We are excited to announce the winner of the May 2024 Chattanooga Writers' Guild Monthly Contest is Kate Landers with the submission "The Boligrafos" and runner-up is G.N. Zaccaria with the submission "An Apparition."
We appreciate all who participated. And thank you to our fiction judge, Alexandria Kelly.
The Boligrafos
It never occurred to young Boligrafos to conserve their ink. Having known nothing but completely full ink cartridges, the youth would spend hours upon hours composing sonnets, odes, essays, novels, screenplays and more, scrawling words with reckless abandon, knowing they had sufficient ink inside to cross out a mediocre noun or nondescript adjective in future edits. Even lazier ones who only ever bothered to attempt Monday crossword puzzles would still blot haphazard guesses into the corners rather than holding them under their caps until they were certain. Eh, I’ll just write over it if it’s wrong, they thought.
Young Boligrafos often wondered why older Boligrafos were so stingy with their words. Why, when they hit midlife, did all Boligrafos seem to suddenly favor haikus over epics, and why did older Boligrafos sometimes go years without writing anything down at all? There were assumptions, of course - older Boligrafos weren’t as creative as younger Boligrafos, or perhaps they just forgot words at some point. The youthful scribblers couldn’t imagine what exactly caused the change, they only knew that they, of course, would never stop writing, ever. They would never become them.
Older Boligrafos knew of these assumptions, of course. They had believed them themselves back in their youth, when their ink chambers were full, the liquid so completely filling its container they were barely even aware of its presence. Possessing infinite ink was an undeniable constant, a truth they didn’t even realize they were taking for granted. And although they did occasionally miss the heady, careless days of their youth when they would dribble and splash their ink across whatever surface they came across, all of them had eventually come to the same realization at some point - that their ink was limited, and therefore precious.
The realization almost always came, not a little at a time, but with a sudden, unexpected shock. They’d be doodling idly in the margins of a book and an air bubble would burst out their nib, strangling their solid, juicy line into a shriveled squeak. They’d retrace the line two or three times in a panic and the ink inside would start to flow again, but once it happened they couldn’t deny the truth - they were running low. And then they could finally name the feeling that had been growing inside them, which they had never felt before and therefore couldn’t comprehend. The feeling of their ink sloshing around in their internal chamber, as more of it spilled out and was replaced with air. The feeling of emptiness.
And once they accepted the truth, all Boligrafos began to treat their words as the finite resources they were. Gone were the days of idle conversations and collaborative story-telling with their friends. The Boligrafos would now strive to conserve as much as possible, to delay the inevitable as long as they could. This meant that no older Boligrafo ever bothered to try to fully explain to a younger Boligrafo the importance of ink conservation. Anyway, they knew from experience that it was impossible for the youth to fully appreciate the day when their inkwells would start to run dry and their Day of the Last Word would appear on the horizon.
The Day of the Last Word was something that all Boligrafos understood was an unavoidable conclusion, but to young Boligrafos it was more of an urban legend than an inevitable reality - something that only happened to really, really, really old Boligrafos, which was something that they themselves would never become. Besides, the Day of the Last Word could be delayed indefinitely if an older Boligrafo was content to never write anything again. The oldest Boligrafo in the world was over 150 years old and would have been able to share an invaluable trove of wisdom and first-person history, but since he hadn’t wasted a drop of ink in a century, no one had bothered about him for generations and he lived a solitary, dusty life behind a broken refrigerator.
Most Boligrafos did go completely silent at the end, usually for a few weeks, occasionally for a year or two, while they tried to extend their existence as long as possible. And then when they realized how boring infinite existence truly is, they focused instead on making their Day of the Last Word as perfect as possible.
For some Boligrafos, that meant finally revealing long-held secrets with cryptic phrases such as “in the basement” or “not your father.” For others, this meant spending their last moments surrounded by their loved ones before penning, “I love you,” or if they were poor planners, “I love yo.” And still there was a third group, which was only fractionally smaller than the first two, which focused on tracking down life-long enemies and scratching out a certain four-letter word followed by a certain three-letter word, thus having the final, conclusive say to their feud.
However an old Boligrafo chose to end their formally verbose life, what happened afterwards was always up to the friends and family of the deceased, as of course no Boligrafo ever bothered to waste ink describing their post-mortem wishes. If the Boligrafo was famous enough, their body would be kept on display at the National Hall of Stationery next to their last word(s), redacted as necessary. Or if they were both philanthropic and of no particular religious denomination, their parts could be removed and donated to those unfortunate souls who had been born with defective springs or had perhaps lost their caps in childhood accidents. And of course some Boligrafos refilled their loved one’s internal chambers with an artificial ink, buried them in the ground, and comforted themselves at night with the thought that the deceased was now decomposing slowly over the course of several hundred or thousand years.
Only once, in the entire history of the race of Boligrafos, had anyone lived their life in a contrary manner. A simple yet wise Boligrafo realized at a very young age that the less he wrote, the more he read, and the more he read, the more he learned. He spent year after year reading and learning, reading and learning. He learned about youthful exuberance and elderly wisdom. He learned about generosity and conservation. He learned about conflict and judgments, and also empathy and grace. And when finally, after a lifetime of reading and learning he was ready to share his words with the world, words that could finally bring peace and joy to all Boligrafos, he brought his ink to the paper and got only 33 words in before he was executed for the crime of Thinking He Was Better Than Everyone Else.
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Kate Landers is a writer, editor, illustrator, and occasional winner of Wordle on the second guess. She cannot play any music instruments, juggle, or whistle, but she is a semi-decent cook and human being. She writes pretty much everything except useful bios. You can find more at her semi-annually-updated blog, katelanders.com.
An Apparition
Another incandescent lightbulb over Germaine’s worktable flickers and then goes dark. A Bulgari crystal slips from her hand and rolls across the metal tabletop but stops when it touches the crushed velvet fabric.
“Georges, do you have a replacement bulb?”
The metalsmith at the workbench across the room silently places his file and tweezers onto his desk, and opens a drawer. Georges wordlessly walks across the factory room and replaces the bulb in the fixture arm over Germaine’s desk.
“Merci,” she replies, and continues to sew the perforated crystal bead onto the tiny costume in her hand.
The clockwork on the wall chimes twice. At two o’clock in the morning the artisans intently remain at their tasks, as the deadline for completion is approaching within days. Time ticks down to the delivery date.
Jerome is struggling at his table to realign the clockworks mechanism that will cause a butterfly’s elaborate wings to beat. Gears and armatures have to be deconstructed and then rebuilt. The activation pin that sets off the entire automaton’s action is also not registering properly.
Germaine stiches the last shiny jewels onto the sleeve of the decorated jacket that she has been sewing. This will costume the small elf figure which is also part of this automaton. She has carefully recut and reshaped the jacket’s pattern, as it had previously obstructed the clicking movements of the elf’s arm. The elf’s inside mechanicals turns its head and extends its arm, which then stimulates the beating of the butterfly’s wings. The elf’s eyelids blink as a small ruby-encrusted flower emerges from a blossoming leaf. All of these movements are precisely timed, but a thread of the elf’s sleeve cuff had been caught on a gear. Georges and the entire workshop team have been repeatedly testing and retesting the movements of this unique piece of art. A year’s worth of design and craftsmanship is now in its final stages of production.
Silvio, the Master of this workshop, had secured the arrangements for creating this piece of automata called ‘Le Apparition du Papillon et des Elf’ for Van Cleef & Arpels. This represents a long-standing partnership, a history of work that has sustained the factory through two World Wars and well past the advancing of time into the electronic age.
Renowned for several generations, the intricate mechanical devices made here are exemplary models of a specialized art form. The factory was originally steam-powered, but with the advent of electricity and the inventions of the contemporary age, the shop was modernized. The only computer on the premises is in the office and is used only for the financial records, the tracking of shipments, and for various contracts. Even the bookkeeping, done by hand with traditional accounting methods, is undertaken daily by a stenographer who has been employed here for over eighty years. Silvio engages a local student to enter the data into the computer. All blueprints are still drawn by hand as when the workshop was founded by his great-great-grandfather.
The insurance policies and the work contracts are locked in the office safe. The gemologists and cutters had frequently attached, detached, and reattached the butterfly and the elf as the months of production passed. In the final days of its construction, the pieces of this bejeweled puzzle were fitting together into a sublime piece of craftsmanship. The estimated price would be upwards of over three hundred fifty thousand Swiss francs. Currency conversion rates to marks, dollars, Euros or pounds were just as impressive.
Covered in pink saffrons, rubies, emeralds and miniature diamonds, the delicate blooming of the flora and fauna of this automaton has gone through several revisions over the years and months since its inception. Multiple discussions had transpired between the commissioning company and the artistic team. The representatives from Van Cleef & Arpels agreed to an inventory that included Italian ice-blue aquamarine stones and a Tsavorite garnet that would be the spectacular focal points of this creation. The agent who delivered the precious jewels to the shop was accompanied by two armed guards. Even then, the staff was still contemplating how to finesse the design.
“Why not try this? Can we add a music box inside?”
“It should be called ‘Jardin du Papillon et de l’Elfe’!” argued the stone setter of the team. Is not that elf sitting in a Garden? It is not some vague apparition or hallucination.
“Apparition conjures up images of wonder and fantasy,” countered Simonet, one of the engravers. We are selling magic here to elite customers.”
“Then why not ‘Marveille du Pappilon et des l’Elfe’ as the title?” asked Marie-Claude, occupied with sketching another automaton that was under development.
“I still think the elf figure needs a flute in its other hand,” Marius-Ernest mumbled from his work table. He had occupied that same spot in the factory for five decades.
“Have the little fellow raise the flute to his lips. Then a music box starts to play as the flower opens and the butterfly’s wings move. It makes a more complete scenario. But what do I know? According to all of you, I am just an old man,” he begrudged before sipping his hot chocolate. “And just who has taken the last of the marshmallows from the cupboard? Bah.”
“Just make it stunning,” admonished Silvio.
It was Silvio who always had and has the final word. His leadership has kept a constant flow of designs and ornate jeweled creations into the marketplace of Europe and across the globe.
“This client competes with Cartier and Fortunoff! You think a typical insect and dirty little Garden Gnome belong in a Tiffany’s or an Arpel’s? This shop creates objects of majesty.” He slammed his office door for dramatic effect.
The beautiful automaton is now almost finished. The last few gemstones are being planted into the metallic flowers and clustered around the elf as it sits cross-legged in its miniature garden. Georges, Jerome and Simonet sit back in their swivel chairs, briefly relaxing as their work is nearly finished. Each recalls the prototypes and revisions of the precision clockwork that is hidden from view in its base. Assembling the underlying rotary system that animates the bejeweled figures was as time consuming as the actual ornamentation. The complex mix of cogs, wheels, springs, clock gears and counterweights are an unseen internal mechanism that brings the figures to life as if it were a ghost beneath polished floor boards.
Now later in this morning, the darkness subsides and the sun rises over the mountains surrounding the factory in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland. The emeralds and rubies glisten as the sunshine crawls across the work tables. Germaine holds up an electric-blue-green tourmaline stone. It sparkles between her fingers but then slips from her grasp and falls to the floor. She kneels down to retrieve it but she cannot see it on the floorboards.
At fifteen minutes past seven, the doorbell chimes. With the same reliable precision as the clockworks that are in the base of the automaton, the daily visiting auditor from the Van Cleef & Arpels headquarters enters the room. He has a leather-bound ledger book handcuffed to his wrist. Accompanied by an armed security guard and a member of the Swiss Police, he has again arrived to take the inventory of the precious gems and jewels that have been placed into the care of the factory.
He moves from table to table, examining every workbench and shelf. Opening drawers and cabinets, he enters firm pencil strokes onto ledger pages that list every crystal, ruby, and emerald. At ten o’clock he has completed his checking of the automata device and every component and jewel to be assembled onto it. He removes his eyeglasses and places his pencil into his jacket pocket.
“I have finished the daily inventory.”
He opens the door of Silva’s office without knocking. The staff in the factory notice that the armed guard and the Swiss policeman have moved to stand in the exit doorways.
“The inventory tally is not complete.”
Silva rises from his chair. It is rare that a daily inventory has not been successful. He calmly asks the auditor to scrutinize the safe in case any of the jewels are still inside.
Germaine earnestly knocks on the door frame. Her hair bun is disheveled and her tweed suit has dust and lint clinging to it. She had been on her hands and knees on the floor. In her palm are the tourmaline stone that she had dropped, and also the missing precious Tsavorite garnet.
Silva looks at her with relieved concern on his face, and turns to the auditor.
“Sir, does this complete the inventory?”
The auditor soon exits the factory with the guard and policeman.
Silva later asks Germaine to come to his office and to close the door. Trepidation in her eyes, she looks as if she has seen a ghost.
“Mademoiselle, we had quite a scare this morning. Is there anything that you would like to tell me?”
.
G. N. Zaccaria is an award-winning fiction-writer, playwright, artist and performer. He holds a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a long-term member of the Atlanta Writers Club, PenAmerica, The Dramatists Guild, Working Title Playwrights, and the Chattanooga Writers Guild. Specializing in short stories of Magical Realism and Speculative Fiction, he has also presented in Spoken Word and Performance Art. He is currently working on a second novel.
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.