RAMONA, KANSAS by Matthew Adams

Author's note
The following is a work of complete fiction and is in no way a depiction of the real Ramona, Kansas. From what I've heard, it's actually a lovely place.

~

In the line at the post office, everyone faces the back of heads, or shoe gazes. Except one, and he's looking to his left at an old bulletin board riddled with colourful tacks, and missing children posters. The man wonders why some are even still there, as the “last seen on” date was more than twenty years ago. As always his eyes eventually settle upon one child, over to the side. Something washes up and crests in the back of his throat. The man wipes his tears on the absorbing cotton of his sleeve. The entrance door jangles a bell, lifting these old eyes up to meet hers.

And now we're pretty much the only ones in this little bar. There's a slouch on a stool, his head curls down and hangs over his beer. He's really thin and the bar maid, who is nice looking, tells him softly that she can't serve him any more beer. He nods accordingly. The bar maid then cracks fresh ice with a pick, maintaining her casual ease.

A small band can hardly be contained by the even smaller stage. Their instruments of euphony poke out into the rest of the bar like pins from a cushion. The drummer's suit shakes dust from itself whenever he moves. A microphone stands in front of the stage, waiting for Pearl's “right quick” bathroom break to end. We can hear a faint flush and moments later she walks out into the open. Pearl is probably close to 50 years old and her hair needs to be dyed again as there are flecks of gray throughout. The one piece dress that clings to her noticeable belly folds is blue and sparkles and it's like she's a queer specter floating across the bar towards the stage. She speaks to her band for a moment and then sings with a great confidence that her average voice shouldn't allow. We can't make out the words but it's probably sad as she hangs her head and holds onto the stand.

~

Excerpt from The American Standard, June. 14th, 1986. Interview with Winston Gale, self proclaimed eccentric billionaire and man behind the much talked about “Gale Towers”.

AS: Thank you again for taking the time to talk to us. We realize you must be pretty busy right now.

WG: Oh, no problem. I think I read your magazine everyday, actually. I love it.

AS: I think you know what the first question is. Why build these enormous parallel towers in Ramona, Kansas of all places?

WG: (laughs) Well, yes everyone's been asking or curious about that now, haven't they? I'll tell you, as a foreigner in this country (born and raised in London, England) with a wealth of funds I've taken every advantage to see and breathe in every crevice of this land. In Ramona I found this wonderful little place that was like no outsider had laid eyes on it. Like an undiscovered island in Fiji. It seems like any other sleepy little town, but I felt something in Ramona. The people and the town are alive in a way that few things are.

AS: Well that narrows down Ramona as a locale. Now why these infamous towers?

WG: What better way to give back to this little community that has been so nice to me. To my understanding things are not so well there. Financially, that is. Many men were able to have jobs in constructing the towers. Now that they're done, people will maintain them and work in the gift shops. And ultimately, my friend, all this attention being deservedly brought to Ramona will kick their economy into a fever pitch.

AS: Why specifically towers?

WG: (pause) Well, why not towers?

AS: That's a point, I guess.

WG: (laughs)

AS: The Gale Towers open in only a few more weeks. There's rumors of an extravagant opening ceremony. Can you go into any details?

WG: I can tell you that there will be an unforgettable act or stunt or what have you involving the towers. It will take your breath away. Also, that there will be a very special guest. One of the most hilarious and genuine women I've had the pleasure of meeting while traveling the country, the lovely Miss Audrey Hepburn.

The American Standard, June. 14Th, 1986. All rights reserved

~

Behind Grace is the little homely looking gas station where she filled up before making the last trek across the steaming highway to her mother. The road is just a black tar run cutting through a wheat field. In the way that Oz was visible to Dorothy from a distance, Grace can easily make out Ramona. This is entirely thanks to two tragically large towers that stand faded blue into the sky with the tiny bumps of a town sitting beneath.

The town seemed like it was ready to be blown out into the blank surroundings. The vibrant paint that was once put on the downtown buildings in preparation for the towers was now chipped and weather beaten. The towers themselves, Grace observed as she walked between them, were fairly thin, about 100 feet apart and 70 stories high. In coming up to Ramona, the towers didn't look so bad. Strange, out of place, but powerful. Now, being this close, Grace could see them for the incredible eye sore that they truly are. Held together by weak stitches from crooked masons, their entrances boarded up and graffiti tattooing the sides.

While on this sidewalk, cracked and breached by weeds and dandelions that came up for air, Grace travels in her mind to the night before the towers opened. The town being walked on by foreign feet, everyone and everything painted in a midnight blue on account of the sun signing off. Each store and restaurant like a glowing orange box to the outside. The carnival, like many of its kind, only looked nice and appealing at night. Everyone walking towards technicolor swinging steel. And all these people never to come back, just leaving behind wrappers and hysterically quiet days. When the media coverage on the towers fizzled out and Gale lost interest so did tourists, that was about ten years ago. In that time Ramona's face lift fell off and Gale had went and shot himself along with his boyfriend. That's how he died.

When Grace opens the door to the bar, it's like opening a coffin for a cigarette and beer corpse. Her eyes adjust shakily to the new found darkness, stumbling over some leg of a table before finding a seat. Her mother, a swaying blueberry disco ball, putting the last vocal brush strokes on a tune from her own pen.

Pearl finishes and can see her Grace sitting alone clapping. She giddily hops off the stage and over to her daughter. Grace stands up, arms open. She's gotten heavier since last time. Pearl tells her this after the hug.

“Mom.” sighed Grace.

“Always were real cute in the face, though.”

“Do you wanna just go home? How's Sam?”

“Oh, Jesus.” spat Pearl.

A green fence fingers out of the snow and winds around the rotting baseball field. We can hardly see through these big fat flakes, but there are two kids trudging their way through snow that goes past their knees. One is in a pink suit and she screams “Sam!” at the one in blue after he shoves snow down her neck. Sam laughs and throws his head back as he tramps towards the fence, leaving her behind to fish the cold stuff out.

Sam dives for the fence, managing to throw most of his weight over. For a brief moment he seesaws on his belly, feeling the fence's arrow points painfully. He quickly falls over to the other side, face first into the white hump which gives away like paper. Sam quickly jumps up, face frozen, he looks back at the pink object in the distance pointing and laughing at him. “Megan! Shhhh!” Sam tries to say more but trails off as he presses the mittens against his face, the snow was already melting off.

Megan stands in front of the fence, a little tornado of flakes blows about in front of her. Sam taunts, splashing snow at his sister. Megan waits for the tornado to find new ground and then makes to climb the million year old fence. A rumbling in the skies draws Sam's head up. He stands, mouth open, a few snow flakes land on his tongue. His eyes scan the clouds. Looking back at Megan, who's on top of the fence now, he asks if she hears that noise. No response. Sam looks up again, turns from Megan and starts walking towards the deeply buried pitchers mound. Yellow and red lights flash warm and dull through the clouds. Sam stops in his tracks. The lights guide over to his sister, who's distorted and occasionally visible though flakes. It looks as if she is floating against the fence. A chest quaking rumble makes Sam cover his already muffed ears. The lights hover over Megan, her collar is yanked to the flashes and bursts above. Sam takes two steps forwards but turns and runs as the rumbling grows higher. He doesn't stop running until he is through the woods and grabbing his mother while she shovels the front steps.

“Aliens.”

“Where this time?”

“Outside of Randy's one night...Saturday.” said Sam

“Does he still have that meth lab?”

“Nope, it blew up”

“Seriously? That was in his garage, was anyone hurt?” Grace wanted know.

“Muffin lost her front leg. That's his cat.”

Sam sat in a swivel chair, leaned back near the window. A breeze picked up, trembled the light curtains and blew his dark thinning hair. Grace sat on the edge of his unmade bed. Her brother smelt like sour milk. That's mostly what she kept thinking about. Years from now and until Grace passed on to the lord, sour milk would always remind her of this moment with Sam.

Her brother talked of patterns in the skies, weather and economic sequences that are all pointing to an external other worldly force. Grace walked over to the window where Sam sat, leaned over and poked her head out the window. A bird on the branch adjacent only said tweet-tweetin' then shuffled off to find a less scrutinized tree. Grace asked her brother if he still had his telescope. He did. She asked him if, tonight, he could point out the constellations, the buckle of Orion's belt and where the saucers cruise the galaxy fantastic. Sam said okay. They dug the apparatus out of the closet and sat assembling together. A breeze blew the instructions under the bed.

Outside the door to the bedroom, Pearl stood for a moment and then walked away downstairs. She sat cross legged next to her bed, surrounded by pictures, albums, the beaten report cards and scholastic macaroni pictures. This is exactly what Pearl would do when Grace came to visit, which was rare now. She held a dog eared photo in her hands. Running fingers across it, the gloss now ceased to exist. It's just old and has a deep crease in the middle, separating the gone from the here. To the left, Washington and Megan. Herself, Sam and Grace on the right. Pearl can remember her sister took the picture at a family reunion. It was the second take because grampy walked in front of the lens on the first try. You could see a lake behind them all, and trifle on the picnic table. Leaving Washington after Megan disappeared didn't make sense but it was the most sensible thing Pearl could think to do. Ramona is small, but she still managed to avoid him mostly. Until today while going to mail a letter, and he was standing in line. They spoke and managed to maintain something Pearl thought would have been lost. A genuine respect and interest in one another. Maybe he would stop by to visit later, with her and the kids. They could all eat and be good too.

Up in the air a jet tore through clouds and just missed colliding with another. Two more jets joined in, racing neck and neck before looping over one another, trailing puffy white exhaust like thread. Way, way down on the ground fingers pointed upwards, kids' eyes widened and their hands quickly covered their ears when one would roar over their heads.

Winston Gale stood on a stage with his hands shaking over the crowd. He stamped his feet with the exuberance of a faith healer whipping the sick out of the sickly. An older but none the less beautifully classy woman put her slender hand on Gale's arm to try and calm him down. She had said some nice words to the town earlier. People were surprised at how short she was in person.

The roars from the sky eventually ceased and Gale shifted focus upon a thick red rope connecting the two towers. What he said into the microphone brought out gasps and and excited chatting. Washington and his family had decided this would be a good thing to go to. Grace was catching the 4:30 bus out of Ramona and almost half way across the country to school.

They all stood together, Sam eating a hot dog Washington had bought, and Pearl dabbing the ketchup off his shirt. Gale yelled something out like “from France” although no one could really hear him, but they all took notice when a woman appeared in a window on the left tower. She stood in front of the rope, above them all, in a red body suit. Now that she was more visible, the audience clapped and cheered down below. A red cape billowed out from behind her and ripped around in the wind. The people of Ramona went silent as this red woman removed her cape and put her arms out like a T. One step out. Two steps. Soon she was towards the middle of the rope. Not a word from the crowd below. Grace felt Sam squeezing the back of her leg. She looked down as he looked up, completely neglecting his hot dog. Grace put a hand on his shoulder and joined his gaze upward.

The red woman looked straight up, now in the middle of the rope. She paused and breathed deep several times. She brought her head back down and maintained eye contact with her manager waiting at the other end.

He smiled.

She finished.

Now resting in her manager's arms, the red woman teared up and began to cry as she heard the huge response from the crowd. This was, after all, only her second time with no net and she had performed flawlessly They applauded louder when she stuck her head out of the window, waving and blowing kisses. Later, on stage, as the ceremony came to a close she threw her cape out to Ramona like a bridal bouquet.

The family said good bye in front of the bus. Pearl probably cried the most. They watched and watched as the bus got smaller and smaller into the blue.

There's a restaurant 'slash' bar grand opening in a couple of hours. That sounded pretty good to Washington. Although, Pearl had requested to be able to sing with a local band they had performing there. He didn't know how that'd be.

It's just Washington and Sam later on, driving in the car from their home to city hall. Then they had to stop off at the rec center and post office before meeting Pearl at the bar. Sam, in the passenger's seat, is quietly staring out the open window as they drove. In the back of the vehicle, on the floor, are pictures Washington had taken of Megan at the park one summer ago. Distracting from his child enjoying that wonderful day was the giant MISSING looming over her head. Five months she had been gone. Only a week since Pearl had yelled at him about wanting to go on with everything and took all the MISSING's down. But what is the harm in having them up anyway? None harm. The car made its way to their second stop, passing people in line for the towers with kids in their arms and dogs at their sides. An hour ago a woman had walked above them on thin air.

And now we're pretty much the only ones that can see Sam's face as he gazes into the side car mirror. He's watching a boy, about his age, who he recognizes from school. The boy has his arms out like a T as he walks along the edge of a curb. Not nearly as sturdy as the red woman, he wobbles and catches his balance. That magnificent god damn cape is around his neck and licks the air. Sam starts to lose sight of him as the car goes down hill. The boys' balance is shaken once again as he sinks out of view. The cape waves good bye and Sam wishes the boy caught himself.

***************************************************************************************

RAMONA, KANSAS earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

***************************************************************************************

Matthew Adams was born and raised in the small town of Summerside in Prince Edward Island, Canada. He has had a keen interest in story telling since a young age. In elementary school he wrote many sequels to the popular 'Gremlins' films. All were well received by teachers and classmates. It was only within the last year that Matthew became interested in writing again and is currently working on a novel. Matthew has a diploma in digital filmmaking and hopes to make a go at a profession in that industry in the not too distant future.

###

FIELDS OF GOLD by Dr. Stephen DB Jefferies

Joyful I step into a golden field. In days the harvest will drop at the will of the stone-sharpened scythe, the grain threshed from the mother stalk, collected and poured like honey into sacks, then rocked in wagons to the railroad depot. But for now the feathery tips tickle my palms and swish against my skirts, and around me, to the horizon, is the undulating gold, bending in the Chinook wind as if God Himself runs His hand through His hair.

Walk on open heart, in step to the quickening. I ache to press my lips against his smile, to let my hair come down and mingle gold on gold as I fall into his arms, but when all I see is ripe barley for a thousand miles, I know that I shall not see him, that he is here in spirit only.

~

I wake with tears. My hands are clasped prayerfully across my chest; elbows, forearms and fingers numb in mock death. And the dream rushes at me like the West Wind, the strongest of winds, the breath of Mudjekeewis, and lifts me from my slumber quickly to the dresser, to pick up my journal, to write down each fragment immediately, lest I should fail in the moment to embellish the record with other memories, other dreams, other truths.

From my room I look out east at the Red Swan floating in a purple haze. The barley fields glow with sunrise flame. The Indian winter trade has filled our stores with salmon, mountain trout and buffalo. The wet spring saw the ploughing and sowing tableaux across the fields, for anyone who would paint them, and now the crops respond to the summer heat.

At the window I issue thanks and rest my forehead on the cabin wall. Only death will take me from this place, for I love it as I love my memories. It is part of me. It hunkers down in winter, resistant to wind-whipped snow, but in spring the windows and doors are flung wide open and prairie breezes blow through west to east, bringing the promise of rejuvenation.

~

I drop my pail at the door and, leaving a shortening shadow on the porch, move, cooling, into the main room.

"There’s a newcomer on the other side of the River, toward Minot Town," says Poppa.

Momma hunts busily at the range. Poppa sits spread at the table, his eyes focused on cleaning his gun. The two boys are beside him, watching, eating.

"I made some pies yesterday," says Momma, and opens the pantry door and looks in.

"Elinore, you can take one over."

"And ask him to Sunday lunch," says Poppa.

My sweet brothers, how your faces howl with silent, indignant screams, knowing that my chores are now yours! But contrast that with my happiness: moan and groan, yet still manage to get the work done in time to go fishing, you loveable rogues.

Lily of the prairie, Wenonah, is a strong horse, but she likes me, and she likes to run, streaking along, her white mane flicking my laughing face. Like a tick on her neck I suck her zest as she carries me on and on as if I were not there. Together we race along the riverbank, heading north until we reach the ford, a place where scattered rocks and shingle reduce the depth of the river. It is rushing, and four feet deep, so, untying the laces of my boots and removing them and my stockings, I hoist my skirts up round my waist and urge Wenonah into the dark, crystal water; it is cold, and she blows and snorts as the Taquanemaw slaps her belly.

The sun still climbs when I reach his homestead. A thin smoke spiral rises from the chimney. In a small corral is a short-horn cow with her calf and between her cloven toes chickens inspect and stab the dirt. A family of hogs root at the side of the shack; the black backed sow gives me a bloodshot glare. A big dog thumps its tail against the earth, embarrassed because he is too old to get up to protest my arrival.

I stand in the stirrups and holler. Wenonah clops forward and I can smell acid earth, wood smoke, and bacon. I wonder what kind of man comes out here, alone.

Suddenly he is there at my bridle. And look at me: boots tied around my neck, skirt around my thighs, ruckled on the saddle in the gallop. My fault for riding like a man. He is amused, I think, and I take instant offence and my cheeks flush, yet I am staring at him.

The sun is strong and he puts one hand up to shade his eyes. Now I can see their darkness. They look deep, like the middle of the Taquanemaw, where currents fast tug at your legs if you swim when the river is in full spate. It seems to me that I can feel something swirling around, pulling me as I talk to him, but I ignore it because I am a strong swimmer.

~

At the Midsummer Dance it remains light until eleven o’clock. The sun slips below the horizon and leaves a rim of magenta sky, which shades into purple, and then finally, over my head, becomes an inky indigo through which stars shine.

All night I dance with John Buckley. Poppa stands by the band and pounds his hands together in time to the beat, his face split by a huge smile. Momma sits with her friends. Poppa makes her dance with him a couple of times and once I catch her eye, and in that glance she makes it plain that she is simply doing her duty. In reply, I flick out my skirts in a promenade, and laugh.

John Buckley and I walk through the fields, our fingers entwined, brushing the tips of the harvest.

"Can you see the future?" he says.

"Sometimes."

I have learned the enticement of enigma.

He smiles approvingly.

"Will you stay with me?"

"Yes."

"Will you be my love?"

"I am."

He laughs a little at this.

"I promise," I say, slightly hurt. "I will stay with you forever."

He sighs and pulls off an ear of barley, rubs it in his hands, blows the chaff away and drops a few grains into my palm. I put some in my mouth, crunch them, then spit them back onto the earth. He does the same.

"I can’t make promises like you," he says. "In the past I made promises." He looks up, shows me the line of his jaw, the conch of his ear, and stares over his shoulder, towards the east, his origin. "And I’ve broken a few." He turns to me.
"But I swear…"

I put my fingers to his lips.

"No," I say, and drop to the ground, pulling his arm. He kneels beside me, trembling. We do not speak. He kisses me. I feel the pressure of his lips, the thrill of his tongue against mine and, as we lie together, I imagine that I am floating in the golden harvest.

The barley sways and whispers, but he stands suddenly, pulls me to my feet, then stretches out his arm parallel with the horizon and makes a broad sweep.

"Just imagine many years have passed." He points to a hollow by a tree. "Children, running. Can you hear their laughter? And there is the house, the open door, a welcome to our friends, and all around is the ready harvest."

My eyes are closed. His face touches mine, his breath is soft in my mouth as he gives me his words, his promise.

So is it you, John Buckley, who prompts the pictures in my mind?

"One day you’ll remember me," he says, eyes closed against the summer sky.

The stalks of barley stretch to infinity.

"We are quite safe," he says.

I shrink and squirm my wing-blades into the red soil, closer to the pulsing earth, and crackle the barley nest as I shake my head. An Englishman in North Dakota? A man who talks in riddles and boasts, and utters poetry, speaking with crisp clear consonants and soft rounded vowels produced from the largest space at the back of the throat, the space where the tongue takes root.

"Who shall I tell about this?" I tease.

"No one."

"Then only we will know."

"And Him,’ he says, pointing his arm straight up, then flattening his palm to shade my eyes so I can stare at the penumbral glare.

"Gheezis," he says, "the Great Sun, the Beholder, has seen everything, and he is jealous."

"He should be," I whisper.

~

Poppa looks up briefly, lamplight on his weathered face. He is mending a broken halter, the one used on the harvester. Soon, everyone will be in the fields before dawn and home after dusk, almost twenty hours on the longest days, and we will be heartened by the volume of the harvest and Poppa’s booming voice exhorting us to "Keep on." Momma works as hard as he does, but when we stop to rest she is the one who carries barley wine round to the hired hands, while I follow and give out thick slabs of honey wheat cake.

I stand quietly at his elbow.

"There’s a storm coming," he says, and carries on working. I help steady a leather strap as he threads it through a metal ring.

"I know. At the well I could feel the heat on one side of my face and a chill on the other, and the air smells different."

"That’s right," he says.

I am aware of the rolling tempest that nears as we speak: Annemeeke, the thunder, and Waywassimo, the lightning, in deadly partnership with Mudjekeewis. They often come in the night.

By morning the fields are flat.

I fly on a winged horse, brushing grey clouds that press down from the dome of the sky. Poppa rides with me, his steed a fistful of sinew and muscle. At the edge of the farm we soar to the top of a hill and look back at the cabin. The sun breaks through the clouds in great shafts of light. Of our one thousand acres the storm has taken half.

"We’ll have to dig into reserves," he says. "No point getting upset. What’s done is done. Learn from it if you can."

"But what can we learn from this?" I say to myself, to Poppa, and to God.

His gaze rises and fixes on the horizon.

"Something," he says, voice husking, and gently turns his horse away.

~

Come now midnight, one of many in my long winter and, as usual, I am sitting in front of the fire. The glow from the hearth lights up your face in orange and gold and I can see your smile shine through the darkness, a light etched in my memory. You are a poet, yet it is I who know you by heart.

"You can’t leave." I am crying, sobbing, my face ugly, and you don’t care how awful I look because you love me. Nothing in Heaven or on Earth can change that.

"I won’t get through the winter." His voice is flat and toneless. "I’m going to Grand Forks. There’s a mining company, they need people."

"Can’t you borrow money? What about the bank? My father?"

John shakes his head slowly, in time to a distant clock. The seconds pass, one by one.

He says, "In a couple of years—"

"In a couple of years we could all be…anything can happen!"

I am shouting.

This time he approaches, stands behind my chair, stoops and kisses my neck, breathes through my hair, and I am calmed.

"Remember me every day, and I will think of you remembering me, and then, you will know that I am thinking of you. Mornings in April, secrets, laughing like children, warm summer nights, my voice, whispering through the barley. And never forget, I have shown you the future."

~

So I remember. I see his face in the flames of the fire, in the folds of a snowdrift, in the contours of a cloud.

A letter. Poppa collects it from Minot Town when he goes for supplies. He stands in front of the fire, hands pressed against the oak bressummer; after years of smoke and heat it is cracked and split and black as liquorice.

I have not seen Poppa shake before. He moves away, paces the edge of the Hessian rug, stepping over Mische, who lies with his muzzle on crossed paws, slivers of white at the rims of his eyes, making canine sense of the human world.

Eventually one hand crumples the letter. Momma looks into the hearth. The boys are silent, anxious. Every crack from the fire is a rifle shot, each sigh a lament.

"What does it say?"

That’s my voice, but from where it comes I do not know. I feel as if I cannot stand for another second, and yet if I move I think my knees will snap.

Poppa knows that he has been displaced in the hierarchy of love, and that is why he shakes when he tells me that there has been a mining accident at Grand Forks and the authorities are contacting the next of kin.

"And may I ask, who is that?" I say quietly.

Some silences last forever. The wind back-drafts down the chimney, strokes the flames, and coaxes them into life.

"You," he replies.

~

I am back, a long time since, with an ache in my chest like a twisted muscle. On many occasions my toes have spread into the glacial earth that enfolds his body. Skin to skin, my way of feeling him.

The fields reach in every direction to a cobalt-blue sky. This summer, the heads of gold, coarse tresses trailing, sway like dancers mimicking nature mimicking dancers, but I have no more tears.

He left in autumn. The leaves were turning.

~

I wake. The fire is out; there is just a glow, the memory of flame. I get up and walk outside. Through the mist I imagine running children, hear their laughter, indistinct in the distance. And there, at the tip of his finger, is the house, the door open to our never friends. And all around me the harvest sings, lifting more than a million voices to the rising sun, staring from a jealous sky.

Sometimes I can taste the bitter grain.

**************************************************************************************

FIELDS OF GOLD earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

**************************************************************************************

Steve Jefferies is a family doctor in Surrey, England. Married with four children, Steve graduated from the University of Chichester with an MA in Creative Writing in 2004. He has been published in the online magazine Pulp.net.

###

LETTERS FROM THE HOTEL by G. L. Osborne

She recognises the handwriting immediately. I’m at some hotel, it says. My room overlooks the rubbish bins. The place smells like something’s rotting. I’ll write again when I know more.

Her heart gives a forward bound, as though starting. A fly buzzes on the sill, punching above its weight. The smell of baking bread forces its way in from the bakery across the road. A label on her cotton top scrapes the back of her neck.

The glaring white shimmer of light on the white page. The familiar writing, its immediacy. Words from him at last.

Now she begins to shiver, unfrozen but suddenly so cold. Her teeth chatter. From nowhere the phrase hot water bottle, an image of pink rubber, an imagined feel of intense heat. A memory from childhood. No one owns hot water bottles now.

Her socked feet drag on the floor. Dust mice roll lazily in the drafts coming under the door. Lifting a corner of the bulky quilt. Sliding under it like a knife into water – quickly, cleanly, and down into a thousand-year sleep.

Much later, watching water boiling in a saucepan. (The kettle burnt out weeks ago, soon after he went. She hadn’t been able to stir, and the kettle had whistled itself dry and shat out its base.) Now – watching small bubbles appear around the water’s edge, the gathering of impetus, the sudden rush of boiling – she blows out the flame with the gusto of a birthday girl. Changing her mind, she switches off the gas. Sometimes better not to follow things to their logical conclusion.

A telephone call. Say nothing to anyone about his letter until there is some sort of plan. "Lisa, I’m not up to visitors. It’s been one of those days."

That night a vision of him between the thighs of Erin. Torment. A sense of betrayal like claws dragged down a blackboard, on and on. The claws do not stop; the blackboard does not end. What can you do?

A rash on the back of the neck. Miniscule, raised red dots, painless. Maybe it’s from sleeping between dirty sheets.

The next day another letter.

People aren’t friendly here. There’s a woman who seems to be in charge, who allocates the rooms. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her. Someone said she owns the hotel.

I can’t get used to the smell. I think it’s boiling mince and rubbish bins and disappointment and old sex, but I’m not sure. I asked her for another room because I can’t sleep with the stink of the rubbish. She said, "You can’t just turn up here out of nowhere and expect the penthouse suite."

Inhaling the scent of the ink – that familiar blue, peacock blue, eyes-of-Erin blue. Peacock-blue washable. A tear, a smear.

Her own eyes speckled brown and grey. Sparrow-coloured. Dark-lashed. Unusual. Always her best feature until he’d said one day, "You could get some coloured lenses, you know. That gorgeous cut-glass blue."

A loud pounding on the door. The shadows long across the floor. Where’s the day? An omelette left outside, with little honeyed carrot wheels and a note from Liz. Darling, you need to think less about him and more about yourself.

Like that’s going to happen. Liz dispenses truisms like Oscar Wilde throwing out bon mots. You have to eat more food to keep your immunity up. Don’t drink; you only feel worse next day. If you cry too much, the skin on your eyes starts to go. It’s supposed to hurt; that way you know you’re human. Have a good cry; there, there, better out than in. The only way round it is through it.

Night, day, night, day. Shadows across the floor. Trips to the toilet; no pants to pull up. A boiling saucepan and scalding tea. The rash creeps around to the front of the neck.

There’s a state of consciousness into which you can drop whereby there’s stillness and no time. Just a holding still. You might be cupping a mug or have your hairbrush in your hand, but suddenly the shadows are all that much longer, and there’s a pounding on the door, and someone like Liz or Therese or even Paul the naturopath from flat 6 must be told, "No, I’m perfectly OK. I just need to be alone if it’s no trouble."

A foil-covered plate being set down. A full casserole dish. People are so kind. And once Paul saying gently through the door, "You were calling out; we thought you were being attacked."

The next day another letter.

I’ve forgotten how to sleep. It’s the smell of this place. Someone told me yesterday there’s a train station nearby. I walked and walked and kept getting lost. Remember my good shoes, the black chisel-toed ones with the narrow fit? For some stupid reason they’re the only ones I have with me. I can hardly walk in them.

I forgot the directions I’d been given. I couldn’t find anyone who spoke my language. No train station, just mean little houses looking onto other mean little houses – streets and streets of them. It’s the most depressing place I’ve ever been.

Erin not mentioned – does he miss her? The visions of them together are violent with passion. Other people’s imagined passion is always full of abandon, lacking conscious thought or anxieties about cleanliness or contraception or performance. Is that why he can’t sleep, because he thinks with unbridled intensity of Erin and longs for her secret places? If that’s it, he’s too polite to say so.

I need to get home to you. Today I found the train station. There was a queue. A train was in. I got to the ticket window and asked for a ticket. I’d left my money at the hotel. The train pulled out and they closed the tracks for repairs. No more trains for a month. Someone said to try my luck at the docks.

Does he even remember Erin? Or did the shock of his death drive her out of mind, wreck the spindly little fibres that held her – last in, first out – in his brain? Has she been wiped?

I long for the sound of your voice close to my ear, for a sight of your face, always so beautiful to me. I am more alone than I can say.

Last night something terrible happened. The woman I told you about came to my room with a couple of men. Now I understand what people mean by under duress. I asked when it was over when I would be allowed to leave, and she laughed. She seems to hate me, and I have no idea why.

(Oh, you could tell him; you certainly could.)

The rash burns as blood pulses through the inflamed skin on her neck and face. Parts of it have begun to weep a clear, slippery fluid that she blots with tissues only for it to collect again in a fine film. Could it be from wearing dirty clothes?

She spends too long in front of the bathroom mirror, fascinated by the rash and by the fluid that collects on her skin, even as she watches and blots. There are minuscule, raised dots now all over her hands.

She had a friend once, Sylvia. When Sylvia was angry about something she would break out in a rash. It was impossible not to stare, fascinated, as the red spots traveled up out of Sylvia’s cleavage, up her neck, over her face like quick-marching hordes. If you hadn’t known better, you would have sworn that Sylvia’s rash were being painted on by some invisible internal companion, a voiceless other who signaled desperately to the outside world.

Another letter.

I found the docks today, but no one I called to on the ships could understand me. They shrugged and held up their hands. Or they yelled to their friends, who came to the railing to laugh at me.

I went back to the hotel; I had nowhere else to go. The cold after dark cuts right through you – you could die of hypothermia if you were out too long. At least the hotel is heated, not that I can get warm these days. But I dread the nights.

Paul from flat 6 taps on the door, bucket in hand. He looks at her face and neck, too close for comfort, and says, "Have you seen anyone about that?"

"Yes," she lies. "It’s nerves." (Just as Sylvia once said to her.)

He comes into the narrow hallway and sets down his bucket. "We can smell your flat all over the building, my darling. It’s frightening the customers away. But don’t worry, I used to clean houses in college. For all the rich bitches."

He looks again at her face. "We have to lessen your allergenic load," he says, taking spray bottles, sponges and cloths from the bucket. "The place is crawling with dust mites about to meet their maker."

He glances quickly at her. "Sorry."

"It doesn’t matter," she says. Because it doesn’t. Why would he think it would?

"I’ll get started if you don’t mind," he says.

The cleaning takes four hours, through which she sleeps. When she wakes, it is to the smell of citrus and a cup of tea in a clean mug, and Paul saying "All done, babe. OK if I pop this down here?"

There is no way to leave. Today I tried to walk out of the town through what I thought were the outskirts, but they went on and on until the mountains seemed further away than ever and I gave up hope. My shoes had rubbed off the skin on my toes and heels, and my socks were soaked with blood. A police car with two policemen in it picked me up. I offered to do anything if they’d drive me out of town. They drove me back to the hotel. The woman who runs the hotel was waiting out the front. The policemen seemed to be friends of hers. She laughed because she saw I was shaking. Her laugh was so familiar: wish I could remember where I know her from. I miss you so much I can’t bear it.

The words layer the smooth, creamy page. She runs her fingertips over it. The texture of the page all down the cheek, over the mouth. A sudden pulling back. Skin of Erin.

The mouth of Erin, open to receive him. This image crowds out the rest. All you’d been able to say as tears and snot had coursed down your face after they’d given you the news was, "Don’t let Erin near the funeral. She’s not to come to the funeral."

"No, no – of course not," people had uniformly said, some obviously appalled by her. She couldn’t explain to them that the vision of Erin was what simultaneously sank her and kept her from sinking. The rest – his death – was beyond, in unnameable darkness. Finally, after days, Evie had said, "Erin’s got a right to grieve too. You’re not going to control even his death, are you?"

One by one, all the friends had said it in their own way. (Erin obviously did her best work on the phone – what she didn’t do in the backs of cabs or in stairwells or between illicit, midafternoon sheets.) One friend called it "honouring the man he really was, not the one you wanted him to be." Another said, "It’s time to be a big girl about these things, darling." Another said, "So what if she was doing him? That gives you something in common."

In the end the only thing to say was, "All right, then. She can come to the service; just don’t let her near the wake."

But Erin had sobbed uncontrollably through the service, loud and vivid in a pew up the back. And when the time had come for all the cars to leave, certain hands had been laid on certain arms, and pressure had been brought to bear, and before you could say in flagrante delicto, Erin was sitting across from her in the big hired car and wailing "I thought he’d fallen asleep on top of me" in a voice that could have cut tin.

They’ve posted guards at the front of the hotel. No one is allowed to go out or come in. The woman who owns the hotel listens outside my door. I can feel how she hates me.

The nights are unspeakable. The days are long times spent waiting in dread.

What am I doing here? I remember the blue of your eyes, like blue cut crystal. I can’t imagine why I would ever leave you. Do you know? Can you tell me? I don’t know if you get these letters, or why I’m even allowed to write them. The woman who owns the hotel probably doesn’t post them.

The scent of the ink is sharp, unpleasant. Blood pulses through her hands and neck and face. Paul has given her some cream for the rash. It’s stopped the weeping, and bit by bit will claim back each fraction of skin – each cell, each patch – until the rash is gone and all is clear again.

Clothes that were wet six weeks ago – his clothes, washed that last morning as he got ready for work – are now a dry browned crust in the washing-machine tub. A fly buzzes on the sill, on its back, near the end. Through the cloudy glass, she watches the comings and goings at the bakery across the road – the last customers slipping in and out under the lowered awning in the sun’s final rays. She watches her hand move the pen over the page, over the creamy white paper, recording his desperate words.

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LETTERS FROM THE HOTEL earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

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Glenys Osborne lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has received various awards for fiction writing, including First Place in the 2008 and Second Place in the 2007 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. She also twice received second prize in the Age (newspaper) Short Story Competition, and the 2007 Marian Eldridge award. Glenys writes early in the morning, teaches editing at masters level, and is fiction editor for the creative and literary journal Etchings.

###

AFTER THE SILENCE by Peter Paton

Sometimes mothers and daughters speak of hate by which they usually mean, “You have hurt me”; “You disapprove of me” or “You reject me,” but that is not really hate. Like boxers in a ring, they tiptoe around one another, dodging blows and occasionally hitting home. Rarely, something happens which neither had taken into account and one person doesn't get up and when that happens, what they called hate becomes like a problem which has been puzzled over so long that it has become meaningless. When looked at afresh one can see that the other was not so very different after all, and that will be enough.

My mother looked fierce as she lay burnt and damaged and it made me angry. There was a pain in her that had made her so afraid that she had turned against the world. I wanted to shake her and tell her that I was not her enemy, that she had made her choices and that I hated her for them but how do you shake a burned woman and tell her you hate her? As she slept, her face was hard, tight and strained and as I watched, I pretended that she was a burned old woman, someone's mother. As I combed her hair, thin gray strands that had once been proud and black came away. The useless hair darkened and grew moist in my hand and I knew then with a sad and stupid surprise that I did not want her to die.

After the silence, nothing was ever the same. The Ota River stood like a stagnant steel sheet: the only interruption to the flattened landscape of charred tree stumps and concrete husks. Lifeless beneath the fierce opaque sky: gray and broken, the distant hills offered the only relief. Like startled creatures emerging from their hiding places, the city's bridges extended their wary links, spanning desolation with desolation. What had once been homes, shops and peoples’ livelihoods’ were reduced to kindling, power poles leaned at unnatural angles: limp and powerless. The facade of a bank maintained what dignity it could whilst buried up to its second floor in the splinters it had financed. Unwilling and unable to leave the familiar for the horrors yet to be understood, dazed people functioned as best they could.

Scorched into the wall facing me were the outlines of people who had been passing the tower when the blast occurred. Like a flashbulb immortalizing the moment, they had been incinerated in an instant and their shadows were all that remained. My mind could not make sense of what I saw and for a moment, I thought that if I walked to the other side of the wall I would find the people waiting behind it. As I turned away, I knew that I had entered a changed world where there were no secrets, where people stood revealed: their possessions, their emotions, their bodies raw and broken before me. Hiroshima was not in ruins: it had been obliterated.

My mother lived at Koi, three miles west of the blast area. A neighbour had seen her leave the house on the morning of the blast but she had not returned. The house was old and solid; it was where I had grown up and where my mother chose to stay after my father's death. I looked up at the dirty, yellow sky where the sun, its power usurped, had been broken into a thousand pieces and smeared across a threadbare gray blanket. Powerless to break through, the heat was oppressive.

Field hospitals had been set up on Hijiyama Hill and at the Army's East Parade Ground where the Navy Medical Service Corps had been deployed. Row after row of patients lay in tents or on open ground. Two thousand bodies a day were cremated, so that the smell of burning flesh wafted over those already burned.

It took me three days to find her, on a basketball court at the Koi National School. Lying on a piece of board she was one of hundreds of wretched souls abandoned to their fates. The woman I saw before me seemed so small, so alone that it took me a moment to recognize her. Staring ahead, an orange scarf was wound tightly around her shoulders and gave the impression that her head was rising above a cordon of flames. Her eyes, once vibrant and defiant, were tired and dim, sagging but watchful. Waiting. Perhaps for me, perhaps seeking assistance or pleading to be left alone. I started to smile and then stopped myself. I felt foolish and quickly looked away and then in my confusion, back. She had not looked away.

My mother's burns were limited to those parts of her body which had been exposed, and they seemed less severe than the horrendous cases I had seen, where the skin had peeled from the body leaving raw painful wounds open to infection and almost impossible to treat. There were abrasions on her nose, a cut beneath her left eye and her skin was burned from her chin and extended to her throat. She was in shock, her clothes torn, her blouse missing, she was dirty and exhausted but she could move. I saw her expression changing, straining, drawing me with her eyes as she tried to speak and then to lift her head and then exhausted, fall back. I leant forward, my face so close I could feel her breath on my skin. I pushed my ear to her mouth:

“You've come”.

Was it relief? Surprise? An accusation? I couldn't be sure. Her voice was a whisper. “Take me home”. In those words lay the only hope she had.

The house was not safe to inhabit, however, apart from broken windows the sunroom was undamaged and seemed suitable for our immediate needs. A tree had fallen across the garden dislodging two large stones so that they now filled the pond that they had once over-looked. For some reason it comforted me and I felt this was how it should have been all along. My mother used to say the pond calmed her and that whenever she smelled the jasmine she felt better about whatever was troubling her. It was where she belonged.

She was on her way to the Asano library at Kamiyacho Crossing when she had the sensation of being carried through the air at what was a terrifying speed but which felt as if she were floating on a blinding white light, as if the sky had split open. There was a deafening roar and she hurtled through a doorway hitting the wall with such force that she thought she would pass out. Lying there stunned, wondering if she had broken any bones she realized that behind her was emptiness. The doorway of the building she had been thrown into was all that remained and from what she could tell, those around her were dead. Thinking that the city had been hit by a surprise air-raid she expected to hear sirens and screams and commotion, but there were none to be heard. What struck her most was the silence. There was a burning sensation on her skin; she remembered starting to vomit and then nothing until waking up in the Rescue Station.

In the living room, I found a photograph of my mother: hand-colored and vivid. It had been taken when she was fourteen or fifteen and I remembered it from many years ago. It sat on a wooden chest which had belonged to my grandmother and which she used to store papers, letters and cards: remnants from before her marriage. The chest sat beside her chair, sealed by the photograph, memories of a past life. This girl stood before a painted backdrop of the kind found in a photographer's studio.

It was an image of the sea, with green and white folds of foam and life. My mother stood before this backdrop in a kimono of crimson silk that had been woven for her as a birthday gift from her parents and she said when she put it on, she felt that the world was hers for the asking. She stood poised and confident and held aloft a paper fan of gold, purple and dazzling red as if she were signaling. Her hair was soft and loose and her eyes shone into the future. I once told her that she looked like the guardian of the ocean, warning all who approached to respect its beauty and to tread carefully before its might. She was silent for a moment, I thought she hadn't heard me, but she turned and looked at me and said that it was just canvas and paint and I should know better. Then she said something that made me realize that as a girl she had imagined a different future to what her life had become. She brushed my hand from her shoulder and I saw resentment in her eyes. I wondered if it was at me. She said there was no use in pretending and we never spoke of it again. One day the photograph was gone and I knew that if I were to open the chest I would find it neatly stored away: wrapped in the irrelevant folds of a faded kimono.

I went outside and I sat by the pond and although I had been gone for many years it took but a moment for the past to return. I had left her behind and when I could have come back, I didn't. I felt that I would have suffocated. A force that was stronger than me, of love and memories and obligation would have engulfed me. I was afraid of the pain of truth and chose instead to say nothing. I was afraid of my past, and my future and I knew I had left her confused. I hoped that she was wise enough to know better but even as I thought it, I knew I was lying. I could not be my mother.

I had found a tea canister floating in the pond. The canister contained paintings I had done as a little girl: a bridge, a tree, a house: silly, meaningless dabs of paint. There was a photograph and I recognized myself as the girl in her sailor suit, her shoulders pulled back and her right arm stiff by her side. I stood to attention, staring obediently at the camera, but my attention was on the fact that my father was behind me. Even now, I can feel the heat from his watchful body. My mother is in a ceremonial kimono, hair strictly divided into two flat, black slabs, tight and controlled, resignation in her face as she stares patiently ahead with her hands clenched in her lap. The anger that I felt then returned, as I thought of the uncertainty with which her entire Being consisted: someone afraid who never thought it could be otherwise. Someone I refused to become.

“My life is my choice”. Her voice was firm.

“What choice. You sit there, you criticize me, and all you have ever done is
accept a life carved out for you”.

“What do you have for all the trouble you've caused? Nothing! You drift around lost and alone”.

“It's you who have nothing. I will look and keep looking until I find whatever it is that will give my life some meaning. You will never have that. If I die looking I have rejected all the things that people fill up their lives with. People like you with your empty marriage and your empty days”.

“You criticize me but you have no right. Sometimes being still is enough. If things don't work out as we had hoped, they can work out in other ways we had never even thought of. Why do you feel it is all right to criticize me? One day you might know”.

I had hurt her. I knew it as I avoided her eyes. I had stung her but it was true and if I had hurt her, I felt alive. I felt she had heard me. I had hurt her.

My voice was tired, a whisper:

“You make me say these things. You've always fought me, tolerated me, shut me out”.

I wanted her to argue with me, tell me it wasn't true, tell me I had it all wrong. I wanted her to talk to me. But my mother couldn't do that, I didn't know that then.

Her voice was flat. “We shut each other out”. Before me, she lay dying.

My body was wrapped in wool and it reassured me. The morning was cool and the light was soft as it shared my world. I felt the cold air in my nostrils, embracing my skin. I felt cleansed. It was a quiet time as I stood in the garden and saw indigo dissolve into a confection of reds and pinks and the softest of yellows. I witnessed the landscape appear before me like a magician's trick: from a dark corner emerged a tree and then more trees, a wall materialized: its stone damp, cold and forbidding. Before long the yellow rays, stronger now, would stretch to caress it, bring it warmth, perhaps a place to rest and gather thoughts before moving on.

What was that sound? Music? It came from nowhere and then there was silence, except for the steady wheeze of my mother's breathing. I looked at the pond and saw leaves and twigs and I wanted to cry. You were so quiet; I worried that you would go without saying goodbye. Your burns were minor, you should have healed but you were bleeding: your gums, your nose. You were wasting away before me. You were so tired and I saw that you had passed blood. I didn't know if I would be strong enough. The breeze distracted the trees, sending them scurrying to one side while it stole past and washed my face as I washed yours. I knew you were dying and I could only feed you sugared water. I had never noticed that your front teeth were slightly crooked. The light made them glisten and revealed a vulnerability that made me gasp and I felt my heart would burst with sorrow for having uncovered a useless truth between your quick, short breaths.

I thought of my life in Tokyo, where I had run so long ago and I wondered where my home was. Was I moving towards something or away from something? Where could I go? Or could I only come back? For two days I was frightened, as if someone had wrenched the masks from my face and confronted me with a hopelessness I could not bear. It was as if a lifetime of regrets were realized in a moment. Deprived of the ability to reason I removed myself from the world which I could not join and sought refuge in sleep.

I didn't say goodbye. I awoke to the silence and I knew. The room was so still, I folded my arms around my legs, and I looked at you, so quiet and brave. I moved to touch your hand and you were cold. When I was asleep, you left me as I once left you. I simply left. Would you have called me selfish? I was tired and I slept while you lay dying beside me. Perhaps if you were not weak and wasted you would have covered me, gently so as not to disturb my rest.

That afternoon I walked to a point in the Hijiyama Hills from where I could see the city before me. The air was sharp and it bit into my face as I neared the top of the hill. I felt alive as if with each step someone was slapping me into consciousness. Earlier that day the Emperor had broadcast the news of our surrender and I thought of the Empress I had seen long ago and wondered what would become of her. I marveled at how quiet the streets were, soon to fill with the Occupying Forces. Clouds of smoke crept across the sky from the crematoriums: it was a part of the city now.

Within the smell of the jasmine lay the song of my mother. It is in the air, it is nowhere, she is all around me in a rush of sensations so overpowering they eclipsed the devastation before me. I watched a woman who was stooped over, an orange scarf wound tightly around her shoulders. Behind her was the dark hole of what looked to be a partially buried fireplace, and as she collected firewood, exuding calm and peace, she looked at me. A slash of color against the gray and without warning, with so little reason that it shocked me, she smiled.

“Let us run!” cried my mother as she took the hand of a little girl. Her eyes met mine, I saw caution and warmth but still I pulled away. I was afraid, I am afraid now but the hand is gone and I have myself to rely on. I will not stay, for I have never belonged but I take her with me in a different way and somehow that is enough.

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AFTER THE SILENCE earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

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Peter Paton lives in Sydney, Australia. He has written a number of short stories and a novella, and is currently working on his first novel. "This story started with the idea of a daughter brushing her mother's hair and then took on a life of its own. To create something from nothing and to have that touch something in others fulfils me. That's why I write."

###

PORT BON TEMPS by Billie Louise Jones

Port Bon Temps hung on to land’s end below New Orleans. Crushed cars were packed into the edge of the land to shore it up. There used to be a beach, but the tide ate it. There used to be marshes along the Gulf, but salt water had dried them up; the marshes began back from the town. Port Bon Temps, not a resort town, lived from the Gulf. There was an oilrig on the edge of the Continental Shelf, professional fishing boats tied up at the long docks, and a plant that processed shrimp, crab, and oysters. The people were mostly Cajun or Vietnamese.

Yvonne Laborde heard the Weather Channel giving an update on Hurricane Katrina and, carrying the baby, Aimée, went back to the TV. This time of year she kept the TV on, always, for the weather. She was a petite, dark woman with an anxious line between her eyebrows. Katrina had hit Florida and was gathering her strength in the Gulf, getting ready to move on Louisiana and Mississippi. It was Thursday, August 25, 2005.

Yvonne felt a terrible dread: She is bad, her.

Yvonne went out on the porch. The house was raised fifteen feet above sea level on steel stilts; the porch wrapped all around and the French windows had storm shutters. Hot winds from the Gulf slapped waves over the docks and into the road that ran along the waterfront.

She knew the feel of a tropical storm in the air. On the ground, Matt and Brittanie, ten and eight, threw balls for their big puppy, Loup Garou, half shepherd, half everything else. Yvonne leaned over the rail and called them to come up.

Their dark heads came up out of the hole cut in the front room floor for the stairs from outside. “Cher papa home soon, soon,” she told them.

They understood and grinned.

“Big storm!” Matt said cheerfully.

“We light candles,” Brittanie added. “Sing in the dark. We need more Cokes and candy!”

“We pack,” Yvonne said.

Bon Temps Platform was the biggest offshore rig in the region. It stood in 2,000 feet of seawater. Its concrete and steel legs were rooted 600 feet below the seabed. Its airgap was 55 feet, the distance between the surface of the sea and the lower deck; it could withstand a wave that high. Its topsides rose 90 feet above its bottom deck.

Two weeks on, two weeks off. The men on the platform, expecting to evacuate, went on about their work in the meantime. They watched Katrina’s parade as part of the job. Never any wishful thinking that maybe a storm would not be all that bad. Not a word of bravado. They had nothing to prove. They respected danger. The nature of the work required them to function through fear: extracting a highly volatile substance under extreme pressure in an environment where they were not meant to be. There was no margin for error.

The call came to close off the wells on Friday, August 26. Katrina was expected to hit land early Monday. Close enough.

Jack and Yvonne Laborde looked at each other and needed hardly a word to agree that they should not ride this one out.

Jack was a man of the wetlands, a dark Cajun with a long nose and thin lips. The minute he got home from Bon Temps Platform and he saw her packing clothes, water, and food, he closed the storm shutters and dragged sandbags to the doors.

She held up the albums of family pictures. They looked at each other. No need to say anything; he nodded and she packed them. He got the cardboard box where he stored their documents. He moved as much as he could up to the second floor. It was not likely that Katrina would send waves higher than fifteen feet at them, but it was better to make sure nothing of value was on the floor.

He loaded all he could get into the bed of his Ford longbody pickup and fastened the camper shell on. He stacked his Ithaca shotgun and Remington rifle in the gun rack and put his Glock under the driver’s seat. Yvonne put her pretty bone-handled Colt in the outside zip pocket of her diaper bag.

Matt and Brittanie and Loup Garou chased each other through the house. Aimée, already in her car seat, picked up the excitement.

On the way out of Port Bon Temps, Jack stopped the truck several times to pass a few words with friends about evacuating or riding out the storm.

Daniel and Emilie Breaux, Yvonne’s parents, lived by the fringes of the swamp. Narrow back roads paved with crushed oyster shells ran alongside earthwork levees and slow bayous; cypress trees trailed Spanish moss to the ground. Winds whipped the moss like pennants. Daniel and Emilie were already going down the steps with their arms open before Jack pulled the truck up in the yard.

Yvonne hugged them before she let the children grab their attention and spoke in French. “Papa, Mama, pack up quick, quick, and come.”

“Emilie, put on the coffee. What is this rush, rush? You live by the city now?”

Yvonne did not let them draw her into the house. They would not listen to her. They hadn’t followed the storm news because back by the swamp, TV reception came and went.

Jack said, “The Katrina is bad, her. Get in the car and follow me to my brother in Crowley.”

“Convoy!” Matt tugged his grandfather’s arm.

“We refugee once,” Daniel said and turned his mouth down. “We sat in a church basement for days. Hot like goddamn.”

“The stink. The dirt.” Emilie’s fingers expressed disgust. “And nothing happened.” She waved her hands at their intact house.

Daniel slapped the porch rail. “This house, she is indestructible. Yes!”

The Labordes would not stay for coffee, for supper, for anything.

Jack said, “We got to get by New Orleans. Think about the hurricane rolling up a gridlock.”

“Draw plenty of water,” Yvonne said. “At least, go to town for more food and insulin.”

Daniel shrugged away her concern. “The check, it comes on the first. Everything blows over by then.”

“The water will stand,” Jack said, “for a long time.”

Yvonne cried while she got the children settled in the truck. She did not look back.

Late in the day, Saturday, August 27. Three lanes of traffic moved by starts and stops away from New Orleans on I-10. The other side was almost empty.

When something up the road stopped everything, Yvonne said, “Why don’t they let people out on both sides?”

“This ain’t an official evacuation. Maybe they think it won’t be so bad.”

Yvonne punched the Breux number on her cell phone. No connection.

The truck radio said that Katrina was sustaining winds of 160 miles per hour.

Monday, August 29. Waiting for the hurricane, Yvonne could not sleep. In the dark hours of morning, she heard rain strike the tin roof. Storm winds tried the roof and shutters and howled around the house. Katrina began abruptly; her sounds were like a solid wall, no ebb and flow. Beside Yvonne, Jack was asleep, though restless, in the spare room of his brother’s house.

Yvonne reached for her housecoat and went barefooted to the front room. She sat on the floor in front of the TV and turned the sound on low. A satellite picture showed the entire hurricane. Katrina blew herself inland. Her center was so strong that the winds and rain whipping around her giant edges were more than a thunderstorm and lashed Crowley, in Acadia Parish, west of Baton Rouge, and reached higher up the state. Some crazy reporters were still in New Orleans and Biloxi. Rain dashed their cameras; the raindrops on the images gave Yvonne a feeling of looking through the TV like a window, into the actual storm. From what she saw, she knew how it was with Port Bon Temps and Bon Temps Platform and the Breux place.

Jack dropped down beside her and held her close. Jack’s brother, Ed, could not sleep well either and came out to the TV.

Yvonne tried to call her parents. The line was dead.

“Power lines down already,” Ed said. He worked for the power company. “I’ll be busy, me, for a long time. A long time – here, maybe there.”

The TV repeated old news that an evacuation from New Orleans had finally been ordered Sunday and that the Superdome sheltered those who could not get out.

“They only talk New Orleans on the TV,” Yvonne said. “What about us? People live all along the Coast and back in the parishes.”

“The TV can’t get back there,” Jack said. “The roads flooded already.”

Yvonne recognized reason, but she did not feel reasonable.

~

Emilie did not know anymore how many days had passed on the roof after the hurricane. There was only the heat and thirst, the steaminess and fumes of the floodwater. The asphalt shingles scorched through their clothes.

Daniel and Emilie had laughed when they talked about telling Yvonne how foresighted they were. They carried water, food, candles, and medicine up to the attic in plastic grocery sacks. They made a pallet up there. Daniel made sure the trap door to the roof worked; he put it in after he’d had to chop a hole in the roof during a flood some time ago. They climbed down the ladder from the attic. Though they would sleep on the pallet, there was no need to move into the attic. They turned the TV on to zigzagging reception. Daniel played his accordion, and Emilie sang.

The Katrina was a monster on TV, stretching from one end of the Gulf to the other. The light went out, the TV went out. Emilie started to climb the ladder while Daniel held the hurricane lantern high.

The flood hit with so much power that it broke the door in half. The water came up so fast, so fast, they were wet before they got to the attic. Daniel’s glasses fell off, and the water tore the ladder out of his hands before he could pull it up. The water seeped into the attic. Emilie grabbed the sheet off the pallet and bundled the grocery sacks into it. There was an old bureau in the attic to get on. The water came up several feet. Daniel waded into it to get their plastic water jugs. They looked up at the trap door to the roof. The hurricane wanted to peel the roof off; she was so fierce, that one, it would be death to go out to her. Le bon dieu, don’t let the water get higher.

When the storm stopped, the water was up to their waists where they sat on the bureau.

Crawling onto the roof, Emilie lost her glasses. She reached for them, but then the bundle came loose and spilled things. She saw only treetops and brown water that looked strangely thick. Things floated in the water, but she could not make out what they were.

Daniel’s hands were shaking, so she gave him his insulin. She could not find his heart pills in the bundle. The can opener was gone, but she used Daniel’s belt knife to pry open cans of tuna and beans.

The floodwater did not go down.

Their water ran out. They drank a can of DelMonte stewed tomatoes.

If rescue did not come soon, they would have to drink the floodwater and trust to medicine later.

They got so tired they passed into sleep on their precarious perch.

Emilie felt the sun hot on her face. Her skin burned.

“Daniel?”

She touched him. He was dead. She stretched out beside him.

“Hail Mary, full of Grace. Be with us now and in the hour of our death.”

Holding Daniel, she pushed off the roof.

~

September 8. Thursday.

“Don’t look in the water,” Mike Mayeux warned them.

Jack and Yvonne could not get news of her parents. The phone and power lines were down and the roads flooded. They could not get back to Port Bon Temps even by sea because the docks were broken up. A wall of water twenty-nine feet high had surged over the Coast. The TV news showed them only one glimpse from a helicopter: clouds of black smoke billowing out of the processing plant, on fire in the midst of standing flood water. Most of the Coast was still too torn and shattered for rescue teams to go in. No one knew how many people lived back in the coastal parishes and where they were.

“They only talk New Orleans,” Yvonne said bitterly. “Let them send cameras by us.”

Jack did not try to reason with her.

Bon Temps Platform was hit by ninety-foot waves. It stood, but no one knew how much damage there was to the pipes on the seabed. Jack could not work until an underwater repair crew got down there.

He called around to the men on the drilling crew. Most had people they could not locate. Mike Mayeux joined a rescue team, out of a town as far south as the road went anymore. He took his flatbottom boat to places that would be hidden from a helicopter flying over.

Men in the crew helped each other. Jack and Yvonne drove through sopping wet country to find him. The team was an improvised group of volunteers with some Coast Guard liaison, working out of a school cafeteria. So far, no one had worked anywhere near the Breux place.

Yvonne heard a man say, “Ain’t no one alive back there. You got to keep hope, yes, but when the water comes in that fast and that high….”

Mike was willing to take a calculated risk, but only so far as it was calculated. Jack understood. Yvonne would go with them; no discussion; she was controlled beyond tears.

“We got to sleep on the boat coming and going,” Mike warned her. “Days, days, I can’t guess how long.”

Tight-lipped, she nodded.

“Rowboats, flatbottom boats, canoes, pontoons, pirogues, but not motors.” Mike explained, “Not to stir up the waters.”

They loaded the boat with canned beans and meat, water and mosquito spray, rifles for protection. They wore rubber hip boots and life vests. At night, Mike tied the flatbottom boat to a tree and stretched mosquito netting across it.

The water was brown and murky, except for floating oil slicks with a purplish green sheen. The current was slow, stagnant. The smell was not like anything they knew. It was so hot and humid the air felt sticky. The boat slid out into an eerie silence, no sound but the oars in the water. Yvonne realized: no gulls, no pelicans. There were no power poles standing. They glided by treetops, slowly, Mike taking care not to snag on submerged trees. The trees….they looked wrong, Yvonne thought. It came to her that the trees were bare; the storm had stripped off their veils of Spanish moss; some places, shredded plastic hung in the branches. Dead rats and debris floated; roofs crumpled like old paper; furniture; garbage bags; fallen trees and toys; a refrigerator with magnets stuck on the door.

Something bumped the boat. A young woman, either bloated or pregnant. Mike pushed the body away with an oar. Yvonne did not look in the water again.

They paddled down the main streets of parish towns, a few store tops above the water, wreckage a danger below.

“Where are the looters?” Jack cracked.

“People lost their initiative,” Mike hooted.

Yvonne knew the grisly humor of men who worked with danger.

People on housetops called to them. Mike rowed up to them. “I call for help.” He held up a battery-powered unit. They always tried to get him to take the children. It hurt to leave them behind.

A helicopter hovered low over a roof with a family on it. The rescue worker came down the cable with no sign of hesitation in his body.

“Coast Guard,” Mike said.

“Great guys,” Jack said.

Yvonne knew the laconic respect of men who lived with danger for other men who lived with danger.

Further south, the damage was worse. They passed empty stilts standing up in the water like ruined temples of old.

They came to a house that had been torn up and wedged into a grove of treetops. Yvonne recognized the red roof and gingerbread trim, a neighbor’s house. They called out; no answer.

They paddled the flatbottom boat over what would be the bayou, levee, and road leading to the Breux place. Water was up to the eaves. The roof was half-peeled but still on. Mike tied the boat up. Jack crawled onto the roof. The two men helped Yvonne up.

She inched carefully to the trap door and looked down. She straightened up and shook her head.

The men looked into standing water almost up to the ceiling.

“Now I know, me,” Yvonne said. She would not cry until they were back in Crowley, when it would be all over.

“They say another one comes.” Mike put much meaning in the simple statement.

Yvonne nodded. “We go now.”

Jack held her. “I do the rescue with Mike until the Platform calls us.”

Yvonne expected no less. “It is the right thing to do, cher.”

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PORT BON TEMPS earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

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Billie Louise Jones was born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, and has lived in a number of places. She began writing at age twelve, originally wanting to be an historical novelist. She has been published in Phoebe, The New Orleans Review, Struggle, Primavera, South Dakota Review, Dan River Anthology, Northwoods Anthology, Palo Alto Review, Under Hwy 99, The Storyteller, The Long Story, and Elderhostel's Anniversary Odyssey Anthology. Billie Louise Jones currently lives in Arkansas, where the directions to her home include "turn off the paved road."

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AN IQUITOS STORY by Douglas Bruton

A space had been cleared in the great jungle, a space big enough to plant a city, and so a city had grown – a city of sorts: at first a city of corrugated tin and sagging thatch, and wood gleaned from the clearing of trees; later a city of imperfect roads and unfinished concrete and brick dwellings, a work always in progress. And the city brought its own problems and these too filled the space that was made. The city is called Iquitos and the people came and stories were begun or ended here.

I first caught sight of him sitting alone at a table for two. He had grey in his hair and the skin at his neck was pink and loose. He looked lost, like he didn’t belong, as a tourist doesn’t belong. He stared out at the street, stared beyond the people that passed, people who eyed him with interest and not a little suspicion. Three-wheeled motorised rickshaws picked their way between the potholes in the road, taxiing passengers from one side of the city to the other. A man with legs like sticks walked by carrying a heavy sack across the bow of his shoulders. He had a metal whistle that he blew. It made a shrill squeal. He blew his whistle because he thought it would please, and because it gave him pleasure to do so. He grinned at the grey haired man, showed him a toothless smile. The man at the table did not see him and did not hear the piercing squeal of the whistle. He was lost in thought. On the table in front of him was a plate of rice and meat and a glass of hot tea and lemon.

I watched him, this man from another place. I wondered who he was and what he was thinking. I opened my notebook and wrote a description of him there. I noted that his shirt was wet across his back and at the collar, and he flapped a new panama hat back and forth, slowly fanning himself cool. He had the hands of one who does not work, one who shifts paper across a desk, or one who spends his days counting money in a bank. And his eyes were dull and grey, the eyes of someone who has lost his way and all but given up on life. He sipped at the lemon tea, but did not touch the food.

Suddenly a yellow butterfly crossed in front of him and unaccountably this caught his attention where the whistling man had not. The butterfly settled on the dusty ground in front of the café. He watched it open and close its broad wings, fascinated; seeing the world we live in through other people’s eyes we can find beautiful what before we took for granted: there are many butterflies here. The butterfly lifted into the air again, its yellow wings like stiffened cloth folded and unfolded, a silent slow handclap, and I followed its ragged flight across to the other side of the dusty street and away into the trees where washing had been left spread over the branches to dry.

He was getting to his feet when I next looked his way, stiffly, his hat low on his brow now. I closed my notebook and got up to follow him. I don’t know why I did this, but because I did I have his story to tell.

At the hotel where he was staying, I paid to know his name and to know where he had come from. He was from London, the young maid told me, though she had no idea where London was. He had come to Iquitos by plane from Lima. She did not know why he had come. She thought he was a doctor but he had no medicine bag with him. She said that he smoked American cigarettes and drank tea with ice and rum. He slept fitfully, and in the morning his tangled bedsheets were damp with his sweat and smelled of insect repellent.

I wanted to know how long he would be staying; the maid said that there was no departure date written next to his name in the hotel register. I thanked her and pressed a twenty soli note into her small hand. She asked me if I wanted to go to an empty room with her. I knew what she meant and shook my head. She shrugged her shoulders, brushed a fly from her face and moved away without looking back.

At the office where I worked I looked him up on the computer. He was a doctor, as the maid had said. And there was a story to be told. I found an old magazine article on his life. I learned that he was born in China, the only son of English missionary parents. When he was still young his mother and father, and all the other missionaries in that part of China, were ordered out of the country. They refused to leave and were killed for their stiff-upper lip and their obstinacy; the child was turned out onto the streets. The people in the village where he was were forbidden to take him into their homes, but out of love for his parents and following the dictates of Christian charity, they did what they could. They left bowls of food on the steps outside their homes, as you or I would leave broken bits of old bread out for the birds in our gardens. So it was that the boy survived.

His British grandparents eventually got to hear that he was alive and they petitioned their government to rescue the boy. Their influence held sway and at last the boy was taken back to England where he was brought up by his elderly family in a grand house made of stone and with glass in the windows. He worked hard at school and university, and went on to become a doctor, devoting his life to doing good. And now he was here in Iquitos and I did not then know why.

I saw him again several days later. It was no accident. I had gone to the hotel looking for him. The maid from before saw me enter and gifted me a smile. I don’t know if she really remembered me, for she gifted everyone the same winning smile. No doubt she also offered to take other men to an empty room – if they had the money to pay her. I made my way into the bar at the back of the hotel. He was there. He sat at a table reading a three-day-old English newspaper. His glass was empty and I saw my opportunity. At the bar I ordered him a refill and an iced tea for myself. Then I sat down at his table. I apologised for disturbing him, and said that I hoped he didn’t mind. He folded his paper shut and folded it again. Then he laid it on the table beside his empty glass.

“I took the liberty of ordering you another drink, doctor,” I said pushing the glass of rum iced tea across the table towards him.

He did not register surprise. He simply thanked me and lifted the glass to his lips. He took a drink, nodded his approval and set the glass back on the table.

There was a fan spinning on the ceiling above our heads so that the air in the bar was cool. The shutters were open and sunlight lit up the room where it fell, and made soft shadows where it did not reach.

“You know who I am and what I drink. I think you have me at a disadvantage,” the English doctor said.

It was like something from the script of an old film, a movie shot in black and white. The Americans called them movies and the English called them films – I smiled at him, smiled at this thought. I apologised and introduced myself. He reached across the table and we shook hands. And that was like something from a film, too.

We talked about the weather, as Englishmen do when they do not at first know what to say; we talked about the hotel and what was in his newspaper, and about yellow and green butterflies the size of dinner plates, and the hot nights that made sleep difficult and the generator that shut down after ten o’clock so that the fans in the hotel stopped turning and the only light came from the moon and the stars. We talked about the jungle, pressing in on us from all sides, and the noises of the animals it hid, and the slow moving river that coiled at one edge of the city snaking past on its way to join the Amazon itself. Our drinks drained away, the empty glasses stacked like trophies easily won on the table before us. The sun began to slip beneath the trees and the afternoon was soon spent.

Then I asked him; straight out I asked him why he was in Iquitos, what it was that had brought him here.

“Chance,” he said.

I did not understand.

“I am here by chance. I am old,” he said, “old before my time. I have worked hard all my life, worked so hard that I am all used up. I am tired. That is what my doctors at home told me. I should take things easier; I should slow down, see fewer patients. It is not new to me what they said. And one morning I did not go to work. I called in and said I was not well, though I had no temperature and no sickness. I was recommended to take a break. Everyone takes a break, I was told; only, I never had. Not till now. I visited a travel agent and asked a woman there for a ticket to somewhere, anywhere, so long as it was as far away as it was possible to get from everything. She sold me a ticket to Iquitos. So here I am.”

“As far away as it is possible to get from everything,” I said.

He nodded.

Then, suddenly realising the lateness of the hour, and thinking there was after all no real story to follow here, I apologised to the doctor for the second time that afternoon, explained that there was somewhere I had to be and stood up. He got out of his chair and shook my hand again. I said we should talk more, and he agreed, though I did not really think it would happen. Then I left the hotel and rushed out into an early evening storm. The rain was like a blessing in the thick heat. Later, I made notes in my book, recording what I could recall of what we had talked about that afternoon.

We did not meet again for more than three months and then it was quite by chance. I saw him in the market place one day. He was holding the hand of a small boy and together they were buying vegetables and pieces of chicken wrapped in paper, and fish that the woman behind the stall pulled out of a plastic bucket and gutted there in front of them. The doctor looked the same as on that first day, his shirt clinging to his back and damp around the collar, his panama hat low on his brow and his skin still loose and still pink.

“Hello, doctor,” I said.

He recognised me immediately and was, I think, grateful to have someone to speak English with. He shook my hand energetically and said over and over how good it was to see me again. The boy clung to the leg of the doctor’s trousers, his fright-face turned up to see mine. The doctor paid for his few purchases and sent the boy off with them, a slow wave of his hand following the boy along the street. Then we walked to the café we had been in before, that first time, though this time we sat together at the same table. He ordered iced tea for both of us and then turned his attention to me.

“It is good that we meet again.”

There was something different about him and it was immediately obvious: the grey had lifted from his eyes and his gestures were more animated than before.

“I am surprised to find you still here, doctor, still as far away from everything as it is possible to be.”

He agreed and laughed. I had not heard him laugh before.

“I have a house here,” he said. “In Iquitos. A simple house made with adobe bricks and a tin roof on which the occasional rains drum so loud that they break my sleep. There are butterflies in my garden and I keep a bird in a wooden cage, its feathers green and yellow and red. Its singing wakes me in the morning. And every morning I breakfast on fresh picked plantain cooked in a little butter.”

I was surprised and it must have shown on my face.

“I have a place here and a job to do.”

“I thought you were here to rest?” I said.

Then he told me a story. It is a true story, though it is I who tell it now to you.

One day the doctor was eating at a small café just like the one we were sat in. It was around the middle of the day and the heat rose up from the road and made the walls of the buildings opposite ripple as though they were reflected in disturbed water. A man walked by, weighed down by a heavy sack that he had thrown across one shoulder. He was blowing a whistle every few steps, a shrill squeal that made the doctor look up. The man took the whistle from his mouth and grinned at the doctor and shouted something across at him and waved. The doctor could see the rheumy glint in the man’s eyes, the black gaps in his teeth, the dust on his skin, skin the colour of milky coffee; but he did not understand the words that the man spoke. He returned the wave and nodded at the man. It was enough.

Then the doctor was suddenly aware of a hand reaching from the darkness beneath the table where he sat, a hand that stole the food from his plate. It was the hand of a small child, a boy, the bones of his slender wrist showing like knots beneath the skin. The doctor did not move. The doctor understood the need; it was something he recognised, something from somewhere in his own past.

He returned to the same café and sat at the same table the next day, and the day after that. Sometimes the man with the whistle passed and each time he shouted an incomprehensible greeting across at the doctor and the doctor looked up and smiled and nodded in recognition. And the boy beneath his table fed from his plate, and the doctor pretended not to see.

That is the story that the doctor told me. Then two glasses of iced tea were delivered to our table and the doctor paid.

“And so, you see,” he said. “I have a place here and a job to do.”

In Iquitos when the poor cannot feed the children that they have, they turn them out onto the streets, turn their backs on them. This is what the doctor had discovered and this is why he stayed in Iquitos, using up his last years to feed and care for the boys who had been abandoned by their families.

I met with him many times after that day; we drank iced tea and talked, about the weather and what was going on between the pages of three-day old newspapers, about the butterflies that came to his garden, and how the rain kept him awake some nights and the still heat on others. He talked about the extension to his house that he was building and the school he had planned; I noticed that his hands were rough and calloused, a workman’s hands now. But mostly he talked about the boys he found: Luis, Gelen, Gabriel, Segundo, Alexsandar. He knew them all by name and spoke of them fondly, as a father might speak of his sons.

And then, some years later when he died - the doctor - I wrote his story for the newspaper I work for, and others reading what I wrote came to carry on what the English doctor had started.

If this was just a story in a book, you would think that I make these things up. But it is true: there are butterflies the size of dinner plates in Iquitos – yellow and green and orange and black and red; and a man walks the streets with legs like sticks and blowing a whistle just for the fun of it; and three-wheeled motorised rickshaw taxis pick their way around pot-holes in the imperfect roads; and the nights are sometimes too hot to sleep in. And once there was an English doctor here and he worked the last years of his life rescuing abandoned boys from the dark beneath the tables of Iquitos, a city built in a clearing in the biggest jungle in the world, a place that is as far away as it is possible to get from everything.

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AN IQUITOS STORY earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

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Douglas Bruton is a teacher at a high school just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. He has been writing stories for several years, stuffing them into blue-green glass bottles sealed with cork and pitch, and tossing them out to sea. Sometimes the stories return to the beach from which they were launched, in different bottles,with small notes of thanks folded between the pages. That is enough.

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CONTEST INSIGHTS AND UPDATES

They arrive one by one, some bearing postmarks from as far away as Australia or Pakistan -- each containing the blood, sweat and vision of an aspiring writer, bound up in 3,000 words or less.

They are the entries in the 2008 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and they're welcomed daily at the contest's headquarters in Key West, Florida.

Founder and co-director Lorian Hemingway, a respected author and journalist, is the granddaughter of legendary writer Ernest Hemingway. She is best known for her compelling memoir "Walk on Water," and has also penned two other critically acclaimed books.

Like Ernest, who lived and wrote in Key West throughout the 1930s, Lorian is passionate about the island city. She's currently working on an in-depth book on the place and its heritage to be titled "Key West: The Pirate Heart."

Lorian is also passionate about recognizing and nurturing the talents of emerging writers. Every spring since 1981, she has assembled a judging panel of writers, editors, and lovers of literature to read and evaluate the contest's 750 to 1,000 entries.

"With these works of fiction I have been offered glimpses into the workings of the human psyche, the human condition, and the human heart," Lorian says. "I have been touched, inspired, saddened, had the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and once even laughed so hard I nearly choked to death on a conch fritter."

Each July, Lorian announces the winners of the contest's $2,000 annual awards at a literary reception. The reception is held at Casa Antigua, Ernest Hemingway's first residence in Key West -- where, serendipitously delayed on his way from Cuba to the mainland, he wrote, relaxed and began his decade-long love affair with the island.

Casa Antigua is now home to Key West publisher Tom Oosterhoudt and his mother, Mary Ann Worth, who generously share it each July for the awards reception. Meticulously renovated since Hemingway's day, the property is notable for its soaring atrium garden and breathtaking interior architecture.

Just as remarkable as Casa Antigua is the talent of the contest winners whose names are announced there.

"People's talent just astounds and amazes me," Lorian says. "There's nothing more exciting than finding something of brilliance, a shining thing, among the entries."

Lovers of good writing are invited to share her discoveries at the 2008 awards reception. Details of the time and date will be posted shortly on the news section of this website.

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