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Prompt One

WEST REGION | First Round

Unaccustomed Shape

Kirsten Rue

University of Washington

The heat settles on me out here like grease, full of smells, full of distance, full of bodies.  It has nothing of the heat my sister and I know—heat cracking brown, sapping long grass, drying the hair and skin.  This heat belches up from metal grates I cross suspiciously and smells oddly—sickly—sweet.

“It’s almost pervy, you know,” Melinda says, describing it...

...When her phone rings, I wrench it from her hand and answer it immediately, slightly breathless.

“Hello?”

The line crackles and then I hear a male voice.  “Mel?  You sound weird.” My lungs give way, just a little: a sudden loss of pressure.

“Oh, hey.  It’s her sister.”

“She was all upset earlier.  Is she there?”

I hand the phone to Mel and she takes it out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her.  I wonder when she even had time to call him out of my earshot.  Perhaps when I stood across the street from the office building, watching the doors keep swinging, now bereft of people.  It is an odd thing, to eavesdrop on Melinda; I press my ear to the wall.

“No, it’s okay now.  She snapped out of it, I think.  But it was weird.  No, really, I said it’s okay.”

“No, don’t worry about it.”

“Mm hmm.”

“Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine.”

The sound of a siren drowns out the rest.  These sirens—after awhile, they whittle you down.

My father, who was not a lumberjack

Stephan Clark

University of Southern California

When the phone rang I lifted my head from the pillow and did the drunk man’s name, rank and serial number: Where am I? Who am I with? And is there any reason, in any combination of the previous two answers, to fear the authorities?

At first I opened only one eye. But then, liking what I saw—at home, lying on the futon...

..."You think you might have a problem with alcohol?”

I shrugged. We had pushed through the double doors and were now surrounded by the vaults where they kept the dead bodies. “The way I see it, there are worse problems to have.”

He let it go at that and pulled at the handle to slide my father out. There isn’t much left of you when you try to catch a tree, especially a redwood. The loggers, they call the big ones widow-makers, and my father had obviously been greeted by one of those. The deputy lifted the sheet. I nodded. Then he looked to me to see if I wanted a moment alone, and I nodded again, cracking my last beer. A moment passed in silence. I lifted the can as if to toast him, but before I could get the can to my mouth, the deputy’s mobile phone rang and he stepped a few paces away from me and spoke in a hushed voice.

“No, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Mm-hmm. Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine.”

The next few days were a blur. I lost Akira somewhere in Fort Bragg, and I mean that in the most literal sense. We were drinking at the Tip-Top Lounge near last call and I lost a game of liar’s dice to this trucker. He was a real speed-freak type of guy, maybe 6-4 and all of 140 pounds, and somehow Akira got involved as a wager. I lost her calling out nine fives, which in retrospect I have to admit was kind of bold, even if ones were wild and I had a full cup...

Prompt One, East Region, Round 1.

"Unaccustomed Shape" by Rue [60.1%]

"My father..." by Clark [39.9%]

Go to Round 2