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Prompt Two

EAST REGION | First Round

Anna

Alexander Yates

Syracuse University

My wife can see again.  She can see again.  After the surgery, after she tells the doctor how many fingers he’s holding up, after she reads a newspaper headline from across the room, I rush home.  I don’t tell her I’m going—just wait till she falls asleep.  She needs her rest.  And I need to clean.  Because she can see again.

First thing...

...“Tell me what it looks like,” Anna says, her face solid and determined.

“There’s lots of big trees,” Katherine says.  “We can see the canal from here.  And the bridges.”

“There’s a man juggling,” I say.  “There’s a bear cub on a leash.”

Anna snorts.  “Pah.  There’s no fucking bear.  There’s no fucking juggler.  I’m in a fucking dorm room.”

She tears up a handful of grass.  “This is cheap carpet.”

We all finish our ice cream quietly.  A Beatles song starts playing from inside Katherine’s purse.  Help! I need somebody.  Help!  Not just anybody.  Her assistant’s ring-tone.  She answers, apparently happy to have an excuse to get up and walk a few paces away.  Whatever the assistant tells her, she doesn’t like it.  She calls him Braniac, insincerely.  “Ah-ha. Ah-ha.  Ah-ha.  Oh?” she says.  “Okay.  So, send him on his way with forty dollars and we’ll call it a deal.”

Anna gropes about while Katherine talks.  She finds Katherine’s purse and dunks her hands inside.  She pulls out a ledger and opens it, working her thumbs into the inky Cyrillic lettering.  I recognize the ledger.  It’s the real one, the one that Katherine keeps on her always because Mikhail knows that someone’s stealing from him and regularly has the hotel searched for evidence.  Katherine finishes her call, turns back to us and freezes.  I give her a ‘calm down’ motion with my hand.

“Who on earth are you giving forty dollars to?” Anna asks.

“Nobody.”  Katherine stares at me as she speaks.  “Just a septic inspector.  He’s got a problem with the quality of our pipes.”

Anna leafs through pages she couldn’t read even if she still had her eyesight.  “Forty dollars aren’t enough to fix pipes.”

“Well, they’re enough to fix the inspector.”  She mouths to me that she is going to tell Anna, right now.  I mouth back that I’ll leave her if she does.  “It’s win-win.”

“It’s dishonest,” Anna says, snapping the ledger closed and plunking it into the grass a foot from the open purse.

“That’s true,” Katherine says...

Did I Win?

David Letzler

City University of New York

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I
mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games,
and so on. What is common to them all?...What still counts as
a game and what no longer does?  Can you give the boundary? No.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

New York Times, Obituaries, 9/20/08, Page C14

Joseph Madison Sobczak, who as the youngest-ever CFO of the investment bank Paulson-McNeil helped lead the century-old firm through its fastest expansion in history, died of heart failure this morning in his Manhattan office.  He was 45 and had no history of cardiovascular disease.

Mr. Sobczak coined the phrase “the endless victory” to describe the growth of...

...But no.  She just pursed her lips, folded her stubby fingers, and asked what was your side of the story.  Instead of denying anything, you just nodded gravely and said that if the bet was upsetting me, we could end it.  You would even settle for $40 instead of the full $100.

I almost fainted—less because of your gall than because I just knew from the cocky tone of your voice that Mom would go along.  Sure enough, when you were done, she smiled and said, Okay, Zachary, so send him on his way with forty dollars, and we’ll call it a deal.

Did I cry?  I don’t remember.  I know I almost slammed my face into my meat loaf.  How does that make any sense, I yelled at her—he gets money for sabotaging his schoolwork, and I get punished for doing the right thing?

Well, she said, you’re not winning.  Life isn’t always win-win, you know.  There’s got to be a loser—after all, where’s the joy in winning unless you did better than someone else? The two of you stared at me across the table, smiling, heads tilted at the same angle, as if it all made sense—as if there was something for me to say.

I don’t remember how long it took me to cave.  Two more days?  But I did.  Mom even made me thank you for the privilege when I handed the money over.  And the moment the last dollar was in your hand, you had the nerve to dramatically wipe your brow, though it was dry as always, and tell me that it was a good thing I gave up, because you had promised yourself that in a week you’d ask Mrs. Bochinsky for your old schedule back; after all, you couldn’t wreck your record just to win a game, right? I felt too defeated to curse you out like you deserved, or to tell you that you couldn’t fool even that gullible old biddy twice.  But the next day you must have convinced her that whatever problems you had at the year’s start were gone, then swore to catch up if you were switched back to the honors classes, because you had your old schedule back.

What iced it was that you did catch up on everything, and got the same grades you always did.  Not only that...

Prompt Two, East Region, Round 1.

"Anna" by Yates [64.8%]

"Did I Win?" by Letzler [35.2%]

Go to Round 2