We’ve slowly been posting the winners and finalists from the 2010 Literary Awards Program over at the journal.
Tag Archives: 2010
The Life of Umberto Cavallo and Other Matters
December 6, 2010 – 6:00 am
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
November 18, 2010 – 9:36 am
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
November 15, 2010 – 9:44 am
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
November 10, 2010 – 9:48 am
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
November 2, 2010 – 6:00 am
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.