forth and clack his beak together. We discovered as well that he could not really fly, but only flutter from one perch to the next. The day before Lauren’s scheduled visit, I got home from school to find my Sean sitting on the back of a chair, bobbing his head, and my father, very excited about something, sitting across from him.

“Stephen,” he called when I came in, “check this out.”

“What?” I said. “What is it?” I imagined Sean spilling the beans on the mysteries of Frank’s life, revealing the location of some hidden Japanese treasure.

“Sean,” said my father, and held up a piece of bread. “Sean, what is this?”

“Rain, rain, rain,” said Sean.

“Sean,” said my father, “what is this?”

Sean rattled off his Japanese phrase.

“No,” said my father. “What is this, Sean?”

Sean shook his head back and forth. “Toast,” he said.

Lauren’s beauty seemed even more extreme in our house, normally messy anyway but especially so that day due to Frank’s possessions scattered throughout the living room. Even my father seemed affected by her radiance. “Nice to meet you,” he said stiffly when I introduced them, and he shook Lauren’s hand.

We took Sean out of his cage and carried him to the kitchen table and we all sat down.

“He’s really pretty,” said Lauren. She held out her index finger and Sean nibbled it. She laughed. Although her beauty was as radiant as ever Lauren seemed different outside of school, less distant. I was suddenly euphoric. There was an electric excitement in the air. We were getting to the bottom of the mystery.

“You just have to get him talking,” my mother said. “Come on, Sean. What have you got to say?”

“Toast,” said Sean. “Rain all week.”

Lauren laughed. “Sean, do you speak Japanese?”

“Rain, rain, rain,” said Sean.

“No, come on, Sean,” I said. “You do speak Japanese.”

“Toast,” said Sean. “Rain. Toast.”

“You can do it, Sean!” said Lauren.

“Rain,” said Sean, and then he finally said it.

We all looked at Lauren.

She stared at Sean for a moment, and then looked up with a sad sort of smile.

“He can count to ten,” she said.

Two nights before he died, Sean revealed that he knew how to say one other thing. It was my father’s fiftieth birthday, about a week after Lauren’s visit, and we were having a party. Sean was wandering up and down the table, pecking at cake crumbs, and my parents were fairly drunk.

“Well, Sean,” said my mother, draining the last of her wine, “do you have a speech to give on this momentous occasion?”

Sean fluttered up and perched on the rim of my mother’s wineglass. He shook his head and then said, “Sorry.”

We stared at him.

“Sorry far away,” he said.

“Sean,” my father said slowly. “Are you giving a speech?”

“Sorry so far away,” said Sean.

“Is that…” I said.

“That must be what Frank taught him to say!” said my mother.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Or part of it,” my mother said. “Maybe he forgot the rest.”

“He must have just messed it up at the funeral!” I said. “Maybe we asked the wrong question, or said the wrong thing.”

“Frank should’ve just written a letter,” my father said. “I mean. Don’t get me wrong, Sean. You’re great. But what kind of speech was that?”

“Sorry,” said Sean.

Sean died the morning after the next. He was an old parrot, the vet reminded us, and we didn’t even know exactly how old. My mother wrapped him in newspaper and tried to put it in a shoebox, but he was too big, so I went to Aladdin’s Bakery and bought half a dozen doughnuts for four dollars and asked them for a big box.

I invited Lauren to the funeral and to my surprise she showed up, arriving in a stunning black dress. She gave me a long hug, after which I had to take a number of deep breaths.

We all congregated at the graveside and watched as my father placed the box into the little hole he had dug.

“You were,” said my father, “by far the best parrot I ever met.”

“We’ll miss you, Sean,” my mother said.

“You were a good bird,” Lauren said.

“Rest in peace,” I said.

We took turns piling dirt into the little grave. When we finished we stood there for a few moments, eating doughnuts, looking at the little pile of earth. It started to rain softly.

Filed under: 2013 Submissions, Individual, Portland | Tagged: Peter D'Auria, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

“Crows at the Farm” by Vincent Rupp

Posted on August 21, 2013 by writer

Prompts:
An animal trainer
Cornfields
Doughnuts
“Don’t eat that!”
Spending $4
Owls

***

Crows at the Farm

By Vincent Rupp

“You taking the truck out?”

“Yeah, saw a couple crows yesterday. Gonna make sure there isn’t a roost in the woods.”

Billy gasped and looked at Rose. Quietly, she whispered “The Crow Man!”

Margaret turned the dough in the pot and looked briefly over her shoulder to ask “Who’s the Crow Man?”

Rose spoke quickly, with excitement. “He’s made of crows and can disappear and then come back anywhere.”

“He’s not MADE of them.” Billy, exasperated, corrected. “He’s a man who BECAME a crow and he flies with them and keeps them safe.”

Margaret understood: The long bus ride, the endless speculation, a story embellished across decades of children. George was lacing his boots, shaking his head. She set the rings on the towels, blotting the extra oil. “Hush, children, the doughnuts will be ready in a few minutes.”

“Why didn’t we just buy them at the store? A dozen was only four dollars.”

“We don’t have money to waste on something your mother can make herself.”

Margaret agreed, but she’d have been less harsh. The other children had newer clothes and their parents’ truck tires weren’t bald.

She listened to the engine noise dwindle while she put on the glaze and let it set. Hours to make the treats, and they’d be gone in minutes. It reminded her of their new existence here; so much work, and it could be gone so quickly.

“Momma is that a crow?” Rose pointed out the window at the yard. Margaret wiped her hands and came to look. A jet-black bird poked its beak around in their waste heap with quick motions.

“Yes it is, sweetie.”

The crow looked up, unmoving. Billy pointed “Look, there’s two more.” Margaret saw them, further from the house, close to the field. The sweet sprouts of corn had just appeared the previous morning. The bright green dots in the rows had brought her immense relief, but now a low dread crept back in.

There was a rush of feathers and flapping against the glass; they all drew back, startled. A large crow had landed on the windowsill, black toes and black claws gripping the ledge. It took a few steps and cocked its head.

Billy peered closely at the crow’s black eye. “Is it looking at us?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s just a bird.”

The crow took another step and jammed its beak at a spider web, coming away with a large brown spider.

“Ewww crow don’t eat that!”

“Look there’s even more now!”

Another three birds landed on the grass, looking around in the dirt.

“We’ll tell your father later. For now, go scare them off.”

They ran for the door, four arms flailing. He charged the birds, cawing and flapping his arms. Rose shrieked and laughed as the crows scattered to the wind.

——

“Damn birds are everywhere. Woods are crawling with them for miles.” He scrubbed his hands in the sink. “Another section of fence came down too. Never should have hired that kid.”

Margaret rubbed his shoulders. They knew the first years would be difficult, but they’d work hard. They’d pay down the debt, find good help, and buy more land.

“We’ll make it work. We’re doing better than most new folks.” He nodded; weather, illness, pests: stories of ruin were everywhere. He rinsed the dirt out of the sink.

“Mommy the crows are back.”

“What?” George rushed angrily to the window. Two crows had landed on the apple tree; its branches were still bare from winter. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d seen them?”

“George, it’s okay. The owls are keeping them out of the fields.” The old-timers swore by real owls, expertly stuffed, mounted on five-foot stakes, and repositioned every morning. These owls eat crows, they said. George had fumed at the cost, but protecting the fields wasn’t optional.

He wouldn’t wait and hope. He grabbed his gun from above the door, a Winchester 1873 carbine, handed down from his father before the infection took him. “George, stop!” She pulled on his arm, but he jerked it away.

“They’re gonna get bolder if we don’t scare them off.” The seeds had gone in late; there wasn’t enough growing season left to replant.

The crows didn’t react when George banged the door open and stormed down the steps. When he fired a shot into the air, they stopped and looked at him, sideways, one black eye each.

He pulled the action and leveled the gun. Both birds stepped off their branches and took to the air. He lined up carefully, and fired at the closer bird. The crow jerked hard, but didn’t drop. He’d hit its wing, near the body.

For minutes, it tried to fly. A species never known for graceful soaring, this specimen beat its mangled wing against the air, climbing at first but then losing altitude as it lost blood. Its light lifeless body struck the ground nearly soundlessly.

Crows nearby peered at the corpse, saw it motionless, began to caw and croak. Others picked up the call, flew to investigate, and within minutes the crow funeral was underway.

Billy saw the flocks first. They came quickly from the woods past the horizon, and then from all directions. There were scores of flocks, hundreds of birds to a flock, a million ink-black feathers moving and so many voices cawing incessantly. The sound filled the fields as the shadows raced over them.

Rose held Margaret’s leg tightly. “Mommy, are they mad?” She pressed her head into Margaret’s dress.

Margaret held Rose’s head with an almost steady hand. “I don’t know, sweetie.”

An hour later, the crows still called from the distance, but the family had gone back inside. Out of sight of the house, a solitary figure approached the fallen bird. His ragged black clothes fluttered behind him, his black hair shook in the breeze. The ten thousand mourners quieted as one. He kneeled near the bird, took it gently in his hands, and spoke very softly, under his breath.

He rose slowly, his gaze fixed on the distance, in the direction the crow had come.

——

George woke early, even before the pre-dawn light. He’d not had enough food or enough sleep, but it’d be better in a few hundred days, if he put in his time. He went first out back to feed the chickens, then into the barn to tend to the horses and milk the cows.

Sometimes he woke up Maggie to help, but he liked to watch her sleep; she’d gather the eggs and have biscuits ready before he went back inside anyway.

It was barely light when he left the barn. That’s when he saw them, filling the fields, standing a dozen per yard along the length of every row of barely-sprouted corn. He froze, stuck between rage and terror, but slowly he calmed; the corn shoots were still there, still green, as far as he could see in the indigo light.

The crows all shook their wings. Dozens alit into the air, flapping furiously before diving onto the owls, thrusting beaks through the feathers and tearing off bits of carefully preserved skin.

If he’d had his gun, maybe he’d have tried to shoot them. Instead, he watched, helpless and awed, as a large portion of his inheritance was destroyed by the blades of tiny mouths. In under a minute, as a mass, the thousand crows took to the air and dispersed in a hundred directions.

George went to the nearest owl; he took it in his hands and knew the loss was total. Looking up, choked with powerless rage, he saw a black figure far on the horizon. He shouted and ran, heedless of damage to the crop he was so desperate to protect. He ran hard for minutes, stumbling across the soft ground. But the figure turned and walked away and disappeared in the darkness.

Margaret noticed the owls and found George loading the truck. He’d siphoned five gallons from the tank and was hefting the canister into the bed. He didn’t wait for her to ask. “He did this. I saw him.”

“They didn’t touch the corn. Just leave it alone.”

He shook his head adamantly and got in, slamming the door. “We gotta protect what’s ours, Maggie. No matter what.” He wrenched the truck into gear and sped off, leaving her helplessly watching his trail of dust.

When the road ended, he drove into the trees until the brush was too thick. He pushed the canister off the bed and rolled it deeper into the trees. All around him, every bare branch was covered with dense black feathers and inquisitive little eyes.

“Come out!” he yelled. He uncapped the canister and pushed it over. Gasoline spilled out with a slow glug-glug. He took out the matches. Louder, he shouted “You better come out!” The trees fluttered darkly, casting deep shadows on a figure dressed in black tatters a hundred yards away.

“You leave my fields alone!” Crows leapt from the trees and took to the air, circling overhead and through the branches behind him. They began cawing at once, tens of thousands of overlapping threats.

He shook the matches. “You think I can’t kill them all?” The noise drowned out his words, and he knew he couldn’t. He put the matches away and pulled his rifle from the truck. He braced it against his shoulder and pointed at the still figure in the wood’s depths. The birds changed course; they flew densely between the men.

“Damnit!” He threw the gun into the truck. Whether he tried to kill the birds, their habitat, or their master, he would lose. “What do you want?!” he screamed above the shrieking of the crows. At his words, they fell silent, stopped their insistent flapping, sat gently down, and all was still.

George looked around, surprised. “That’s it? That’s all you want?” A single caw pierced the silence and hung in the air. “And you’ll leave my fields alone?” From a different direction, another caw sounded.

The early sun glinted on a million shining black feathers as George loaded the half-full canister back into the truck.

——

It’s a cold winter morning, with frost on the panes. A black bird brings a stick to a garbage can, pries the metal top open, and nudges the lid onto the ground. The clatter attracts a girl to the window. Excitedly, she says “Mommy a crow opened our trash!”

The mother knows the land’s generations; she doesn’t look over, just simply says “Better leave it alone, sweetie.”

Filed under: 2013 Submissions, Individual, Portland | Tagged: prizes, Sledgehammer, Vincent Rupp, writing contest | Leave a comment »

“Processing” by Eva Sylwester

Posted on August 21, 2013 by writer

Prompts:
An animal trainer
Cornfields
Doughnuts
“Don’t eat that!”
Spending $4
Owls

***

Processing

By Eva Sylwester

April was nervous about her blind date. But weren’t blind dates all small talk anyway? Being brand new in the big city, she hadn’t had much but small talk for a while, so at least she was up to speed on that. The office busybody do-gooder, however, had managed to find out after a lot of focused effort that April was single and a lesbian, and had immediately concluded from there, “You should date my friend’s daughter. She is a real hoot. Real colorful, eccentric young lady — very Portland. It would be like an opposites attract thing. She actually seems to like the quiet types best.”

April was so shocked by the request that she went silent and blushed really obviously. “So you’ll think about it?” the busybody said.

“Sure, I’ll think about it,” she said. She thought she had managed to look embarrassed enough by the request for the busybody to shut up about it permanently, but the next day, the busybody brought it up again.

“Have you thought any more about dating my friend’s daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should do it. She’s been on a lot of first dates, so she’d be fine with one more.”

Other people in the office were starting to gather around to eavesdrop, so April said, “Okay, okay, fine,” to quickly end the conversation.

Anyway, here they were in a coffee shop. The date, Corinne, was easy to find. As an icebreaker, Corinne had a huge bird, probably an owl, on her shoulder. That made it easier for April, as it was normal human curiosity, not a weird awkward date question, to ask about the bird.

“So, what’s the bird about?” April said.

“I’m an animal trainer specializing in owls,” Corinne said.

“Okay. You’re allowed to bring her in the restaurant?”

“We’re regulars here.”

They were up to order. April had been so distracted with the bird that she hadn’t even been looking at the menu. “What’s good here?” she asked.

“I personally like the soy cappuccino for the coffee, and you can’t pass up the doughnuts. But we’re going Dutch, so you can get whatever you want.”

April realized she did not want to spend $4 on coffee, so that narrowed her options. She finally ordered a plain coffee and a plain doughnut, $4 total.

“So you’re new in town, I heard,” Corinne said.

“Right.”

“Where from?”

“Placid Valley.”

“I know somebody who used to live there,” Corinne said. “He said it was a place where injured people go to heal.”

“Really? I’d never heard that before.”

“Were you from there?”

“Yeah, I lived there my whole life.”

“Maybe it’s different for people who are from there. He just lived there for a while after college, and he said he heard it from someone else who lived there.”

“What was he healing from?”

“I know he and I talked about it a long time ago, but it was so long ago that a lot of things have happened since then — like I’ve processed it, you know?”

April noticed the owl shaking her head a bit, maybe like a cough or a hiccup. Then the owl fluffed her feathers. Corinne extended her arm onto the table, and the owl waddled down. April was too busy noticing the clacking of the owl’s claws on the tabletop to notice the owl eating off her plate until Corinne called out, “Don’t eat that!”

The owl shook her head as though willfully disobeying Corinne. “Sorry, she’s new,” Corinne told April.

“Birds eat doughnuts?”

“The owls mainly eat mice at their designated feeding times, but, when they’re socializing with me, they eat what I eat,” she said. “Maybe they’re not really supposed to eat doughnuts, but I guess we’re not really supposed to eat doughnuts, either.”

“They come down on the table and eat with you at every meal?”

“Oh, yeah.” Turning to the bird, Corinne said, “Here, sweetie, you can have some of my doughnut.”

Dating was supposed to be about planning a future with someone. Though it was early to be thinking about that, could April really see having a bird eat off her plate at every meal for the rest of her life? She didn’t know much about birds, but she had heard they could live a long time. “So what are you training them for, then? I mean, when I hear animal trainer, I think like, obedience school, that kind of thing — like keeping the animals off the table.”

“I’m more interested in the cognitive capabilities of owls. If I were interested in having them do physical tricks, then, yeah, I would want to establish the standard dominance relationship with them, but the birds actually open up more mentally when you spoil them.”

The owl seemed to be returning to Corinne’s shoulder. “So what are their cognitive capabilities?” April asked.

“Well, they aren’t called wise for nothing. Anyway, enough about me for now. Now I’m really curious about your hometown. How long did your family live there?”

“My grandparents transferred there for work when my dad was in high school, so that was about 45 years ago.”

“Where were they from?”

“Nebraska.”

“I drove through there once on a really crazy road trip in college. Nothing but miles and miles of cornfields, right?”

“Right.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Still have some family there. I’ve been back a couple of times.”

“So they just transferred for work? No big injury?”

“Well, my dad wasn’t happy about the move, enough that he still talks about it. He was popular at his old school, not so much at the new one. But that was after the move.”

The owl then looked really uncomfortable, appearing to seize and twitch.

“Is she okay?” April said. “The doughnut didn’t kill her, did it?”

“It’s just an owl pellet, like a cat coughing up a hairball. She’s fine.”

“That looks pretty nasty.”

“I’m used to it by now. You know, the funny thing is, a few years back I sold owl pellets from my birds to Urban Outfitters for a while.”

“How did you get them to buy owl pellets?”

“It was their idea. They looked for people with owls to be their suppliers, and they sought me out. Go look it up on your phone. It’s real.”

April looked it up on her phone. “Oh my god, it’s real. What were they thinking?”

“Hipsters apparently thought displaying the vomited-up mouse skeletons in their homes made them look rugged. Maybe in a few years I can find a place in Portland that will get the same idea again.”

“It looks like there’s more in the pellet than mouse bones,” April said. “Is that a piece of corn in there?”

“Could be.”

“That’s so weird. We were just talking about corn. Wouldn’t it be weird if the owl knew what we were talking about?”

“When I first got owls, I used to wonder what they would say if they could speak in English. I don’t wonder that any more. They communicate what they want to tell me without words, and I’m sure they find out what they need to know from me and from other humans around them. In addition to their intellect, they’re very wise emotionally.”

“I can see why you’d spoil a creature that smart,” April said. “I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of that. But what exactly are you training them to do?”

“Everyone always asks me about my owls,” Corinne said. “I want to talk about something else for once. I really want to dig deeper into this rumor about Placid Valley.”

“Why don’t you just ask the guy who told you the rumor?”

“I’m trying to get validation from multiple sources, and I don’t meet that many people who are from there.”

“Fair enough.”

“He told me there was a big drug scene in Placid Valley.”

“People who really want to get in that kind of trouble will find it wherever they are. Maybe there are a few potheads in Placid Valley who get more attention than they deserve, but people abuse, for instance, prescription drugs all over the country.”

“You know something about that?”

Before April could voice a reply, the owl shuddered and hacked up another pellet. This one had a pharmaceutical pill on top too obvious to miss.

“My dad said his mom used too many prescription drugs after the move,” April said. “Valium and that kind of thing, like a lot of women did in the 1970s. How did your bird know?”

“She’s good at processing.”

April got up, leaving a lot of her doughnut behind. “I can see why you have a lot of first dates,” she told Corinne, walking out of the coffee shop.

It would have been really interesting to see the owl pellet exercise done on someone else. But April knew the national corporation her grandfather worked for arranged his transfer and substantial promotion to Placid Valley not primarily on the merits of his work, but primarily to discourage him from reporting to police that his boss had raped April’s grandmother, and she couldn’t bear to see the next owl pellet come out with two mouse skeletons intertwined in that act — even though she knew Corinne could get a lot of money selling it to Urban Outfitters.

Filed under: 2013 Submissions, Individual, Portland | Tagged: Eva Sylwester, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

“Thanks Hank” by Bob Ferguson

Posted on August 21, 2013 by writer

Prompts:
An animal trainer
Cornfields
Doughnuts
“Don’t eat that!”
Spending $4
Owls

***

Thanks Hank

By Bob Ferguson

The blistering sun and dust from the corn fields gave his face a swarthy look and his hands a leathery feel. He was tougher than the land he had tilled his entire life, but looked older than his sixty years.

It had been nearly a year since Samantha had passed away and Samuel Butler couldn’t move on. She was his ranch partner as well as his wife. In Fox Hollow, Alabama they were referred to as The Sammies. Everyone called each of them Sam, but to each other they were Samantha and Sam. They had been high school sweethearts and were fixtures in the community their grandparents had helped build. Her death came after a two year battle with cancer. Watching Samantha die had been like watching the slow wilting of the grandest rose in the garden. It withered Sam. He was a hard-boiled, horse trainer, but her cancer was not something he could rope, brand, hog tie, and bend to his will. He could only watch and weep.

Sam put the tractor in the barn for the season. Harvesting was done. His tired body climbed the well worn stairs and he took a seat in one of the two rockers. He looked out over his acreage and was pleased with what he had done by his own hand. He took a cigar from the box of White Owls he kept on a wicker table.

The night was warm. He grabbed a cold PBR from the fridge.

He looked at his old acoustic guitar hanging on the wall. He took it down, tuned it, and began to sing. His voice was like the rest of him, ruggedly sexy, and welcomed anywhere. He had been singing the same song since Samantha’s, the Hank Williams classic “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” He sang the same verse over and over:

“Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry”

Tears streamed down his face. Six PBR’s couldn’t ease the pain. For some odd reason he sang the last verse.

“The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry”

That verse jolted him from his misery. While he was wondering “where you are” he knew Samantha would be the first to tell him to buck up and get on with the business of living. He drank the last of the beer and began packing.

His ’63 Chevy was like the one he had in high school. It was made to run. He put the guitar in the back seat and a few bags of clothing in the trunk. He had arranged to have the farm taken care of for the next month and he now had a plan to live with gusto. He even whipped a few doughnuts in the front yard, and made a bee line to the county road. He would rejuvenate his mind and body on the beaches of Mobile, play his guitar and sing in the karaoke clubs. Samantha would like that.

On the edge of Montgomery Sam stopped for lunch. Nothing fancy, but a city diner.

“Hi there hon, take a seat anywhere,” the waitress said. “You look like you’re the real deal, not like the guys who come in here, they’re all hat and no cattle.” She handed him a menu and said “We had a little problem with our stove today so you don’t want to eat the jambalaya, but we’ve got some good four dollar gumbo.” She was filling his water glass and wiping tables all at the same time. She was a hard worker like Samantha.

“Where ya’ll from?” She asked.

“I’ve lived my whole life up in a little place called Fox Hollow,” Sam said.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” the waitress shouted. “Let me take another look at you baby cakes. I lived in Fox Hollow for a few years myself. I hated to leave it, my dad got transferred.”

Their eyes met. They were of the same vintage, no wedding rings, life’s experiences etched their faces, and there would be no need for awkward flirtation.

“Charley, I mean Charlene is that really you?” Sam said, remembering her as one of the prettiest girls in school.

“And you’re the guitar playing Sam who married Sam!” They had the rest of their lives to fill in the rest of their stories.

“Well, I’m single again.” Sam was going for it. He was starved for fun. “Since we seem to be between the lunch and dinner crowds, how about if I sing for my supper?”

As he went to fetch his guitar he heard another refrain that Hank made famous,

“Hey, hey good lookin’ What ya got cookin’
How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?”

The End

Filed under: 2013 Submissions, Individual, Portland | Tagged: Bob Ferguson, prizes, Sledgehammer, writing contest | Leave a comment »

“Saddlebrook” by Sarah Kindler

Posted on August 21, 2013 by writer

Prompts:
An animal trainer
Cornfields
Doughnuts
“Don’t eat that!”
Spending $4
Owls

***

Saddlebrook

By Sarah Kindler

In Saddlebrook, the first freedom we all learned was how to leave town. The second was how to lie about it. Usually this happened around the age of sixteen if you had a friend with a brother with a truck, or sometimes younger if you were particularly ambitious and not averse to bicycling several miles of dusty shoulder. The lying was important because there was nothing outside of town. The town limits divided some acres of cornfield from some others far before you got to another main street. But still there were places you could go, out of view of the road and nondescript enough to seem like you had discovered them. Places that couldn’t be found. Places that could be anywhere. So when you told your mother that you were going to Josie’s for dinner and when Josie told her mother that she was going to yours, you were safe in that secret spot. Safe and free.

Once we started lying about where we were, we began to invent entire personalities. We stole pieces of lies from the internet, from television, or else concocted them in the boredom of always going to the same secret places and having nothing secret to do. We had a set of lies for our parents, a set for our teachers, one for our siblings and one, carefully and painstakingly constructed, for our friends. We held each other to them, judged each other by how good they were and how convincing you could be and how many people believed you. Eventually, everyone believed.

Wanda really had made it all the way to Chicago over the summer break. Harry had found a two-headed deer flat and dead on the side of the road. Kim was meeting a secret boyfriend from the rival school when she disappeared on weeknights and was late for class the next morning. We could be anything when we lied, so we lied about what music we listened to. We lied about who we knew. We lied about the weather and what day it was and what time the party was starting. We didn’t question or second guess or doubt. If you were the only one who showed up to Tom’s, you told him that you were looking for his sister, and if she was home, you asked her what the math homework was and she made something up and you did that assignment.

We thought at first that we were the only ones who knew how to lie, but some of us were paying attention and noticed that the adults did it too. They weren’t flashy about it and usually wouldn’t contradict the obvious, but Josie did notice that her mom always said she’d be home half an hour sooner than she ever was. Michael’s dad was never angry, even when Mike’s little brother sank the lawnmower into a flooded gully and wrecked the motor. We supposed that the lying had always been there and we hadn’t noticed sooner because we’d been brought up to respond to it, like animals to our trainers. It was easy to be obedient to a lie because the lying was instinctive. Sometimes we’d catch them trying to remind us that honesty was the best policy, but honestly who were they kidding.

It was after Kim stopped showing up for class altogether but before the time Tom spent the night in jail that the Lowells moved to Saddlebrook. Their daughter Alicia was our age. We knew she was a little funny right off because although she had learned to drive (proved when we saw the license Mike once swiped from her wallet), she never left town. She never went anywhere. She said she liked to eat dinner with her family. She said she didn’t know anyone in town well enough yet to go to Tom’s party. Naturally we figured she was lying. That’s when someone said that the Lowells knew the mayor’s family, and then everyone claimed to have gotten to know her. After a few weeks though when no one had seen her at any of the places we all were, we didn’t know what to think. That’s how we figured she was telling the truth.

We started asking her questions to see if she’d keep doing it. Where was she from? Chicago, well actually just outside it. We couldn’t substantiate. What did her parents do? Her mom was a veterinarian and treated livestock. Her dad wrote for the news station in Dubuque. We caught a glimpse of his name in the paper the next week. What was the English homework? Read the next two chapters of The Great Gatsby. We were all surprised, the teacher included, when the whole class had done the correct assignment.

The third time Alicia didn’t show up at Tom’s, I decided she needed help. Maybe she just needed someone to show her how things worked in Saddlebrook, and anyways even though I still saw a lot of Josie and Wanda it had been a long time since they felt like friends. But I didn’t say that, because by all accounts we were thick as thieves. Even though the general consensus was that I had probably never been to Chicago like the other girls had. Even when I tried to say that I had been south to St. Louis, not to Chicago. I wasn’t the best of liars.

Saturday morning, my older brother Bobby said he was driving to a friend’s house, so I asked if he’d take me along and if we could pick up Alicia Lowell on the way. I was pretty sure he was headed out of town. He looked me over, rolled his eyes, and said, “I’ll need money for gas.”

“I only have four dollars,” I told him, even though I had about twice that in my pocket.

“Give it here. You can get me the rest later.” I agreed and handed over half my crumpled bills. When we pulled up to the Lowell home, Alicia’s father was weeding in the front yard. I nodded to him as I went to the door. When Alicia opened it, one eyebrow raised, I asked if she wanted to go for a drive.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, couldn’t say,” I smiled. She sighed.

“No, I guess you couldn’t. Sure.”

“You want to?”

“Yes.” I was delighted, rare as it was to get a straight answer.

“Come meet Bobby. He’s driving.”

We set off, going west to the freeway. It was a nice morning for a drive, sunny and not too cool. We chatted about a class we shared and Bobby chimed in with what he remembered from taking it the previous year. The cornfields flew by. Alicia was easy to talk to. Direct. I found myself starting to imitate the way she spoke by the time we arrived in Waynesfield.

Bobby pulled into the Eat N’ Pump and let us out by the front door, giving me his order (“Tuna melt, a side of eggs, glass of milk. Whole.”) before going around back to fill up. Inside, we sat down in a booth. “Get a doughnut,” I urged Alicia after I placed my order. “They’re why I come out here. They’re the frozen kind, but they heat ‘em fresh every morning in real oil.” Alicia got a glazed and a black coffee. I liked to load up my coffee with cream and no more than four sugars, and my doughnut was a big jelly-filled thing covered in sprinkles and powdered sugar.

“Don’t eat that,” Bobby said, sitting next to Alicia. “You’ll get my truck all sticky.”

“What am I, eight?” I said through a mouth full of confection. Alicia ripped her doughnut into chunks before dunking them in her coffee and popping them into her mouth. “Good, right?”

“Yeah.” She paused. “Is this where people are always going to? Places like this?”

“Nah,” was Bobby’s reply. “The Eat N’ Pump is kind of slow.”

I scoffed. “Sometimes we do come here at night. It’s open late because of the motel down the road. We come out here to meet all sorts. Real night owls and folk.”

“How do you get out here in the middle of the night, little sis?”

“Wanda knows how to drive stick.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. One time she came here by herself when she was real mad at Harry and got picked up by a guy who plays for the Badgers. The handsome one.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Passing through.”

“Uh-huh.” He scooped the last of his eggs onto a piece of sandwich.

“She has his watch.”

“He probably paid her with it.”

“Jerk.”

“Dweeb.”

Alicia slurped her coffee. “I’m sorry I asked. I’m always sorry that I asked.”

I turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“She means that she’s new here.” Bobby looked around at her impatiently, then stood up. “C’mon, let’s go.” Once his back was turned, I left the remainder of my money on the table and then followed my brother outside.

“I’m dropping you off,” Bobby told us when we were back in town. “I have people to see.”

“Yeah right. You’re probably just going to drive around until it gets dark.”

“Later,” he said as I shut the truck door behind me. Alicia watched him drive off and then turned to me. “No one here just says what they mean.”

“Sometimes they do. Or at least even if they don’t you kind of get it anyways.”

“Don’t you get tired of not being able to trust anybody?”

“You learn how to trust people. Take Bobby. I’ve always known that he’s never done what he says he has.” Alicia crossed her arms.

“Or he’s always done what he says he hasn’t.”

“Hey. He’s my brother. You don’t know him.”

“Sorry,” she said.

We moved on and then parted for the day, but afterwards I saw a lot more of Alicia. She remained straightforward, which was reassuring. Slowly I found myself confessing things to her. Just small things, whispered things, but things I had never told anyone before. I started to feel like I could tell her anything. She kept calling that trust, but I was starting to feel less trusting of everyone else. When people laughed or smiled or were angry, I wondered why, really. And I wondered why we didn’t just say.

Alicia told me things too. She told me that she was angry with a guy who kept bugging her at school, but that mostly people had started to let her be. She found that as long as she said less and paid attention more, people lost interest in making up things about her. I asked her why she minded the lies. “Because who cares, right? It’s not like any of them really tried to know me. They just made things up. Why would anyone care about the things people make up?”

Wanda and Josie thought she was weird and didn’t understand why I was hanging out with her. “You never go anywhere,” they complained. “You never do anything anymore.” I tried to make up something but I knew they had decided not to believe me. Besides, it was true. I wasn’t leaving town as much except sometimes just with Bobby. I wasn’t going to parties much.

I didn’t go to Tom’s party, the one he threw despite being on probation. The one where afterwards they found Kim in a ditch, thrown from his crumpled station wagon.

The adults all said it was an accident, a tragedy, a real shame. Everyone agreed they hadn’t seen this coming, not Kim, not in this town. Quite a shock. Tom was in deep trouble, the poor thing. It was almost too much–they were dating, didn’t you hear? Losing his car and his girlfriend in the same night. I had heard a hundred versions of the night’s events before Alicia stepped forward. That was when I found out that I had really been the only person not to go to Tom’s that night.

Alicia said she had been there and it was true. Everyone had seen her. So when she said that she had seen who had gotten behind the wheel of Tom’s car even though he had hardly been able to walk, they all believed her. And all eyes turned to my brother. Bobby, who could always be trusted to have done what he said he hadn’t. Bobby didn’t graduate from high school that year. Already eighteen, he was tried as an adult.

I didn’t speak to Alicia much after that. After the trial, somewhere between school and home, I confronted her because I thought I trusted her to have told the truth, but once we were face-to-face I didn’t know. I looked at her standing there in the street and I couldn’t place her. It wasn’t that Alicia always told the truth, but it wasn’t like she was honor-bound to her lies like the rest of us. I had never known when she had lied to me, and I had no way to tell if she had. All I knew was that she had taken my brother from me, and what was worse, I had no idea that he didn’t deserve it.

Filed under: 2013 Submissions, 2013 Winners, Individual, Portland | Tagged: prizes, Sarah Kindler, Sledgehammer, writing contest | 1 Comment »

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“Saddlebrook” by Sarah Kindler

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