We are excited to announce the winner of two recent Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Monthly contests.
The November 2024 fiction contest winner was James Brumbaugh with the submission "Crushed" while the December winner of the non-fiction contest was also won by Brumbaugh with the submission "How to Spot Postpartum Depression in Men: Or, Mr. Lemonhead, My First Toy".
November’s theme of "Crush" were judged by Alexandria Kelly. Sherry Poff judged the December contest whose theme was "Toy(s)."
Crushed
You find out she’s dead from the newspaper. It’s Christmas Day and you’re at the table in your mom’s house, stuffing yourself with slices of leftover ham sandwiched between halves of crescent rolls. Your mom lays the newspaper down next to your plate, opened to the obituaries. And there she is, K Smith. Thinner than you remember and with a shaved head. Cheeks no longer plump, but the smile is still there, the eyes that make you feel like there’s a secret somewhere, a joke you don’t get.
The obit says she returned to the Lord. Cancer, doesn’t say what kind. You think of all the cigarettes you smoked with her, all the money she bummed off you for a pack of reds, and feel a pang of guilt. Thirty year olds aren’t supposed to get cancer, aren’t supposed to die. She’d become a nun, just like she’d always wanted, had been diagnosed in the German convent where she’d worked. Came back home to die. And now here she is in black and white.
You haven’t spoken to her in three years. You remember exactly the last time you talked to her, a short conversation after your father died. Told her all about it, didn’t know who else to tell. With everyone else, you felt the need to posture, the need to act unbothered. But K had known you.
The rest of the day is a blur. Christmas stuff, the same kind of thing she would have hated, the kind of stuff that was a distraction from, whatever, contemplating the birth of God. When you open presents you think of the day you lost her virginity to her, how she’d pulled you into evening mass, how she had gone to confess, how she wouldn’t hold your hand. You think of sitting on a bench, fidgeting with your promise ring while she was in the room of contemplation, eyes unwaveringly on the cross.
You look at your mom while she picks up the ripped up wrapping paper and remember how she had always disapproved of K. How she’d told you that it was inappropriate, a nineteen year old dating a fourteen year old. The way she’d looked at you and asked what she could possibly want from a relationship with someone so much younger than her. But you were special, your connection had been special.
K had dismissed your mother’s concerns out of hand as racism. She was black, you’re white, it’s Mississippi. People are going to stare, people are going to disapprove. The world encircles you, tries to break what you have, tries to make you conform.
You look at your gifts all lined up in a neat row. An electric shaver, a new coat, about a pound of Christmas tree Reese’s cups. On your fifteenth birthday she’d given you a CD, Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin. You’d never really listened to rock music before, another new experience, as new as touching her body had been.
You’d met her at a theater camp, the yearly conference of the Mississippi Theater Association. An elderly Lebanese couple had driven a group up from Biloxi all the way to the W, the Mississippi University for Women, all the way in Columbus. Ten kids packed into an RV, but you only saw her. A graduating senior in high school, and you were only about to start ninth grade the following year. You’d never seen a girl like her, brash and loud and rough, a girl with an edge, a girl who cursed and smoked and listened to metal. You were in love.
K had been there to perform a monologue. Hundreds of kids participated, performing in front of an audience of other theater kids, and, more importantly, the theater directors of all the major colleges in the state. When you walk the dog with your mother and make idle chitchat, you try and remember what she had performed, but it won’t come. What you do remember is sitting in the back row, manfully hiding your tears as she performed.
During the next few days, you drive around town, and you always end up in places that remind you of her. The Lynn Meadows Discovery Center, where you had performed so many plays in the open air. She had always come see you perform, just like you’d always come to see her perform in her plays at the local community college. Out back of Lynn Meadows is the tiny submarine where she took your virginity one evening after play practice.
Eventually, you make it to her neighborhood, without even really noticing that you were driving in that direction. You park your car and get out, walk down her street. Her mother is sitting on the porch of her house, dressed in sweats and a button up pajama top. She’s smoking a cigarette. Without thinking you walk up the drive, pulling your cigarettes out of your shirt pocket.
She looks at you skeptically. “Hello,” she says. Her voice is hoarser than you remember, smaller, the passage of years and the loss of a child had robbed her of her robustness.
“Hi,” you say. “I’m one of K’s friends.”
She smiles. “Everyone was a friend of K’s. I’ve had more friends of K’s pass by here in the past few days than I’ve had visitors in the last twenty-five years I’ve lived here. Should have come after the funeral, place was overstuffed, busting at the seams with friends of K’s.”
“Don’t know if you remember me, I was here all the time. My name is Frank, she used to call me Francis. I was her boyfriend in high school, or I was in high school. She was in college by then.”
She squeezes her cigarette between her lips, pushes her glasses further up her nose. “Boyfriend? I’m sorry, son. I don’t remember any boyfriends.”
“No need to be sorry,” you say, although truth be told, her words had hurt you. You’d thought of yourself as a fixture in this house, a part of the fabric of daily life. “I just wanted to know, or rather, wanted to tell you, that I’m very sorry for your loss.”
You sit there in silence with her, she has nothing to say to you, you have nothing to say to her. Once upon a time you’d thought that she’d be your mother-in-law. But that was a long time ago.
You’re at Skeeter’s bar, down by the train tracks. There’s smoke in the air, this is one of the last places in the city you can smoke inside. You’ve lost count of the beers that have passed through your hands. The ashtray in front of you is full. And then you see Mal.
Mal was two years older than you, a friend you had shared with K. You’d had lunch with her every day in the library, two theater kid dork outcasts sharing their loneliness. Time has been kind to her, kinder than it’s been to you. She hasn’t changed a bit.
You sidle up to her. She sees you and her face momentarily brightens.
“Francis, been a long time. Ten years, what? Are we old enough to have friends we haven’t seen in ten years?”
“God, it hasn’t been quite that long I hope. But thereabout, I guess.”
You catch up for a while. She lives in Oregon, has a husband and a house full of kids.
“I guess you heard about K,” you say.
“Actually, that’s why I’m here. For the funeral.”
“Wish I could have gone, but I just found out. But, Jesus, what do ex-boyfriends even do at funerals?”
She snorts. “Boyfriend? You, boyfriend?”
You look at her, you’re shocked, your heart breaks a little. “Yeah, we dated for like three years. She was my girlfriend, like, all through high school. Don’t you remember all the times I talked about her? Talked about us together?”
She looks at you with a pained expression. “Francis, she was five years older than you. She was in college when you were a freshman. You didn’t think you were her boyfriend, did you? I mean, that’d be,” she takes a long drink from her beer, “that’d be sick.”
“She was my girlfriend, Mal. She told me, she told me we’d get married one day. She took my virginity for Christ’s sake.”
“Jesus, Francis. I didn’t know. You know, she always talked like you were a puppy, following her around. Always told us, you know, friendships look different to different people. That you just had, like, you know, just a crush. I always took what you said at lunch as like, a kid with a big crush.”
After that, there’s not much more to say, so you just go home.
How to Spot Postpartum Depression in Men: Or, Mr. Lemonhead, My First Toy
Step One: You get a package out of the mailbox from your mother. Brown cardboard, reused from an Amazon order she’d received. Too much clear tape strapped all around it. You bring it inside and cut it open. Baby clothes, tiny socks that fit in the palm of your hand. Onesies and pajamas for the three month old your wife holds in her arms. The baby is asleep. You must be quiet when the baby is asleep. Inside the box, there are also pictures, pictures of you as a child. Baseball pictures from little league, pictures from Christmases, from your birthdays. You can’t tell how old you are in the photos. You know it’s you, but it seems alien. You don’t remember yourself looking like this, a chunky kid with a bowl cut. But that little kid has your eyes, deep blue, one a little wonky, just a little bit, you have to look closely to notice. There’s also a toy, a lemon with arms and legs and a face. Mr. Lemonhead is his name. Your first toy, or the first toy you remember.
Step Two: You show Mr. Lemonhead to your wife, explain who he is. You show her the pictures too. She tells you how much your baby looks like you. The spitting image, a mirror image, she says something like that but you’re not really listening, not listening closely enough. You’re looking at Mr. Lemonhead, imagining the boy in those photographs carrying him around. You know that you carried him everywhere but can’t remember where you’d went. But you know Mr. Lemonhead was there.
Step Three: You tell your wife that you’re sad. That these photos, this stuffed toy, makes you sad. She asks why, but you can’t explain it. Words have left you, and whenever you’re without your words you feel hollow. Your internal furniture is all built of words, and without them you’re an empty house. You leave your wife, you go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet, cradle your face in your hands and try to stifle your sobs. Remember, you must not wake the baby.
Step Four: You rock your baby to sleep in the white rocker that sits inside her room. The room is pink but in the darkness you can’t tell. Her eyes slowly close, and then they open quickly, then close slowly, then open quickly. You love to watch her fall asleep. When her eyes are closed for good you lay her in her crib and creep out into the living room. Everything is silent. Your wife, the dogs, the baby, all asleep. You must be quiet. You must not wake your family. Mr. Lemonhead sits on the dining room table and looks at you. Old friends reunited, but life has made you drift apart. You two are strangers now. Your life is a Rubik’s cube, all the colors are jumbled up. You’ve never been able to solve them, never were one much for puzzles. Your life is a secret. You don’t know the kid you were anymore. You wish Mr. Lemonhead could tell you about him.
Step Five: You go to the kitchen, to the knife block. You pull a serrated blade from its little holder and you hold it against your skin and you wonder if it would make you feel better to bleed. You wonder how your blood would look in the dark. Would it shine? You leave the knife on the counter and go to sleep.
Step Six: You blow off work. You just sit in your cubicle and hide your face, try to swallow your tears. You text your wife and tell her that you feel sorry for the kid in those photographs. You don’t feel sorry for yourself, you’re doing alright. Married, a beautiful baby, a home owner, a job that pays the bills, what’s there to feel sorry for? But you feel sorry for that kid. She asks you why and you can’t tell her. That’s as far as you’ve gotten. You sit there and let work whizz by you and you think about the knives in the kitchen and wonder how they would feel.
Step Seven: Christmas is here. Your daughter is too little to understand presents, but she understands ripping up paper. Family tramps in and out of your home. They are here to see the baby. Having a baby makes you anonymous in your own home, makes you a secondary object. You don’t mind, in these moments you appreciate your invisibility. You have a pain in your side, a pain in your bladder. Your wife tells you that it’s because you don’t drink water, you’ve been downing coffee by the gallon. You believe her, but having a solution and implementing it aren’t the same thing. The warmth of coffee iscomforts you, the bitterness. Your mother gave you a bag of coffee with chicory and it reminds you of home, of the home you had and left behind.
Step Eight: On Christmas night you think about the Christ child. Everyone is asleep except for you. You’re watching your baby snooze. She has these cute little snores. You wish you never had to sleep so you could watch her snore all night, but you’re exhausted. But you can’t help but think about the Christ child. Early Christians believed he was born in a cave, not the barn that people imagine today. You’ve learned that there were probably not even barns in first century Bethlehem, that the people were too poor to have enough livestock to put inside a barn. You imagine Mary and Joseph holding their little child in a cave. All the hopes of the world pinned on this squealing little baby boy. You realize that every child, every single baby, is Christ reborn into this world. All of Mary and Joseph’s, and the world’s, hopes lived inside their baby. All your hopes, your wife’s hopes too presumably, and perhaps the world’s one day, who knows, lie in the snoozing little bean that you watch toss and turn in the night. You were once that baby, that Christ child, for your mother and your father. Perhaps that’s why you’re sad. All the hopes of the world end at the cross. The story of Christmas ends in betrayal, in Christ taking up his cross, in bleeding wounds. The little Christmas baby, good tidings of great joy, ends with a mother’s tears before the cross. People don’t get resurrected, in your experience.
Step Nine: You throw Mr. Lemonhead in the trash. You don’t want to see him anymore, you don’t want to be reminded of your past. Something happened to the boy in those photos and you don’t want to know what. People are at their best when they’re like sharks, always swimming forward.
Step Ten: You grab a knife with a serrated blade and let it sink into your arm. A great tension is released, a slackening. You didn’t know that you could feel so relieved. You try and say a little prayer. Words disappear but the feeling is there, and presumably Christ will be able to interpret it.
Step Eleven: You start wearing long sleeve shirts, and you never take them off.
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James Brumbaugh is a writer in Chattanooga. He's a father and loves to pump iron. He's also a huge fan of the New Orleans Saints.
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month.
Go to the Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE.