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Prompt Two

EAST-SOUTH | Second 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 I hit is the picture frame on the bed stand.  My fingers shake so bad I almost break the little twisty-knobs on the back as I open it.  I shove the 5X7 of Katherine and me into my back pocket.  There’s another in the living room, blown up to fit the frame my wedding photo used to be in.  And one in the bathroom—a shot I took of Katherine last summer.  Her brittle blonde hair is all mussed around her head.  She’s nude from the belly up, her lower half covered with a threadbare hotel sheet.  We’d just had sex and she’s sleepy and smiley.  The photo hangs where anyone can see; right above the clean toilet.  But we never get any visitors.  And my wife… well, obviously.

I fold all the pictures into tight little squares, take the originals out of the closet and refill the frames.  My wife and I at Skaneateles Lake.  Her eating cake in a funny hat when she got her GED.  The two of us surrounded by friends at First Lutheran.  Friends who’ve all moved south now, because each winter up here is worse than the one before and not half as bad as the one coming...

...“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...

Genesis

Vanessa Cutler

University of Miami

Open the fridge. Close the door. Leave the kitchen. Don’t look back.

It might have been when you were sitting in the car with your ex-boyfriend last week. The last of the leaves were falling off the naked trees and getting stuck in the wipers, while you struggled to find common ground. He made that comment about your head looking like it was the sweet, round, jawbreaker of the lollipop, except that he also used words like gaunt, frail and breakable to describe the contours of your face and the hollows of your cheekbones. You questioned his taste in music when he tried to convince you that one of the lame bands from his hometown was going to be the next great thing. “Ok,” you laughed, glancing at your sore, bitten fingernails. “If that’s the way you see it. Just drop me off, please.”

This week, you will be better. You will do a better job of staying away. From everything.

“Mom?” you call out. Except, there is no mother in this house. It’s your own place, the first time you’ve ever lived alone. There was this puppy that you couldn’t help but buy. She tilted her head at you every time you passed by the petshop window on your way to and from your office. Her name is Donut, and now she pisses all over the place, in places you wouldn’t even dream of pissing, like that corner in the kitchen, and then on your brand new chair, even on your feet....

...You remember this because your father died suddenly, like he was in a hurry to go, and nobody bothered to turn off the TV. You were split in half. A part of you feeling the flesh of your father’s mitt of a hand, most of you watching the big mobster breaking down slowly, for everybody to see. It was funny because your father was dying and all you could hear was the mobster’s big mouth. “Fuck,” he said, cradling his forehead in his hands, and then he agreed. “Okay,” he said, while your mother tried to fuse her body to your father’s dead one as his flesh grew cold, “so send him on his way with forty dollars, and we’ll call it a deal.” Your boyfriend, he went to the funeral with you, but then he dumped you in January. So, you moved a little farther away, and you wonder if they ever did make that deal.

You hold your knees together and band them with your arms. The mobster is taking out a hit on somebody. The planning is elaborate, and though you don’t quite understand what is going on, you are crying for reasons that have sunk so deep that they anchor you in place. The phone rings, and you tell yourself that you don’t hear it, that it’s a part of the show that’s going on in front of your blurry eyes because at this point, what else is there to say?

The camera focuses in on the mobster’s wife, who is in the kitchen, drying dishes, and talking to her two children about what it means to make the right decisions. Somehow, it all seems a lot easier on TV. When you still lived at your mother’s house, when your father was still alive and you felt like the world was waiting for you, you would make fun of him for sitting in his chair and drinking gin and watching reruns of this stupid show, night after night. “Kiddo,” he’d said one Saturday night while you were rushing out to go to this bar or that party, “this is happiness.” You just didn’t get it.

“Well, you’re not winning,” the sister insinuates, lunging towards the brother, who is eating a glossy, green apple. She is sassy and innocent, naïve and far too bold for someone so young, and you’re jealous. In the only other episode of this show that you have seen, you’re pretty sure that she was wearing a gold crucifix and taking her driver’s test. But, the more that you try and make sense of what happened, the more that day and all of its contents seem to fade so that now they sit like patchwork pieces of memory, a little too frayed to ever make something whole again. Whenever you try to think about how much you’d give to go back, you can’t. You would give yourself, but you don’t know where to find her.

“Life isn’t always win-win,” the mother says...

Prompt Two, East-South, Round 2.

"Anna" by Yates [59.1%]

"Genesis" by Cutler [40.9%]

Go to Prompt 2 Finals