Guest judge Lacy M. Johnson, author of the memoirs Trespasses and The Other Side, has chosen four outstanding stories from a competitive selection pool of hundreds.
“They believed in a separatist nation of underdogs, all for the unreasonable purposes of art, which is human folly, which is monasticism, which is free jazz; they came to Marfa to defend the turkeys of Marfa, even should they need to lay down their own lives to do so.”
“…after another long silence I make a comment about the weather being warm for this time of year. Dostoyevsky’s response touches on the nature of love, the devil, and doctors, and is too deep for me to comprehend.”
“She could go out to lunch every day if she wanted, or meet friends at the country club. But she likes to stay home and drink. When does she start? Noon at the latest. And eat. She really likes to eat. Which is how I came to meet her again, after all these years.”
“Angel of Strawberry, Angel of Grape, your purple body
not only fills these coffins
but takes the shape of the coffin—emptiness
made whole…”
“Gentleness when she was quiet and roughness when she spoke—I kept turning these two opposites around until I pictured a snowy landscape, the softly falling snow. Such a gentle death had never happened on the fields I had excavated.”
“Never, willingly, has she touched the beast. When it rides her for days on end its skin burns like several tons of stomach acid. How will she get it into the hole?“
“My father held the road, and my mother read the map, while I luxuriated in the temporary absence of gravity, watching postcard abstractions of sky, trees, rocks and clouds pixilate through the window, an undulating display of elements. I imagined crossing the divide between the back seat and the front, to the world inhabited by my parents, and what it might feel like to be welcome there.”
“And suddenly it seems like me and all the kids and Mrs. Candler are squeaking madly. Surreal. Fellini meets Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons.”
