The winners for the 2011 Literary Awards Program are in! The grand prize goes to: Lance Larsen for Seventeen Ways to Float. In second place is: Angie Chuang for The Four Words for Home In third place we have: Emily Stone for In Search of Chocola: Love, Chocolate, and Language in Guatemala
Literary Awards Program
Spirit Theft
Tacánecy tenses as she waits to begin her next count. The lightning is closer now, and she readies herself for a silent and measured five. She prays her sleeping husband will not hear the sound she is about to make.
Despite herself, she jumps when a piercing flash lances through the window in the opposite wall and, in a spasm of blue-white light, illuminates her husband’s Hawken rifle hanging on the wall beside her. It flickers lethally for a moment before the room goes black again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Her grip tightens on the soft doeskin shroud on the floor at her feet.
Five. On cue, the thunderclap vibrates through the soles of her moccasins and rattles a china cup against its shelf-mate. Its roar masks the whisper of leather against wood as she drags the bundle a few steps closer to the cabin door.
Shasta’s Monsters
“Floor ‘Z,’ please.” The school elevator was packed, but no one spoke. I noticed several kids glancing at me in the reflection from the brass doors. RING! “Excuse me,” I said, squeezing out into the hall. I was the only one. The doors closed and the elevator resumed its journey. I heard conversation as it sped away. They didn’t trust me. I threw my gym bag up over my shoulder and began down a short hall toward a set of very large double doors. “Whatever. They just don’t know you yet,” I told myself. A shiny plaque on the wall read: Acuity and Physiology. I paused for a second and took a deep breath, mustering strength. “You got this!” I said as I pushed one of the big doors aside and walked nervously to a large desk in a well-lit, modern-looking waiting room. “Hi.”
The Life of Umberto Cavallo and Other Matters
Berto’s earliest memory was not of a vision but a smell. It came from under the door of the room that he was forbidden to enter. He’d been playing a game with sticks and pebbles on the floor – war, against the Austrians – while his mother simultaneously nursed the newborn and rode verbal and physical herd over his younger brother and sister. The older brothers were outside working the vineyard with his father and the older sisters were for the moment out of the kitchen and on various errands of some sort.
He was oblivious to the domestic commotion around him. He put his head down against the stone floor and sighted an imaginary rifle. “Fump!” Down went an Austrian. Then “fump-fump-fump!” More white-coats fell. “Move ahead!” he commanded. Then in another voice: “Retreat! Retreat! Over the mountains and behind these trees.” His eyes scanned the battlefield with minute intensity while his arm and hand, descending from the sky, orchestrated troop movements.
Wooden Nickels
I followed the Metal Men. I watched them load baskets of fish, meat, water, and charcoal, and finally the enormous carved pole into their steel boat. I stood on the beach as they rowed out to their silent, looming vessel, the leader clinging to the pole and barking orders to the others. And in the gathering darkness, I longed to join them. Something had changed in me. With a kind of metallic click, I found myself snipped off from my people. At the moment that the strange chief unhooked the contraption from its chain, I understood that it was not his heart, and that he was just a man with wondrous objects. The other Trojans saw this, too, but for them, it was the magic of the objects that mattered. The visitor’s watch was a talisman for them. For me, it became a compass. It pointed to a universe of technology and industry, of science and time. These things were out there somewhere, over the waters, and I wanted to go there.
Someone Like Me
I was eight when Perry Cole moved into Blacksburg. She was special ed. She was tall with string for hair, and no one even saw her. All the special ed kids were invisible, except when they weren’t and we’d snicker and watch our boys toss paper at them, make kissing faces at the skittish girls. She wasn’t dumb, not even slow. Perry was quiet, silent really. She never answered her teachers before coming to our town—at least that’s what I figure now because I’ve talked to her. I don’t mean to say that I was her friend, but just that I knew maybe a bit of her.
Witness
The boy’s body hit the hood of the Toyota, slammed off the windshield, and then slid, falling out of sight from where Marie stood. She thought it might have been a performance, it happened so quickly, but there was no mistaking the terrible, high-whistle screeching of hot rubber on asphalt, the dull thud as the kid’s body hit the street. His bike crumpled under the front wheels as though it was fake, made of foil. People flooded the street, retail workers from the stores, good Samaritans pulling over in their cars to help, but Marie was frozen, waiting for someone to tell her it was just a joke.
A Beautiful Evening
He remembered her long nose. A Meryl Streep nose: it bisected her face on the vertical axis, while her high cheekbones and eyebrows did the same on the horizontal. When they were sleeping together, he had wanted to crack open her deadpan disinterest, to find the smoldering he knew was underneath. He never found it. Their affair had dissipated like smoke.
In the Coal Mine Shadows
The first year after Henry’s death, the Blackwells cleared the hilly land. By the next spring, a half-dozen acres were ready to plant. On a frosty March morning, Mary headed to Harrisonburg. In her right pants pocket was ninety-two dollars folded over with twine into a tight, thick wad. She could feel its weight on her thigh, but she reached into her pocket just to feel it, to touch it and make sure it was still there. This was her and Henry’s life savings, and most of it would be spent that day on those little black specks of gold called burley seed. The future of the Blackwell family depended upon seeds.
Next Year in Paradise
Ginnie and Roger were already planning next year’s trip, when they’d just arrived for this year’s annual family vacation, one of the lesser Caribbean islands with a Catholic-sounding name. They preferred to just call it Paradise, as in Next year in Paradise we’ll rent a car for the far beach, the one with the goats. When their daughter Maxine was little, Roger would hoist her on his shoulders to hang their bag of peanut butter sandwiches from a high branch so the mangy gray goats couldn’t nuzzle for a bite. By next year, Maxine’s baby would be old enough to make goat sounds, if Ginnie sang “Old MacDonald’s Farm” like she used to with Maxine.