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Prompt Two

MIDWEST REGION | First Round

From the Far Reaches

Dan Leonidas

The Ohio State University

Eight o’clock that morning—a good hour before aliens from the Andromeda galaxy abducted me—I stopped at the Koala Bear Express to grab a cup of coffee.  At the register, I asked Irma, the skinny, blue-haired old lady who worked the early shift, if she had any gossip for me.

She shook her head and worked her lips the way old people do...

...“Closing the house up this early?”

“It’s almost Halloween, brother man.  The snow starts flying in a few weeks, and if I don’t do the roof, it’s not gonna hold through the end of year.  I should’ve been out here weeks ago.”

“Well, look,” Jamie said, sounding irritated, “I need you at ten instead of noon.  So don’t get too comfortable up there, all right?  The last thing I need is you snoozing on a roof when there’s meat needs cutting.”

“Ten?  What—”

“Hold up a second,” Jamie said, and I heard a rustling sound, like he was covering the phone with one of his fat, callused hands.  “What can I do for you, ma’am?” I heard him say in a muffled voice.  A woman said something I couldn’t make out, and Jamie told her that yeah, he could fill the order.  The woman spoke again and Jamie said, “Okay, so send him on his way with forty dollars and we’ll call it a deal.”  I heard the rustling sound again and Jamie was back on the line.  “Sorry about that.”

“You just move a little merchandise?” I asked, grinning at myself in the rearview.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “That was Mrs. Perrault.  Her nephew’s in town and he’s looking for a good time.  Didn’t realize how little there is to do here and didn’t bring enough entertainment of his own—same old story. But we don’t talk about this on the phone...”

The Way It Goes

Joe Vanderhyde

Kansas State University

Dear Ida,

Am I dead? Most likely.  Otherwise why and how are you reading this document, which was at one time in an ordinary manila envelope marked only with the sweaty palm-print stains of my often sweaty-palmed attorney, Carl Fitzpatrick?  If I am not dead and you are reading this letter then I can only think of a handful (and by handful I actually...

...Scenario 1:  You, having become bored with Nebraskan life, have decided to take a road trip from Omaha to Skokie with your new life mate, Barbara, Valerie, or Victoria (I can never remember her name) and, in an act of cruelty, have mentally/physically flagellated Carl Fitzpatrick, whose palms are most likely leaking pond-loads of moisture as he most likely is in a state of extreme duress while Sally, Vivian, or Sylvia holds him hostage by gun/knife/letter opener-point so that you can traipse freely through the small stock pile of personal files including but not limited to my will, my medical records, the divorce papers from my first wife, Joey (a gentle breeze in comparison to your hurricane-force blowing), as well as some of the documents concerning the dying/death/financial hubbub surrounding the burial of my dead father who perished some 12 years ago as the result of a liver infection, the same father who once offered me as an apprentice to a traveling hat salesman while I was still in my teens until the traveling hat salesman, while shaking my father’s hand said: “Okay, so send him on his way with forty dollars and we’ll call it a deal,” and my father, as near to crying as I have ever seen him had to balk on the proposition as he did not have forty dollars, or thirty dollars or three and a half dollars to spare, having recently sunk all of his money into some pyramid-type scam involving the selling of ladies’ feminine-type products. (When I confronted said father on his deathbed, asking him straight into his jaundiced eyes why he tried to pawn me before I even had any hair in my nether regions, all he could say was “Who knew what was what.  Times were rough and the less mouths in the house the better.”  And still, I found space enough in my heart to put this man in the ground proper—I forgave him enough to bury him the right way.)  If you are holding poor Carl Fitzpatrick hostage so that...

Prompt Two, Midwest Region, Round 1.

"From the Far Reaches" by Leonidas [58.3%]

"The Way It Goes" by Vanderhyde [41.7%]

Go to Round 2