The Chattanooga Writers’ Guild announces the winners of their November Fiction Contest.
First place goes to Shawn O’Neal with the submission “Prologues,” and second place to James Brumbaugh with the submission “Once Upon a Dream.” This month’s theme was “Forgotten Places.”
First Place: Shawn O’Neal
Prologues
Cynthia’s hand dances in the beam of low winter sunlight seeping through the dirty panes. Slender fingers waltz with the swirling dust kicked up by the hem of her long skirt. The daffodil-yellow curtains that once covered the window, that made even the dreariest days feel sunny, slump against the baseboard, bleached and nibbled into mouse nests.
The splintered floorboards creak under her boots. She shuffles through the dimness to where her old bed sits crooked in the corner. More dust huffs into the air as Cynthia plops onto a mattress that seems far too small to have ever held her. Mildew and rodent droppings crinkle her nose. Nearly thirty years ago, the first time she walked into this house, it smelled like home. Her aunties were always baking cobblers with the orchard fruit. She would hover in the kitchen as whole cobs of garden corn bobbed in boiling water, waiting to be brushed with fresh-churned butter.
A lurking spider, disturbed by her intrusion, scurries across her wrist and vanishes over the side of the musty mattress. Cynthia’s eyes track it—it used to be her job to knock the cobwebs down—finding a splash of blue on the graying plaster of the bedroom wall. Her frizzy bun brushes the drooping slats of the top bunk as she yanks on the bed’s heavy oak frame. It surrenders with a raspy cough, revealing the simple mural. Her hand eases out, sliding across the thick wax drawing now webbed through with fine cracks. She sighs as it all comes back to her—sneaking the box of Crayolas out of the playroom then waiting long after bedtime to crawl under her bunk and bring her vision to life.
The crayon cottage with its steep roof is cobalt blue, crowned with a chimney, and nearly split down the middle by an orange door. Below, four round-faced people smile side by side: a man, a woman. A little girl and a little boy. The kids’ hair is lemon-peel-bright and they pose beside a car with big, round wheels that can take them all wherever they want to go. It was everything she thought she wanted when she was ten. And she got all of it. Even the children’s blonde hair. It’s all gone now. Just as well.
Cynthia turns as Marcy’s heels clip-clop into the room. The realtor stabs at the screen of her phone, her tailored pantsuit cutting a sharp silhouette against the window’s glare. “Sorry about that.” Marcy still stabs. “My kid. He’s just . . . ” As she tucks the phone away her mouth blossoms into a polished crescent smile—just like on the faces in the drawing. “Do you have kids? Did I ask that already?”
Cynthia offers a slight nod and scans the rest of the room. Ten other handmade bunkbeds stand in formation. Once, her sisters sprawled and chattered across them, their brothers clowning in the room right above. She recalls the ceiling-squeak of the boys’ feet as they crept around at night, thinking they were being sneaky.
“Well, it’s all a go,” Marcy says through the smile. “A cash payment certainly does make things easier. Just need your signature. Well, signatures. I do have to document that I disclosed the . . . incident. State law.” Marcy’s smile shrinks an appropriate degree. “Such awful stuff. Just awful. To think—well, no need to dwell.” She offers Cynthia a leather binder and pen. “Such a lovely property. I’m glad someone will finally enjoy it again. Now just sign here, here, and then here.”
Cynthia watches the pen deposit the name onto the designated lines. People care so much about names. About her names.
Papa Z cared too. Cynthia signs and remembers.
“Do you know why I named you Clio?” Papa Z drew the straight razor across her stubbled scalp, his wiry hands calloused from mending fences and tossing hay bales. They did this every Sun’s Day. Usually, he would tell her stories while he shaved her head. Stories of heroism and folly. The Tragedies, he called them. He said they could teach you everything you needed to know. But this story was different.
“No, Papa.” She only knew her old name was to be forgotten. She wasn’t even allowed to mention to her siblings that she was once called Cynthia.
“Clio was one of the Muses, a daughter of Zeus.” Papa Z rinsed the lather from the razor and returned it to her head. “She was the muse of history. The Proclaimer. In Greek, her name means to make famous. That’s what you’re going to do one day.” Finished, he dried her head with a soft towel.
“For you, Papa? Make you famous?” She traced her fingers across her smooth scalp. It always felt like gentle tickles.
“For me. For your brothers and sisters. For the Ecclesia.”
Cynthia glances up from the binder. Marcy, back to staring at her phone, picks at her teeth with a pink manicured nail. Flipping the page, Cynthia scrawls a final signature. Her life has become a mosaic of papers, a leaden collage plastered onto tottering ruins. Titles and deeds. Divorce papers. Petition for Involuntary Commitment. Termination of Parental Rights.
Her ex-husband and their children are a world away now. In Europe. Across an ocean. Separated by a judge who golfed with her husband and more papers. Enough papers to build a bridge across the Atlantic to walk over to her kids.
But they aren’t her kids anymore. She doesn’t need papers to know that.
The FBI men who came here that day brought papers, too.
“All done? Lemme just take a gander there.” Marcy’s crescent smile returns as she swipes whatever she has freed from her teeth with a flick of tongue, spraying a mist of spittle onto Cynthia’s arm.
After the raid, her parents hired a man who spat when he talked. Or, at least when he yelled, which was mostly. He had a belly like a pregnant auntie. Pasty skin ballooned out between his straining shirt buttons. It was reprogramming. That meant to teach her right—to get the wrong ideas out of her head. He would pace around and wave his arms and spit would fly out as he yelled and land on her bare legs while she shivered on the concrete floor.
He told her things that Papa Z had done. He would bring in a plate of food and a cup of water and set it by the door. The food always looked too bright, like her stolen Crayolas, and smelled like strong brine. But it made her stomach rumble anyway. The reprogrammer would take out a picture of one of her brothers or sisters. Like Thalia. Or Olly, maybe. He’d tell her that wasn’t their real name—that Papa Z had stolen them. That they were back with their real families now, with real brothers and sisters. That they were happy and home. Then he would strike a match and burn the photo.
“What’s your name?” he would always ask while the photo burned.
“Clio,” she would reply. Then the man would go with the plate of too-bright food. Sometimes he left the water.
Whenever she tried to curl up on the cold floor and sleep the reprogrammer would pound on the door like the FBI, and she’d wake up wet and whimpering. Like that day in the cellar just beneath this bedroom when she’d huddled behind shelves of canned food and steel boxes filled with ammunition. Her arms were wrapped around three of the youngest kids while her aunties pointed Kalashnikovs up the stairs at the bolted door. But ultimately, they gave up. They surrendered and let them all get taken.
Papa Z never gave up. He died for them.
She was not as strong. After two weeks of reprogramming she took the match and burned the photo of Papa Z like the man wanted her to. “My name is Cynthia,” she yielded, and she ate a plate of cold pork and beans with shaky fingers.
“Well, this all looks good.” Marcy tucks the binder under her arm. “I’ll have your copies sent over.” Fishing a set of keys out of her suit pocket, she jingles them like a cat toy before pressing them into Cynthia’s palm. “Oh, so exciting. I’m so happy for you.” She’s already stabbing at her phone as she struts toward the front door. Cynthia trails her out to the wrap-around porch. Dust rolls down the long driveway, drifting up into the clear sky as a battered Ford van towing a U-Haul lurches to a stop.
“Oh. Who is this? Your movers already?” Marcy slides into oversized sunglasses.
A young man hops out. The driver smooths her pleated dress as she skips around to join him. They heave open the van’s side doors, spilling a medley of gawking children onto the hard-packed farmyard. Their shaved heads glint in the winter sunlight.
Clio beams. “It’s my family.”
Shawn O’Neal is a fiction writer living in East Tennessee.
Second Place: James Brumbaugh
Once Upon a Dream
You run and run and run. The doctors told you with the new medication that you had to keep active. That even with the medication, if you stood still too long, if you gave way to sloth, to a sedentary life, that the sickness might come back. So you bought some good shoes, some Nikes. A pink pair, you felt compelled to pink and you don’t know why. Somebody would like them, you just don’t know who. And now you’re wearing them out, running as long as you can, running until you’re on your hands and knees beside the road dry retching, people in cars pulling over to check on you.
Sometimes you hear little feet pattering after you, a hue and cry. Words that you can’t make out, but the sound wrenches at your heart. Your tears freeze on your cheeks in the mid-December air. You look back and there’s no one there. You turn up the music in your headphones, but nothing can drown out the sound. The medication will sometimes make you see ghosts. You must tell them at your next appointment. A larger dose will banish them.
****
You sit next to Mel at the bar. You’re both drinking the same beer, an IPA that she tells you was your favorite. It’s okay. You figure you haven’t developed the taste for it yet. With the memories gone, everything has to be built back up. Like a muscle, the doctors say.
“Hey Mel,” you say. “Can you tell me a little bit more? About how I was before?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off the TV. There’s football on, a game she’s invested in, a game you would have been invested in too, you’re sure, if you could remember what team you supported. That was the way it went with the medicine. You remember football, the rules, the teams, even the history of the game. But you don’t remember your favorite team, your favorite players, if you’d played in high school, what position. Your existence, wiped from the record.
“You were the same,” she says. “Inward looking. You’d stare into the mirror. Not cause you thought you were pretty. Just to memorize your own face.” She finally looks at you. “Do you still know your own face?”
“Yeah,” you say. “That doesn’t go away. I know I’m me, I know my name. I even knew your name, somehow. Just not anything about our friendship. Like, I know you like sour cream and onion chips. I just don’t know how I know that.”
“Huh,” she says and looks away.
“So, how do I know that?” you ask.
“Cause I eat them, dummy.”
You shrug and smile. The TV drones on and on. A commercial for Disney comes on. A song plays, “Once Upon a Dream.”
You close your eyes and little feet stand on top of your own feet, a cheap little princess dress fraying at the ends, a little tiara with fake jewels. The song is playing and you’re swaying and then the commercial ends and you’re back in the bar with Mel and you’re crying and you don’t know why.
She’s holding your face in her hands and she’s staring at you in horror and she says, “What the hell was that?” and you realize you’re still sobbing. She drags you by your shoulders away from the bar and into a booth in the corner and you suddenly remember that Mel hates making a scene. When had you made a scene before?
After a while you calm down and the emotions fade. Mel just stares at you silently with concern in her eyes. She hasn’t stopped drinking, she’s crushing beer after beer.
“Mel,” you say. “I keep having these visions.”
“Hallucinations,” she says. “It’s the medicine, huh?”
“They feel real,” you say. “I’ve been seeing a little girl.”
She’s just staring off into space and you think that she didn’t hear you. “Have you told the doctors?” she asks.
“Not yet,” you say. “I haven’t told them yet. I’m afraid, afraid they’ll take me off the medicine if they know. I got on it for a reason, I know I got on it because it would save my life. Whoever I was before I got the cancer, that guy knew that he would die anyway. But he gave me a new chance at life. He knew he’d be wiped away, and he did it anyway. And if I tell the doctors, they’ll take me off the medicine and the cancer will eat me away from the inside and that version of me will have died for nothing. And I just, I can’t have that. I can never let that happen.”
“I think,” she says, and she pauses for a long time. She stares at her beer bottle and furrows her brow. “I think that you need to get your dosage adjusted. Isn’t that what they told you? That in the case of hallucinations, they’d just up your dosage? So what’s the harm in telling them?”
You sigh. “You’re right. I mean, insurance costs, but I’m already going to be a debt slave for life over the treatment I’m getting. So what’s a little more? I’m just, I’m worried, I guess. I’m worried it’s not working.”
She stares at you with wide eyes. It’s the look that only an angry drunk friend can give, you do remember that. She stands up. “I have to go. Listen, talk to your doctors. Maybe they can help, if not, who cares? The worst that’ll happen is you remember.”
She walks off and you follow her and ask what you’ll remember, plead with her to tell you what you need to remember, but she stays mum, gets in her car and drives off.
***
Your mind is being ripped in two. Your house is full of memories just out of your grasp, or perhaps hallucinations. Your mother saying the house feels so quiet without Eva, but who is Eva? Car headlights approaching too fast to avoid, shards of glass everywhere, blood on your hands and in your face and in your mouth. A small body twisted in the roadway, a small voice asking why you forgot. You break a mirror when you see a face like yours but smaller, you insert a small shard of glass into your wrist, and as the blood drains out you hear a small child’s voice asking why why why?
***
Before:
They let you smoke in the office, which is nice. Smell is the sense most closely attached to memory, and everyone has fond memories of smoking, they say. It’s a tiny little room, painted all white, with two comfortable chairs that face each other and a table with a metronome. You sit in one chair and a woman in a lab coat sits in the other. She stares at you with her lips pursed.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“ Because I want to forget,” you say. “That’s your thing, right? You make people forget?”
She records your answer on a small notepad and looks up at you. “Yes, actually. We can make you forget. But what do you want to forget?”
“My daughter,” you say. Your voice shakes at the mention of her. “She died, and it was my fault. We were driving, it was the middle of the night. I’d been driving all day. I should have stopped, but we were so close to home. I thought we could make it. But I fell asleep. Woke up to a horn blaring. I was thrown out of the car, was fine.”
“And she died in the accident. Because of your negligence.” She doesn’t say this with malice, just as a statement of fact.
“Yes,” you say. Tears roll down your face. “I killed her through negligence.”
“We’ll have to wipe away a lot,” she says. “A child, that’s a pretty big thing. Not like a bad relationship or, you know, a traumatic event. You’ll lose everything. Everything associated with her, music you played her, places you went with her. You’ll forget her mother, you’ll forget, well, everything. Just functionally, it’s impossible to remove memories of a child without removing, well, almost everything else. And when the procedure is over, we’ll just tell you that you have a rare form of brain cancer, that you’re on an experimental treatment, a possible cure. People don’t usually ask questions about that. We’ll also have to brief your loved ones, do you have any loved ones?”
“I do.”
“Are they supportive?”
You consider the question. “I don’t think they care. I don’t think that anyone has cared about me since she died.”
“We find that the loved ones are more supportive once they see the change in the subject. Some even come to us to have the medicine themselves. But, anyway, why don’t we get started?”
You give your assent, take the pill she hands you, and fall asleep to the sound of the metronome.
James Brumbaugh is a writer from Gulfport, MS who now lives in Chattanooga. He recently ran his first marathon.
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month.
Go to chattanoogawritersguild.org and scroll down to "Latest News" 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.