The Winners Of The Jezebel (Very) Short Fiction Contest
LatestPicking the best of all the exciting entries in the Jezebel (Very) Short Fiction Contest was difficult indeed — but at long last, we have a winner! Well, two winners, to be precise.
Rockstar guest judge Emma Straub and I selected the following two from the many awesome stories we received. The first, in alphabetical order, is by Sara Gilliam:
Things We Throw Away
I am taking my Aunt June to dinner tonight. She is Korean and very fat. Her hair hangs thinning and long, black clasped in a shiny blue bow. She wears a flowered cotton dress, from the Salvation Army, she says, and white tennis shoes with no laces. She shows me her room before we leave. She owns a coffee pot, a portable TV, a mattress on the floor. There’s a poster on the wall of an oiled naked man signed by Troy from the “Ladies Only Revue.” A mobile of painted wooden birds floats above the steam heater. I tell her it’s pretty. I like to go through trash cans, she says. I found that last summer. Isn’t it amazing what some people throw away?
Over crab rangoon, I ask her to tell me about herself. It has been eight years since I last saw her, and I hardly know her. She says she still enjoys working at the group home, where she cooks meals for six
middle-aged schizophrenic men. Her boss, Tom, drives her to chapel services at the mission once a week. She tried a dating service, but no one ever called after the first date. She thinks it’s her appearance. She walks painfully on wide feet, and only has five teeth. June tells me about her favorite talk shows and her pen pal Steve, a widowed truck driver in Virginia. He promises to stop in Wichita and see her sometime.
Our main course arrives. June eats loudly, sucks the Mongolian beef into her mouth and swallows it whole. She asks, did your mom ever tell you what I was like as a little girl? I was a tiny little thing, and I only liked to eat mashed bananas. I tell her I saw some old family films of her. Was I dancing? she asks. I used to love to dance. I nod. She had been dancing, deliberately sliding her feet across my grandparents’ front lawn. Someone behind the lens was waving at her, trying to coax a smile for the camera, but she was absorbed in her dancing, her lips silently counting the beat. Perhaps she learned the jerky, cautious steps in the orphanage. Maybe it was her dancing that caught my grandmother’s eye.
We crack our fortune cookies. I smile and read my fortune aloud: You are talented in many ways. June reads hers: The only true love comes from within. I wonder if she has ever been in love. I wonder if Steve, her pen pal, could love a woman like her. June sets the broken halves on her plate and sips her tea. She looks happy. I eat mine quickly. I relish its crunch between my teeth.
And, by Kayla Hammond:
A Little Too Obvious
The animals move fast and weird. The chickadees in the grass, and the men, pulling in empty trash barrels and nodding at each other.
I’ve come out on my father’s stoop to smoke what’s worth smoking, while I balance an antique rifle on my shoulder. My father’s been restoring it for a friend, but I don’t know if he’s giving it back. It was lying on the same shelf in the garage the last time I was here.