Short listed, Fish One Page Story Contest, 2004

Second Place, Fish One Page Story Contest, 2005: Vanilla
(Judged by Dave Eggers)

The details were vague as to why Sharon was having sex with this man. He was tall, and fairly good-looking, but that was about it. What had he said at the bar? "Hey there." And later, "You're really hot. Are you single?" She had laughed at the time because her threshold was so low that evening that, although he didn't know it at the time, he was already in her pants. She was bored and lonely and he was male, straight, and looked like he had a box of condoms at home.

Picture a twenty-two year old woman in black and white sitting straight in a chair with a glass tumbler tilted in her hand. The kind of sitting straight when all she wants to do is slump. It is strained. In the glass is whisky, bourbon, something hard and dark. She is entirely too young to be wallowing. She is too young to be a widow. The shadows falling from the glass, her frame, the door half open, are etched—if the sun were to move on along its course, they would just stay put.

Vivien is sitting this way. She has been sitting this way for weeks on end. She cries because a car ran into the man who ran into her. There are no tears on her face right now; of course, one is much more likely to catch the wet tracks and red nose and eyes than the actual beads of water en route. But this face is beyond even those signals; it bears the weight that presses her posture and lets it show through in her slackened lips and paused eyes. The tilted glass in her hand means she was and is drinking, begging questions of the drink and then shushing the answers. The near-empty bottle means that this is a theme and not an event. The young woman is wearing black, black muslin or some other uncommon, uncaring fabric that makes her look bigger, when what she really is right now is the smallest thing on the earth.

a) Herbert puzzled over the letter in his mail: it had neither the outward appearance of junk mail nor of the monthly letter and check from his mother.

b) Herbert slid the cream-colored envelope from his mailbox and ran its rich, thick stock across his slightly sweaty palm.

c) The envelope in his mailbox was something odd, signaled something as being astray.
d) The letter called up to Herbert in a high-pitched voice saying hey baby come and tear me open, kay...
e) This letter would change things, Herbert knew.

A man has written me a letter. A man to whom I have inadvertently sent my manuscripts, twice—just one of the lucky people that I randomly chose. It appears that my selection process, that of flipping open one of my many phone books from across the country and pointing with my eyes closed, has inherent flaws—I say this now as I notice a few sharp creases down the spine of most of the books. I must have turned to his page twice, and as I do have a tendency to choose the second-to-top name on the second-to-left column I may have subverted my own game of chance. I should have expected long ago that someone with my brain capacity would eventually buck the odds of probability, but I cannot possibly worry about every contingent. The letter this man has sent me claims that I am "stalking" him (to use his words); that I am sending him "nonsense" and would I please "stop before he has to take some sort of action." I must say I find this reaction to my public services very distressing. He also says that if I am going to "bother people with mail," which is a federal criminal offense [and he mentions this as though I am not perfectly aware of the ramifications of the postal services and their abuses], I should leave my return address off my envelopes. This is, as I've mentioned, a policy I already follow. Due to a freak mistake, however, it appears I sent my electric bill in an unmarked envelope and slipped my daily writings into one of my embossed envelopes. A small accident, but one with grand implications and consequences.

The view from my small window was dominated by a plateau that rose out of the flat line of the land. Its base was a gentle rise, a pile of dirt pushed up by children's flat hands, rounded and sloping. From the midst of this pile stuck the top, set off from the rest by both its sheer vertical face and its hard look. Like the stump of a tree surrounded by a sloppy heap of sand. It was not the plateau where the spirit lives—that one was on the other side of the house and I had seen it only a few times when I was carried outside. My flat-topped mesa sat square and hulking, and blocked the view of the sunrise. I could see what was between it and myself though: short, broad pueblos like my own, shades of brown and dirt. Children with long hair running, adults working. Open spaces between the houses for walk and talk to occur and no green at all. The colors were unvaried, and hardly present, as though the heat had baked them off. Brown: light, shadowed, old, weak—and we had the rainbow. There were many dogs around and they belonged to all of us. Meka was the oldest, not quite reaching my fifteen years. He was part wolf and had the teeth and curled erect tail of one. I smelled food cooking all day, fresh doughs and variations of corn. The red corn, after it has been cooked for two days, made the air taste of sweet walnuts. From my window I saw my cousin Hakan polishing his turquoise, using wools his mother weaved and the tanned hides of the rabbit. Every day when I woke, he was up before me and at work already, perhaps because the sun hits his face earlier in the morning. Once, my brothers picked me up in my chair early in the dark morning and carried me outside and up near the stream. I sat still and was overcome by my surroundings. The dim gray of the air lessened, showing the stream water flushing downhill in its shallow bed. We saw a small cougar plunge its face and claws into a jackrabbit. He rushed the meal and slipped away towards the mesa. That day, I saw the sun rise.