The Chattanooga Writers’ Guild is excited to announce the winners of the February Fiction Contest.
This month’s theme was “Edges.” The First-Place prize goes to William Mitchum with the submission “Empathy.” Honors for second place go to Rick Sapp for his entry “The Edge of Silence.”
Thanks to all who participated and special thanks to our talented fiction judge and CWG Newsletter Editor, Hannah Sandoval.
First Place: William Mitchum
Empathy
It was the buzzing that attracted my attention first.
The abnormal, low hum of way too many wings all buzzing at once.
I’d been walking in the woods on that trail for at least 20 minutes, so the normal noises from the road had faded away. That low hum by the water’s edge perked up my instincts as I imagined how unpleasant it would be to walk up on a swarm of yellow jackets on a hot Summer day.
But almost as soon as my eyes locked in on the center of the sound and I began to see the whirling mass of blurry wings, my nose was assaulted by the unmistakably putrid smell of decaying flesh. Soft, fibrous tissues breaking down at a cellular level. The yellow, dappled heat of the midday sun overhead was accelerating the process. The smell so thick it hung in the air like a sheer, wet curtain. Clinging to your skin, permeating your clothes, overwhelming your senses.
A dented up Ford Ranger, parked on the shoulder of a rarely used access road had an envelope tucked beneath the driver’s windshield wiper. The envelope was inside a Ziploc bag. The consideration of weatherproofing the letter had impressed me, and almost immediately, by that tiniest of associations, I felt a hollow sort of empathy for the man who’d written the letter. I imagined that wherever he kept his tools, they were tidy and neat like mine.
The discovery of that truck and the handwritten letter on the windshield started a series of events that eventually led to me stomping through the woods and approaching the cloud of flies and vapors at the edge of a feeder creek.
This wasn’t my first body recovery. Not by a long shot. That smell, although never pleasant, was as familiar to me as my father’s Bay Rum aftershave that he would splash on when we were headed to the hardware store so many Saturday’s ago. No, nothing really new for me, and as usual, I felt a sense of calm accomplishment come over me as I realized that we’d be able to bring some closure to the people who had loved this man.
I’d outpaced some of the other volunteer searchers, and I was alone, at least for a little while. I sat down next to the tree he’d chosen and tried to look out on what had been his last perspective. It was a pretty view. Nothing spectacular.
A small creek running through a small stretch of woods. But for him, I suppose it had been enough.
I kept my eyes low, knowing that there was no sense in rushing the inevitable unpleasantness. Worn work boots rested on pine needles and summer moss at the base of the tree.
Worn, but well taken care of, and again I felt a thump in my chest for the soul who had filled those boots.
William Mitchum’s first career was as a commercial diver in the Gulf of Mexico, where he functioned in multiple roles. Underwater welding, oil platform demolition and pile encapsulation, as well as serving as the emergency medical technician and the hyperbaric specialist for his team.
From offshore diving and nuclear power plants, he shifted to the Fire/EMS industry and has worked in that capacity for the past 25 years. His first assignment in Florida’s poorest urban community prepared him for rotations in Iraq and Qatar.
For the past 15 years, he has worked to translate his overseas contract experience into a functional leadership model for a full-service Fire/EMS department at a stateside automotive manufacturing facility. He has been published in multiple trade magazines and industrial fire journals and enjoys sharing the knowledge he’s achieved through blogs and editorial commentary.
Second Place: Rick Sapp
The Edge of Silence
When Roy turned sixty-five years old he quit speaking.
This decision was not an act of aggression. It was not passive-aggressive, as he understood the term; he was not a physician. It was not a question of anger or the lack of anger. In fact, once he made the commitment, he realized he had never felt quite so calm. So in control, so self-possessed.
And Roy, who had always been rather talkative, even jovial, was not certain why he made such a peculiar decision about his vocal output. It just seemed correct, and he was at peace with it.
Now, Roy did not quit smiling or nodding or shaking his head. He did not stop fist-bumping, and he continued to respond politely, although in an abbreviated manner, without encouraging conversation. He merely decided that of the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet, he had covered them sufficiently. As if he had worn them out. The vowels, the consonants, the “Y.” Roy was not a linguist or an anthropologist, and he could not appreciate why scholars were uncertain. Why they could not make a decision. Was “Y” a vowel or wasn’t it? It was a simple question, really.
Although Roy felt at peace, everyone else had questions. “Is it something I said?” his sweet wife asked, taking his hand in hers and staring into his large brown eyes. “Did I do something, Roy? If I did, I’m sorry.”
Her “something” of course meant something offensive, something wrong.
Her “I” actually meant, “It’s about me, isn’t it?”
“No. Everything’s okay,” Roy said, smiling as he leaned down to kiss her cheek.
“Maybe we should go see somebody,” the wife suggested. Her tone was not firm. Almost hesitant, even questioning. But “somebody” meant a counselor, some plastic-wrapped individual who would sit without listening, empathize without caring, and doodle on a notepad resting in their lap.
“No. I’m fine,” Roy said and believed he had hit on something good, something true.
Once, long ago, he heard that just smiling and acting stupid would navigate most social situations. It sounded … well, stupid, and if not stupid, obtuse, even a bit mean. Roy was not stupid or mean, but now he thought, “I can do that.”
This not speaking was not a strategy, not a delayed way of coping with secret childhood trauma. Roy simply concluded that he was tired of talking, and listening as well, because he suspected that the people he met had little of value to say, that most talk had no meaning and little consequence. Most talk was empty. Acquaintances at church, neighbors, casual encounters at the mall, none of it was thoughtful or, if he was honest—and now he was, at least to himself—even interesting. The endless stream of talk swirling around him was entirely empty of substance.
No one Roy encountered actually wanted to know how he felt, despite asking, “How you doing, Roy?” They didn’t care what he thought … especially the ones who asked. They were not interested in what he had accomplished or failed at in his long life. Their questions were only a holding pattern until they could seize the initiative, tell him what they thought and felt, what they believed, how they had saved the world. No one was particularly interested in his ancestry, his education, his life experiences. No one regarded his answers, his opinions, at more than cocktail napkin level.
“Hey man, how you doing?” His friend.
Roy put his beer down on the counter and looked up and said, “Okay, but I was just thinking. My dad died twelve years ago this month. We had a complicated relationship, but you know, I loved him a lot.” And his friend stared at him with a curious expression, as if to say, “Well, what you gonna do?” and slid away toward the clacking pool table beneath the Budweiser mobile, the great Clydesdales dragging their 1903 Studebaker beer wagon in an absurd and futile circle.
The man didn’t ask, “What was he like?” He didn’t say, “Tell me about him.” Didn’t wonder, “You guys didn’t get along? He teach you to play golf? Take you fishing?” And certainly not, “Was he a kind and generous man?” The guy didn’t even offer, “Yeah. My old man’s been gone a hundred years, the son of a bitch.” Or “He was a good man.”
Just an “Uh, uh. Well, see you around, Roy,” and moved away. As if his interior monologue didn’t matter or was perhaps too painful or fragile to question. As if by going inside, deep, he might crumble, burst into tears at the swift passing of his life. As if his father or mother or he himself, in some future history, was little more than a marble move in Chinese Checkers. As if by thinking of his youth, recalling it, he could fall off the edge of reason and into regret.
Maybe this is why I quit speaking, he thought. Maybe I’m as thin as a spider web, slick and glossy as everyone else. He didn’t care for the thought, but there it was. So Roy settled into his silence, and people around him adjusted, faster than one might expect. “He’s kind of quiet,” or a sly, “Yeah, old Roy. He never did have that much to say. You ain’t missing nothing.”
After a while though Roy began to feel an emotional tension. A pressure of expectation, of wanting, even of need. One day when he was alone at home he walked into the bathroom, closed the door, and stood in front of the mirror to carefully pronounce each letter of the alphabet. He watched his mouth for the fricatives—the F and the V—and the softer sounds, those without force, A and O. Even the tiny puff of air that resulted in P. Roy understood that he could not meet neighbors with an X—an “ekks”—or a Q—a “cuuu.” They would think him odd. And Roy was not odd.
“How are you this evening, Roy?” A former coworker. A decent guy at the backyard barbecue his wife had begged him to attend.
Without waiting for Roy to answer, the man patted him on the shoulder as he might a child or a favorite imbecile, sipped from the bottle of beer in his hand, and turned away. But Roy had, unaccountably, considered responding, something on the order of, “Not bad. What’s new with you?” Which would have been more words than he had become accustomed to speaking on a daily basis. Why he would break his self-imposed silence to speak now occurred to Roy in no measure greater or more urgent than the act of silence itself.
Eventually Roy found himself maneuvered into a corner. He was not ignored. People nodded but moved on. It occurred to him that either they respected his silence or they found interaction laborious. He had become an outsider. An anonymous individual outside the front door. In his solitude he had become invisible.
The small talk, the bits of “Hey!” and “Whassup, Roy?” and “How’s it going?” They all meant something beyond the edge of speech or of silence. They meant a bond, a social glue that maintained community in the randomness of the cultural universe.
These bits of “Get out of here!” and “You betcha!” and the insignificant touch on the arm were not meaningless. They were, in fact, necessary for people to slide along on the surface of society, which is ragged at best. Without them the void crossed the periphery of civilized discourse and people became solitary, ordinary animals, raw in tooth and fang.
Roy realized that each person at the barbecue, each member of this tiny communion, had a history, a lament of joy and sadness, and that, by design, their stories would all soon pass away. That the universe, their home, was a void, a darkness without end. But how is that so and where will our stories then go? he wondered. And Roy began to see that in this universe of void there are bright bits of connectivity, of light, of stars, and these lights span the universe, tie it together like gravity with a “Hi ya, Roy,” and a “What’s going on, bud?”
Roy set his beer bottle on a coaster and wound his way through the crowd. No one snubbed him, but no-one spoke. They only smiled. He found his wife sitting in a plastic lawn chair, chatting with a group of neighbors, and he understood that this was the wall at the edge of the known universe. Here was their separation from the void.
And he said, “Can I get you another drink, darling?”
At that instant Roy crossed a boundary, engaged the continuum of thought and light, the obscure but somehow universally understood border, and rejoined the human race.
Rick Sapp is a freelance writer who lives in Chattanooga with his wife, a musician, and two Australian shepherd dogs.
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.