$1,100 Grand Prize Winner 2009 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award:

Rational Actions by Noah Edelson

Edelson is the author of Cooperstown Dreams: Baseball Poetry for Children and a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul. As the writer/director, Edelson saw his short film "78" premiere at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, win the World Medal at the New York Festivals, and featured in over 35 festivals worldwide, including Sundance Japan. His script Hear, Boy! was awarded Best Feature Screenplay at the 2008 International Feel Good Film Festival. He has been a writer/producer/director for television and film since the 1980's. His stories for adult readers have received honorable mention from The New Millenium Writings Contest and the Juniper Creek Writers' Conference. He is currently working on a novel, "Healing the Invisible."

RATIONAL ACTIONS

Noah Edelson

I always sat in front, listening to the soft tackity-tackity-tack of Tracy Maple’s laptop two desks behind me.  Would she go out for a pizza, a drink, and a skinny dip?  Don’t kid yourself.  She was going for the frat boys, and that wouldn’t be me.

Not that I didn’t want to be one.  The frat house is cheaper than an apartment or the dorms.  God knows I tried to get rushed.  But the fact is I look way young for my age, plus I skipped a grade.  I’m not little.  I just have sort of a fresh face.  I’m the only freshman on campus that looks like he’s pushing fourteen, and all the girls I ask out think I’m “cute.”  I’ve got a lot of friends who are girls.  They definitely like me…”just not like that.”  I’ve got an impish quality.  Sounds like I’ve got a weird walk or I’m a Hobbit.  Hobbits have hair all over the place and I barely have peach fuzz.  And I’m much taller than any Hobbit.  Nope, I’m a hairless imp.  In all the fairy tales I’ve read, imps don’t get laid.  Knights get laid.  Shit, even frogs get kissed. 

Danielle White thinks I’m charming, and every guy on frat row “wants a piece of that.”  Danielle is Elizabeth Hurly gorgeous.  She’s got legs that make sneakers look like a pair of stiletto heels.  And Danni’s got this smell.  Not strong or sweet or patchouli smelling.  It’s simple, like the smell of clean, soft skin.  I don’t think she uses perfume.  It’s just her smell.  I’m just making an observation.  Danni’s great.  I mean, great.  But the last thing you want when you’re studying with a girl like that is to hear about her ex-fiancé in Fort Wayne.  I know everything about Randall Pierce from his dream car to his ring size.  He’s got a long red ponytail, he’s built like a Viking, and he hunts with a bow and arrow.  He’s not going to college because he’s got his dad’s store to take care of: Pierce and Son: Everything for the Real Outdoors.  Randy loves it.  Says he’s never leaving.  He hooked up with Danni’s high school Phys. Ed. Teacher two weeks after she started classes here.  That’s like nine months ago and Danni still cries about him.  That’s one fucked up dude to dump a girl that looks like Danni.  And she knows how to have fun too, in a real playful, sexy way.  She can tell a dirty joke, you know?  It’s just comfortable and funny.  Anyway she’s like a friend.  You don’t want to wreck a friendship like that.  She hangs out with me because, I don’t know.  I do have perfect teeth and, even though I take lousy notes, I have a real knack for retaining facts.  Danielle figures I’m not so tough to look at and frankly, she can use all the help with organic chem she can get.  So I’m useful.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s worse to be able to hang with a girl like Danielle White or be invisible to a girl like Tracy Maple.  The point is I didn’t get rushed by any of the frats for the same reason I can’t get a date.  I’m like everyone’s kid brother who’s too young to play with the big kids.

It only sucked because I could save two hundred and forty-five dollars a month if I got out of those shitty dorms and into a frat house.

#      

Professor Parker Bullington paces in front of the room fondling his pipe while he gives his rote lectures.  You can’t blame him for playing with something while he’s in lecture mode.  The guy’s been sharing his insights for almost forty years.  These days you take his class for his rep and you pay the price.  We’re his captives and as long as you turn in a paper that confirms you’d never be able to write in old English better than he…him… Bullington… you’re going to pass with flying colors.  But he was so, I don’t know.  He was sure that no one else was right in the world. But that didn’t bug me.  I’m just mentioning it because it was a trait I noticed.  I liked the guy.  But you had to sit in front to really hear him.  This was a big room for the guy to be lecturing in without a microphone.  I know the kids in back didn’t hear a word.  And if they did, they couldn’t understand it.

No, I wasn’t bugged. It was nothing like that.  It was just for, I don’t know.  I felt like doing it.

Sometimes you just have to try things.  We’re students of life at a university known for testing limits.  Right?  All I did was test a limit.  Hell, all the great thinkers paid the price at one time or another for going off the beaten path.  I think the whole class benefited from it.  And it’s not like I was out in the world trying out the social taboos.  I kept it in the classroom.

The classroom had history.  It was a product of the early nineteen hundreds: worn hardwood floors, carved wood moldings, brass hooks to hang your hat on, worn brass doorknobs on the heavy oak door, alabaster lighting fixtures that held real light bulbs.  The blackboard dominated the front, and was made of real slate framed in a wood frame.  On the institutional olive walls, you’d see a few portraits of our founding fathers, and on the back wall, “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence.”  Inspiring.

All that rustic academia was offset by seventy-eight seat/desk combos made of plastic, Formica and chrome metal tubing.  You could still see the dots of wood putty and varnish where the old desks were screwed down.

While this was a time of discovery and experimentation, some just felt certain traditions and rituals should be left in tact.  Dr. Parker Bullington was not in favor of liberating student desks and without fail arrived at the classroom ten before two so he could create rows, aisles and order.  Just like it used to be.  This cut into his lunch, but the statement of order was one he wanted his students to learn.

His final touch was closing the window.  It was large and opened out to the quad.  Five lights by five lights, twenty-five ancient panes of glass joined by the wood of an oak tree that was most likely a sapling on this campus over two hundred years ago.  It was a picture frame of picture frames and by far was the most interesting attribute of the room.  Including the ninety minutes that Dr. Bullington paced and lectured next to it twice a week.

Bullington loved his corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, his cardigan sweaters, and his pleated slacks. He chose a robin’s egg blue button down shirt and brown wingtips to put the period on his fashion statement.  His bent stem pipe lived in his breast pocket.  He handled it constantly but never smoked.  They were his robes and he wore them like a lord.  His reign would lead the common folk through the battlefield of early English literature.  Make these serfs read Beowulf and Chaucer until they loved it…no, needed it.

Although he got high points in the academic trivia department, his work was considered pretty average in literary circles.  (I’d call him an over achiever though.)  Over his career Bullington had published three novels. Since no one had published in old English recently he figured that reviving the style would bring him fame.  You can’t argue with a guy’s passion for something.  Two out of the three masterworks were required reading for the class.  They even had medieval dirty parts. I mean literally dirty, peasants doing the nasty, with rats and the plague all around them.  (Too much information about your fantasy life Dr. B.)  Except for pages seventeen and three hundred fifty-six, everything else was like a sleeping pill on a page.  I’m not knocking the guy’s life work or anything.  He gets a ton of credit for trying to get these books to make sense.  The novels were annotated with old English hieroglyphics on one side of the page and his translation of his text on the other. Kind of like how Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, in French then translated it back to English.  Only Beckett’s stuff is understandable in both languages.

Bullington’s books got him a few brown-nosing freshman readers and footnote in a new edition of The Canterbury Tales.  Nevertheless, the volumes were of note because they were all set in 12th century England and they were written in a dead language.  So the Doctor was gone a lot speaking at other colleges on “The Relation of Literature to Lifestyle for the Medieval Everyman.”  The impressionable minds in the lecture hall did not always understand these engagements, because he presented stories and his insights in old English along with a single-spaced handout of the translation.  He never stopped for questions.

In the classroom his quirks were sort of amusing, but they were definitely overshadowed by his, “I’m-a-dead-language-expert-so-I-know-about-life” attitude.  If you listened to him for any length at all you would know three things about him.

    1.He knows the struggles, heartbreak and joys of the English peasant.

• 2.No one can weave a story better than he.  There have been others through history that may have been his equal, but never his better.
• 3.His image of himself was about as warped as a Fun House mirror. 

Bullington conceded that there have been writers that have had a better command of Modern English than he…him.  However he always made a point of saying, “Just because you can put words together in a pleasant form doesn’t mean your storytelling is any good.”  (We heard that line once a week.)  He was the king of his classroom.  We were his obedient courtiers, no, vassals.  We listened to every word he said and were expected to take it for gospel.

Hell, Tracy Maple took down every word he said on her laptop.  She was an exceptional typist.  And she looked damn fine in a tank top.  I could never get the guts to introduce myself to her. 

#      

Right before Spring Break we had to turn in our midterm papers on “Dating in the 12th Century.”  (Dr. B. had his fun side.)  I get to the room while Bullington is finishing the desks; sit down in my assigned seat, and when he’s checking his seating chart trying to remember my name, my desk moves a little.  Bullington looks at me like I just shot his dog.  He doesn’t say a thing till the whole class is there with pens ready to take notes.  Then he starts right in on the lecture, without a hello or anything, and collects all our papers while he’s talking.  Dropping the stack of papers on his desk like we should feel pity for his burden, he goes into his routine, lecturing, pipe fondling and pacing in front of the class.  He’s almost brushing by the pleat on my khakis.

While he’s doing this, I’m thinking (and I swear to god I don’t know why) all I need to do is lift my leg, and he’d drop.  I wouldn’t even have to do it hard.  If I kicked him in the nuts right now he’s a sack of potatoes.  He’d be so surprised he wouldn’t know what happened to him.

He was just so completely vulnerable.  He came centimeters away from my leg and I thought about it again.  All I’d have to do is raise my foot.  It wouldn’t take much.  I squeezed back a smile, picturing him on the floor writhing around, moaning.

I laughed.  He stopped pacing and got real quiet. I guess a laugh wasn’t appropriate for what he was Thou-ing about.

Bullington stared at me.  “Yes?”

“Nothing.”  My eyes shot down to my notebook.  Blank page.  I took my pen from behind my ear, looked up and caught his silent eyes still on me.  Pen in hand, I was ready when he was.  He took the cue and started droning again.  There was no way I could keep up with him.  My notes morphed from words to scribbles.

See, I didn’t even know what he was talking about.  Nothing was bugging me.  I just had this thought itching my brain, heading down to my leg.   He kept on pacing.  Tracy kept typing.  How the hell she could keep up was a mystery to me.  She was probably keying in bullshit just to look good.

I raised my right leg at the knee.

Contact.

He didn’t go down for, I don’t know, four to six seconds.  His knees were together like he was going to block the kick, but he was way late.  He sucked air, looking right at me like I was an escapee from Area Fifty-One.  Before he hit the floor he gave us his quote for the yearbook, “Zounds!”

Short for “Gods wounds!”  Although a relatively up to date cuss word for this class, it was the first time any of us had heard it in a definitive context.

All the kids are standing around him now and, like a miracle, Bullington gets up too.  I swear to god, I would have paid to watch this.  This Old English professor looks me right in the face and growls.  I mean a real primal sound. Then he spins me around, grabs me by the back of my pants and launches me through the window.  And as I’m going through, I’m thinking, “This guy must work out.”  At one fifty-eight I’m no football player.  But you try throwing that kind of weight for any kind of distance.  Plus, the fact that I was hitting twenty-five panes of ancient, thick glass tied together with cured oak was like doing a belly flop onto concrete.  If I just went with it I could have taken the header, ducked and rolled onto the grass.  But I was resisting, trying to stand up, so I took a full body slam and about nine panes of glass out the window into the quad.

So this part I don’t remember at all, but the doctor says I have the intestinal injuries because I didn’t go all the way through the window.  I hit the glass, and kind of bent over at the waist.  You figure Bullington wasn’t bench pressing one fifty-eight consistently.  If he were, with the momentum he had on me, I would have flown through that baby.  Hell, I can press one eighty-two and I don’t work out like a maniac.

#                

I passed the class.

We all did.

Nobody saw my leg move.

Yeah, he swore on the Gutenberg Bble that I “provoked him with a kick to the groin.”  The sad truth is, out of seventy-eight students in the classroom, none of them could back him up.  They were too busy taking notes.  Most of the depositions said they heard him say “Zounds!” all squeaky, saw him growl at me, like he was an animal.  Then he ran me through the window.  Donna Bennett said she thought she saw me crossing my legs, but she didn’t think it was an act of aggression.

It wasn’t really.  An act of aggression, I mean.  It was only an experiment.  Not even.  An urge.  An itch that I had to scratch.

Don’t feel bad for either of us though.  I’m taking some time from school and healing up pretty well.  My folks settled with the university for “an undisclosed figure,” along with a written apology from Professor Bullington, on university stationery.  It’s the only thing he’s written in modern English that’s gone public.  I had it framed.

Bullington got an early sabbatical.  Plus he doesn’t have to teach at the school anymore.  (I think that was part of my parents’ settlement.)  He’s touring Asia this year with his Old English stand-up act.  If it was so riveting for English speaking lecture halls just imagine how much students in Tokyo are sucking into their brains.  When he gets back, he’s going to head up the newly formed Ye Olde Englishe Department. So he gets to be the boss of all these new teachers.  Well, a teacher and a T.A.  But that’s not nothing.  So I figure he’s got nothing to complain about.

I got get-well cards from all over the place.  Even from Bullington’s family.  My bank account is now stone cold solid.  Sigma Chi and the Tri Delts both are going after me to pledge next spring.  Top it all off, Tracy Maple came to visit me…twice.  The second time, Danielle showed up just as Tracy was leaving.  Danni starts in like she’s looking out for me.  She would “despair to see me involved with that girl.”  I think I’ve got a shot with both of them when I’m walking again.

#

Something still bugs me about this whole thing.  I can’t nail it down.  You get these feelings in your brain like something’s not right and your stomach says, “Yeah, something’s bugging me.”  When I was a kid I couldn’t steal a soda from the refrigerator without confessing to my mom.  It’s easy for me to get uneasy about little things.  My dad says it’s a natural reaction to the trauma and I should get over it.  I guess I will.  I look at it like the glass is three quarters full.  Aside from a couple of stitches and a male nurse who keeps asking me if I want a sponge bath, college is turning out pretty well.

You know how you feel like kicking a can to see how much noise it will make going down the street, or throwing a stone at a drifting log?  The log could turn out to be a crocodile and bite your leg off.  But you had to throw that stone.

Who knows what that noisy can is going to wake up?  No matter what it turns out to be, two things are for sure: You didn’t plan on waking that thing up, and you had to kick the can.

$100 Editors' Choice - THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD by Johanna Lipford

Lipford grew up near San Jose, California. She worked seven years in the American aerospace industry as a mathematical analyst, then moved to Rome, Italy, where she now works as a translator (Italian to English). She was a winner in the 2008 Aspiring Authors Writing Contest, the Turner Maxwell Books Short Story Competition, and the Fall 50-50 Fiction Contest.

THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD 

It was not at all, thought was telling itself for the thousandth time, like what it had expected.   There hadn’t even been any particular moment  when thought could say to him “Now I definitely am.”  Instead he had simply lain there watching while first his wife, then his sister, approached  to look  intently into his face and turn away sobbing – his sister had wept anyway.  His wife hadn’t.  Presently, the doctor entered the room, put a stethoscope  to his chest, and after announcing something he couldn’t hear, closed his eyelids,  imprisoning him in darkness.  He was unable to move, to hear, to feel, able only to think.  Then came panic.  A  scalding yellow fluid flooding his brain.  He had wanted to cry out “God!   Is this the way it’s going to be?   Forever?”  But of course he hadn’t because he couldn’t.  He could only shriek it in thought.

He had no idea how long the darkness lasted; he knew only that he had somehow become conscious of where he was; he neither saw nor felt nor heard, and yet he could in

some way sense, in some way “see”, or visualize, his surroundings.  He was conscious of everything at once, and his self seemed to inhabit the space he was conscious of, just as once his self  had seemed to inhabit his head.  He chuckled grimly, or thought he chuckled.  He was lying in a stainless steel box.  Its shiny inner sides were lined with white satin.  It extended a few inches beyond his feet, and somewhat less beyond his head.   Its upper limit lay perhaps three inches  above his nose, and his corpse lay on its floor.  Rigidly.  (he was already beginning to rot;  his eyes had sunk into their sockets, and his belly was a balloon inflating, swollen  by gases generated by decomposition;  his brain was an exploded mass in his skull, and his blood stagnant pools  in stomach and pelvis; there was a black hole between his eyes, and a gaping cavity in the back of his skull…).   He tried to visualize whether he was above or below ground, but could not.  The limits of his world were the limits of the steel box in which he lay supine, his collapsed eyes  blindly staring at its satin-lined roof.

      No, it was not at all like what he had expected.  He had probably given as much thought to death as anyone did – that is, as little as possible.  But those times he had, he had supposed there would be some instant, before which you felt and thought, and after  which you simply were not.  Oh, of course, he had admitted as intellectually possible  that he might live on after death, but certainly not like this.   He had put little stock in any conventional heaven, and even less in a conventional hell.   If he had really thought about an afterlife at all, he had supposed it to be totally unlike anything anyone could imagine.  And this was:  no one could really imagine perpetual solitary confinement, unable to move or speak, without even the hope of death to deliv—

Easy, easy, thought told him.  Think about something else, anything else.  Don’t think about that.

The puzzle of course was, what was it that was thinking?  Certainly he had no active brain cells – they died within minutes after the blood flow stopped, and anyway he felt outside his body.  So what was this entity that thought?  Thought implied memory, and memory matter.   Could he be thinking with the  brains of the living?  All the people who had known him, carrying around pieces of him stowed in their skulls…   He  had once hypothesized  a telepathic internet linking all men, as an explanation of Jung’s Unconscious.   But there was also consciousness, which did not depend on thought – and which thought did not depend on.   Thought was mechanical and could go on perfectly well without consciousness.    That was why some believed consciousness to be a mere epiphenomenon.  

But what generated  it?  In this case, not the brain for sure.   Well, anyway, call this consciousness that was aware of thought (his ego) the “soul”. 

But perhaps, perhaps he was only asleep and dreaming.  He no longer clutched at this with the hope he’d once had.  True (he went over the same arguments he had revolved before) he felt as if he were in a dream – that is, he could, as in a dream, somehow see himself from outside while nonetheless remaining an actor – if you could call this acting – but that was the only similarity to a dream.  He had no hope, as he remembered sometimes having in dreams,  that he could awake from this if he really wanted.  And it was a dream that had gone on a wretchedly long time.  He couldn’t begin to estimate the time, but it seemed infinitely longer than any dream he’d ever had.

No.  It was no dream.  Or if dream it was, it had come in the sleep of death, and he would never wake—

Hadn’t he, thought hastily skipped on, read about  people who had almost died and on reporting their experiences stated that they felt peculiarly light and free, that they almost hadn’t wanted to re-enter their body?  He didn’t feel light and free.  He felt weighed  down by this mass of decaying flesh sharing the coffin with the “soul” and his ego, as if he were somehow attached to it, as though his body were a rotting albatross  hung about the soul’s neck.  (liquified eyes, the hair seemingly flowing  from a shrunken scalp, the mouth, open, some putrescent liquid drooling from its corners…).   Mentally he licked a tongue over his mouth, but the ichor remained…(the belly had ruptured now,  greenish intestines  oozed out covered with a slimy fur of decay, glowing luminously  in the dark cavity against portions of flesh greasily white and maggot-infested…).  Thought wondered when flies had had a chance to settle on him.  But they were always around:  a housefly would be buzzing over the open mouth of the last dead human being on earth, the final victor.

Aware of his body, in a kind of congealing horror he tried to turn awareness away, but could not.  Thought  focussed awareness on the coffin.  Its white satin had turned powdery grey – cheap junk, thought offered.  Cheap.   The undertakers, they didn’t care.  Anything was good enough for the dead.  If they, just once, had to be buried in their own coffins… he dismally chuckled.  They would be.  That was the one sure thing.

Thought immediately returned to his body and he was vividly aware of viscous liquids soaking into the satin lining on the under side of his corpse.  He felt he retched.  Thought hastily turned away.  …he was going to be here forever, thought despaired, he was going to follow his body through every stage of decay, right down to the bone, and beyond, and finally there would be nothing in the coffin but dust, and a consciousness gibbering in madness…it’s not FAIR! he silently shrieked.  IT’S NOT FAIR!  IT’S NOT FAIR!   Nobody deserved this, no matter what their sins might be, give them Hell, yes, burn them, torture them, flay them, but don’t lock them up in utter loneliness with their own decaying selves…God, thought screamed, this was Hell.  This was Hell.  God, it prayed, don’t let me spend all Time here, God, don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T….!

An odd feeling it was, that his head was in two halves, and that the slightest motion might separate them; gingerly he allowed a tongue of thought to lick around his situation.  His mind  must have come completely unhinged.  He felt more himself, now, so long as he avoided a certain subject.  He did not mention the subject to himself.  It was forgotten, he told himself.  Did he understand that that particular subject was forgotten?  Yes he did, he replied.  That Subject was under no circumstances to be approached again, not even to be mentioned to himself.  Thought erected a wall between itself  and that Subject.  Mentally stepping back he surveyed the wall, but made no attempt to test it – he feared  it could be too easily breached.  The Subject, thought determinedly stated, was now imprisoned—  his mind backed hastily away; he had almost breached the wall without knowing it!

With the Subject walled off, he decided that he was in a comfortable restful place where he could think without interruption ..careful .. where he could think.  Just think.  About what?   Well, he could indulge himself, let his mind wander where it would ..so long  as it didn’t wander too near the Wall, behind which lay the Subject…he had always been a contemplative type.  Really, this was an opportunity, where he was…careful…to meditate.  He would meditate on his life, he decided, and perhaps find out why he was here..careful, careful.  He would just meditate on his life.  He would face facts.   And talk about facing the fact of death!...he was doing that, all right, thought comforted itself.        

Thought had just decided that, all his life, he had been selfish; rather proud of himself he felt, for facing this fact.  If his older sister could only see him now, she would not be able to reproach  him for his unwillingness to face facts.  “You don’t  face life,” she used to say.   “You just shut it

He  had thought:   People starving are far off, and floods don’t affect me.  Wars are elsewhere.   There’s nothing I can do about them so why think about them?  Was that a sin?  Or was it simply recognizing reality?  Could he help what he didn’t care about?

“Whenever something comes up you don’t like, you simply deny it; it’s as if you build a little wall around whatever is unpleasant in life, and suddenly it’s not there any more.  And you leave the rest of us to face it for you."

That was true, thought decided.  Proud of his new clear-sightedness, he admitted  to himself the justice  of her charge.  A dozen examples from his life could be cited, when he had simply ignored the unpleasant, and left others to see to practical affairs.  But after all he was – had been – a professor of philosophy:  no one expected him to be practical, least of all his students.  Everyone treated him as if he were a sort of intelligent imbecile, able to competently explicate Hegel and Kant, but unable to solve life’s simplest problems.   And that wasn’t true.   He had certainly dealt with his share of life’s problems, after all.   The worst – second worst – was when their little boy had died after being struck by a car; he had tried to comfort his wife by making her see that however painful it was, it had happened and there was no point to fruitlessly dwelling on it:  she should do as he was doing:  turn her back on the memory and look forward to the future.    They would have another child.   When a thing hurt, the best you could do was to forget about it as soon as possible and go on.   Any psychologist would tell you that dwelling on the past finally became sick.  

But she hadn’t seen it that way.

Probably her obsessively pursued grief – a grief he had tried to reason her out of – was why he had become infatuated by… well, no, interested in,  Sofìa.    That and the fact that his wife endlessly blamed him for their son’s death.    He had been walking along, she accused, in a trance, thinking about  Wittgenstein’s true thought or something, and had let little Timmy run out into the street.    Which wasn’t the case at all:  the child had been walking right beside him, and  he still couldn’t explain how it was that the next  instant Tim was in the street and brakes were screeching and—    But it certainly wasn’t his fault.   And even if it had been, beating his breast and blaming himself would not bring Tim back.   He had simply removed – well! set the incident aside, and gone on.   Still, though, that she tried to make him feel guilty, and that she herself was always in mourning, was certainly behind why he had noticed Sofìa in his freshman class.   He had suddenly discovered in her seventeen-year-old  self a rare talent for understanding philosophy.   And she was pretty.   And revered him.

      He had certainly never intended anything personal with her,  and that was why it was such a shock when she had shown up on his doorstep with a suitcase.   When his wife had seen her…!    As his wife looked on he coldly informed Sofìa that she had totally misunderstood their relationship, and  insisted that she return home.   He himself got in  the car and drove her back, telling her how sorry he was.   He explained to her father, an emotional Mexican, why he was not responsible.  But there was a scene and he had to run to his car to  keep the situation from degenerating.  It was after Sofìa took the overdose of  sleeping pills that her father had come looking for him with a pistol…

Thought could see now the kind of man  he’d been…never facing the trouble he’d caused,  running away from its consequences, hurting people with his selfishness, uncaring.  He certainly deserved any punishment meted out to him.   But thought saw all the wrong he’d done, now.  Thought saw how he should have acted.   That was what counted.  And of course thought was sorry.   So  surely  he would be let out of here.

Perhaps, he might come across  Sofìa  some time, then…

Relentlessly awareness included  his corpse, and thought tried to ponder something else.   (black strings of  flesh were falling from his bones; his hair had fallen from his scalp and was a thick felt-like mass embedded in the fluids-soaked satin, which itself was mushy and black; gleams of white bone peeped through the interstices of rotted flesh…).  He would avert his gaze, and could not.  It was as though he were frozen, hypnotized, forced to look at his rotting self as in some sort of interior mirror, and he panicked; he tried to scramble away, and felt himself more rigidly fixed; he felt the six steel sides close about him, and thought was shrieking let me out, let me out, let me out, LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT…!

      He felt exhausted.  He gazed at the rotting thing and, having no further energy, stopped fighting awareness of it..  Thought had offered a bribe to get out, and the bribe had been spurned.  Cheap.  He was cheap. His whole life had been a series of cheap attempts to avoid consequences.  A problem came up?  His response had been arguments to show why he was not responsible, or in any event why nothing could be done.  He had used thought, not to solve problems, but to mendaciously show that no problem existed or  anyway could not be solved.   He wished he had never been born, he felt his life had polluted a clean earth, and his death was polluting it yet again.  He gave up; if only awareness would cease and he could just die.  But he was dead.  And there was awareness.   That was a fact.   And he was that thing lying in the steel coffin, rotting.   He focused on  it.  The black and blistered flesh had dried, and was stuck to the bones, part of it had dried on the satin where it had dripped as it decayed.  Probably, all the air was used up.  Even the maggots were dead.  Bracing himself, he looked behind the Wall, at the Subject:   this was how he would spend eternity.   Alone, a sickening fragment of black matter that was the eternal part of him.  His true self.   Look at it.  Take a good look.  This is how you end up.   This is the real you.

In that moment he realized  that he was aware of the underside of the surface of the earth, and that below the surface there were plant roots and  worms and insects; a mole was burrowing a tunnel and he could feel their small satisfactions and its mole-ness, and below there was more soil, and below that, coffins,  and below them more earth and then rock strata.  Thought saw that somehow consciousness had expanded, and that the corner occupied by itself appeared small and mean by comparison.   Thought wondered what it all meant…

$100 Editors' Choice - LA ESPERANZA by Rodney Nelsestuen

Nelsestuen has an MFA in Writing from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has studied with novelists Sandra Benitez and Linda Rice; poet Deborah Keenan; writers Honor Moore, Sheila O'Connor, Larry Sutin, Barrie Jean Borich and Carol Bly; and playwright John Fenn. A member of the Loft Literary Center where he serves as an instructor, Nelsestuen won the 2008 Loft Mentor Series competition. He has also been a judge in the Minnesota Book Awards Contest in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction.

LA ESPERANZA

Rodney Nelsestuen

     Between the statues of Saint Francis and Saint Valentine the old man pats his donkey while he studies Miguel and Alicia at the tour stand. Under the coming heat of midday, her mother’s disapproval of Miguel, and Alicia’s own doubts of both his prospects and his fidelity, Miguel protests. He is no worse than the others. And as for prospects, he will soon own a piece of the agency. Alicia fears Miguel’s flight when he himself comes to see the truth of it.

     The old man ties red and yellow paper flowers to his donkey’s halter. A sturdy beast, the saddle blanket is for a larger animal and has the tipica red and yellow Aztec weave. A bright green and black design in the netted hemp cinch holds his saddle in place. The old man hangs a sombrero from the saddle horn where Miguel and Alicia turn as its rhinestones flash in the sun. The Polaroid around his neck swings side to side as he swats flies from the donkey’s eyes as if he didn’t know Polaroid is a poor choice in cameras.  

     Alicia feels the tick of time in her midriff, once hoping to entice an American tourist for more than what attracts them. And surely American men speak of love while their eyes grow wide with the vision of her straddling them as the dark girls do in lap dances in the strip bars near the border. She fingers her crucifix.

     Miguel leans over and shakes his finger. She looks down. He touches that same finger to her chin and pulls her head upward until their eyes meet. The tension goes out of him as she reaches for his cheek with her fingers while the flies have left the little donkey’s eyes.

     The old man surveys the lack of shade at midday, wipes the donkey’s sweat from around its eyes and checks the film of which there is abundance.

     Alicia’s polo shirt has its collar turned up under the sweep of hair held up by the comb. Her great, dark hair: the casual suspension within the comb’s grasp – except the carefully loosened swatch that falls across her eyes at propitious moments during Miguel’s scoldings, when a fingered removal and sideways glance take the terrible air from his anger.

     The old man considers the true power of the sun. Age brings the wisdom: to take the donkey, to go home, to rest and not bear the fretful heat of midday. There are no dollars for there are no tourists and the donkey thirsts although he never speaks of it. Alicia smiles as they pass from the space between the statues of St. Francis and St. Valentine. The swatch of hair falls over the eye that tears up.

     Miguel is angry. A seediness of age beyond his years settles across his face under the hot sun. Alicia, chastened in his disapproval, cannot escape hope in the memory of the old man. That, and the care for the donkey.