ALERT: BRAGGING AHEAD!
so today, for the first time in my life, I GOT PAID FOR A STORY! HOORAY! so what if it's just a little ann arbor publication (current magazine, available at www.ecurrent.com) and so what if it was only $125 plus a $35 gift certificate? this is hopefully the first occurrence in a long, LONG chain of writing-related events... and hopefully the checks get a lot bigger. i took second place in the fiction category, and i got an honorable mention for a poem (this meant another gift certificate)... i was the only person to be honored in both categories, which made me feel special. and, it wasn't just students or kids, either--there were lots of older people (read: twentysomethings to sixtysomethings+) who placed and got honorable mentions, too. so yeah, i feel special today.
if you want to read my second-place story, it's below. it is commonly referred to by the ever-quotable chris hess as the story about which he said: "i still say grass for asian people." (although the story is now called "fear of flying")
He moved into the farmhouse with her nearly eleven years ago. It was an old house, with a slightly sagging roof and a long dusty driveway that stretched for almost a mile. There were small flowerbeds next to the porch overflowing with impatiens he planted early in each summer and a trellis of ivy climbing around the front door. Still, the house showed its age. Flecks of yellow paint chipped from the shutters in the rain and the wind whistled through the walls on cold nights; the ceilings were low and the floorboards groaned with pain at even the thought of his footsteps. Yet there was a charm about it. He liked waking with the sun rising in the window next to the bed, its legs first tripping over a faraway hill and then its fingers reaching his eyes, coaxing them open. On warm summer nights, he opened the window and fell asleep to the crickets singing their melodies. The stars, their light uninhibited by streetlamps or skyscrapers, formed a blanket across the night sky like he had never before seen.
In the house, there was a small, unfinished basement. He adopted this as his space. Only a small window and a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling provided any light, but he set his paint and glue and plywood among moth-gnawed couches and record players and family photo albums. On Sunday afternoons, he opened the window to let the air in - even if it was cold - pulled out his tools and paint and wood and worked. He could work for hours without leaving that cement and cinderblock room, cutting out parts or filing down a wing or painting a tail. Occasionally she would call down to him and ask if he needed anything, a snack or some cocoa, but he never did. He was fine here, alone with his tools and his nails and his planes. One day he came home to find a rug and some furnishings in the basement, her attempt to make his space just ever so more comfortable and less cold. But that didn’t really make a difference, since for him it was fine the way he had first discovered it.
Behind the house lay hundreds of acres of land. Her family had owned it since the days of Jefferson and it had once been prosperous and extremely lucrative. Now little was farmed in the fields, but the land was still immensely valuable. Yet she would not sell it. Her parents had held the deed to it at one point and were in talks to put up a development on the property, but she had exchanged stock holdings for the land. He never really understood why she felt such a connection to the family farm. Especially since she had always lived in the suburbs. Almost immediately after moving in, he discovered how she loved walking the fields. Early in the morning, she would slip from bed, pull on her father’s old Wellingtons, and hike through the fields while the dew was still wet. He kept his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, and just listened to her noises. She hummed while dressing, but quietly so as not to wake him. She pulled her hair away from her face and twisted it into a neat bun at the base of her neck. She stepped from the room, calling softly to the dogs as she walked. In the spring, the grasses were tall and at some points reached almost to her knees. From the house, it looked almost as though the ground was swallowing her up and taking the Wellingtons with her.
Once he asked her why it was the mornings she walked in. The air smelled differently in the mornings, she told him, virgin and unspoiled by the heat of the day. The outdoors were more alive in the early mornings - the jays cackling between the trees, the grasshoppers humming among the stalks of grass, the frogs jumping from the water of a pond onto its banks or a lily pad. The feeling of renewal made her feel more alive, she said. So she continued to walk.
While in the fields one morning, she suddenly felt ill and was forced to rest on a flat rock with her head between her knees for nearly twenty minutes. He was concerned, but she told him not to be. In the days after, she arose and dressed but found herself unable to pull on her boots. Eventually she became too sick in the mornings to walk through her fields at all. But one morning he found her writhing in bed next to him, her skin pale and the veins in her neck nearly bursting through the skin. He rushed her to the hospital but nothing could be done. Feeling ravaged but secretly relieved all at once, he realized his obligation to her was gone, but now he could never leave.
He sat by her for hours in a cold, sterile room. Mostly she slept, which they told him was normal. They also told him she’d be fine. He didn’t think she looked it. Her face was ashen and her hair, which came to the bottom of her chin, was matted with beads of sweat around her forehead. Her body suddenly seemed tiny and frail between the sheets, as though even the faintest noise could shatter her into millions of tiny pieces. So she slept and he sat next to her, his head in his hands and weeping all the while, but quietly so he would not wake her. They never again spoke of what had happened. Still, he always hoped there would be another chance but never said anything, for fear of upsetting her; and she cried privately for reasons she did not know or understand. They had not told anyone else in the first place, so life slipped effortlessly back into its normal routine without any unnecessary commotion. Eventually, she took to the fields again, and he was relieved to see her do so. But never again could she find the strength within herself to walk in the mornings, and he did not need to ask why.
For weeks after, he spent much of his time in the basement, working. She never really came down the basement stairs, so he knew he was safe to work uninhibited there. It was a release for him, to smell the wood and the paint fumes mixing in the air. The paintbrush felt right between his fingers, forming a smooth indent on the tip of his thumb. The sand paper fit in his palm like skin. Day after day he toiled over the wood until his hands were rough and the surface was smooth as glass. He applied the paint, meticulously covering every inch with a cherry red stain and added stripes, milky white and glossy, along the wings and fuselage. Then came the waiting. He sat and watched the paint drying slowly, losing some of its sheen in the process. It took days. When it was finally done, he gingerly held each piece, fitting it into the others. Seeing his plane assembled, he recognized this was his best work yet. So he put it on a shelf where it would be safe and sat on the couch and looked at it from a distance.
She loved him, he knew. He could see it in her face from the first time he woke up next to her. Before she opened her eyes, he lay silently next to her, listening to the noises of the house. It was October then, so he could hear the heat running along the pipes in the ceiling and the floorboards stretching to catch the sudden warmth. He watched a deer sprint across the field behind the house, stopping only to munch tentatively on a stalk of something left on the barren ground and take off once more. He absorbed it all while she slept, taking in tiny bits and pieces of the house and the land and all the while thinking of how inviting it was. This place felt warm and familiar, as if he had reached home while lying in some foreign bed.
There had been other women, other opportunities for him. He worked in the city, far away from the farm and from her. His secretary was pretty in all the usual sort of ways, and they had worked many late nights together. Once he had met a lawyer in an airport while waiting for a flight; she was from Chicago and wore long, dangling earrings. But then there was the woman who worked behind the counter at the local market. She was small with dark skin and sparkling eyes. Every week he found a different reason to go to the store, driving fifteen minutes each way just to pick up a pimento loaf or some out-of-season fruit. For weeks she just smiled at him across the counter until one day she was not there. He walked out to his car and found her waiting for him. They drove to her apartment in silence, climbed the stairway in silence, made love in silence. He lay there in coldness afterward, surrounded by stainless steel and white walls, and felt alone.
Their unspoken dance continued for a time. He said he loved her and she asked him to stay, but every time he said no. He could not bring himself to sleep in that apartment with the black leather couches and the abstract painting above the bed. Lying next to her, all he could think of were the floorboards groaning out a welcome or the window boxes with lobelia or the oak tree that split the driveway into a fork. So one day he told her he could not stay, nor come back. She was angry and hurled insults and threats and curses at him, but he was not bothered. He just thought of his floorboards and his flowers and his tree, all waiting for him. He left her apartment for good and went back to his home where he belonged. Walking through the door, he felt warm and full inside, as though it was a Christmas morning of his childhood. The floorboards welcomed him home. She was not home yet, so he moved through the house alone, running his fingers across all the things he had missed. He had not been gone long, only since the morning, but it felt as though years had passed. And then he went to the basement, where a faint odor of sawdust and paint still lingered in the air, and worked on his planes until he heard the door close upstairs.
Now, years later, he watched her walk, in long strides, across the field and back toward the house, the sun setting behind her. She was a tall, robust woman now; her hips and thighs showed no evidence of ever being denied a meal. Her hair was long for a woman her age; nearly all her friends had theirs cut in shorter, more mature styles, but she insisted on wearing it past her shoulders. It made her feel young, she told him. The setting sunlight bounced off the crown of her head, igniting every strand with a certain brilliance in the evening light. It was only at rare moments like this that he ever stopped to think of how beautiful she was. Yes, perhaps she was more sturdy than other women he had been with, but that is not to say that she was not exceedingly lovely. She had a way about her, and it was unlike anything he had ever felt or seen before. They were not married, though all their friends and even their families thought they were. They each wore silver bands, purchased at a Mexican flea market on a vacation, and it was simply assumed they had eloped there. They found it easier to elude the subject than address it, and therefore did not correct this assumption. But it was at times like this when he watched her come in from the fields in the setting sun that he regretted never marrying her. It was not often that he took the time to regret anything, but when he did, it was most often this.
He twisted the band on his finger. It was comfortable, this ring; it had formed a groove around the base of his finger where it lay. But this was how all things were for him now. Comfortable. The regret was beginning to overwhelm him now, choking in his throat. He had never been an emotive person but suddenly he found himself weakening. He realized that, for so many years, he had not loved her; it was not love that kept him in that house, but comfort. At first it had just been the window boxes filled with lobelia in the summer, or the cool lake just over the hills, or the bay window in the front room. Now though, if it was possible, he felt as though he did love her. Yes, they may never have married or had a family and she was not the most conventional beauty, but he loved her nonetheless. He loved her in a way he could not have loved her years ago for he loved the way the setting sun flecked her hair with gold as she walked, the dogs nipping affectionately at her rounded ankles. He loved waking up before her and listening to her nasally breathing. He loved how the shadows fell into the lines time had etched into her face. He did not know why he could love her now instead of then; now all he knew was that he felt suffocated without her.
But he knew it was too late to say it, too late to tell her. Now was not the time for things to be said and feelings to be shared; it was too late in life and things could not be taken back. He was afraid that she would see him vulnerable, see how he could not even breathe without her around. Besides, there were no words he could say to describe how he felt, how he loved. If she still felt the same, he did not know it, but he could better cope with the unspoken. So this is how his life, their life, would be forever more - complacency without the talk of love, no show of emotions, nothing to disturb their comfort. And faced with the choice, this is how he would have it be.
A gust of spring night air whipped around the corners and down through the house, and he knew she had returned. She whistled low, calling the dogs in. In his mind’s eye, he could see her - stepping through the doorway and onto the rug, sliding one heel out of her boot and then the other, and tucking them next to the doorframe. He heard her walk softly in her stocking feet across the tile and down the stairs. More than anything now, it was the sounds of her that he prized most; the floorboards were irritating and the wind kept him awake at nights. But she made the soft, gentle noises he could not do without.
He turned his head to see her walking to him. She sat down next to him on the musty couch and looked for a moment at his collection of airplanes, all collecting dust along a row of high shelves. She sighed as though she too was content and rested her head on his chest. His heart raced at the sudden contact, but he coolly stroked her hair until his pulse gradually slowed, and he kissed the top her head. She let out a little murmur but said nothing, and together they gazed at the planes.
if you want to read my second-place story, it's below. it is commonly referred to by the ever-quotable chris hess as the story about which he said: "i still say grass for asian people." (although the story is now called "fear of flying")
He moved into the farmhouse with her nearly eleven years ago. It was an old house, with a slightly sagging roof and a long dusty driveway that stretched for almost a mile. There were small flowerbeds next to the porch overflowing with impatiens he planted early in each summer and a trellis of ivy climbing around the front door. Still, the house showed its age. Flecks of yellow paint chipped from the shutters in the rain and the wind whistled through the walls on cold nights; the ceilings were low and the floorboards groaned with pain at even the thought of his footsteps. Yet there was a charm about it. He liked waking with the sun rising in the window next to the bed, its legs first tripping over a faraway hill and then its fingers reaching his eyes, coaxing them open. On warm summer nights, he opened the window and fell asleep to the crickets singing their melodies. The stars, their light uninhibited by streetlamps or skyscrapers, formed a blanket across the night sky like he had never before seen.
In the house, there was a small, unfinished basement. He adopted this as his space. Only a small window and a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling provided any light, but he set his paint and glue and plywood among moth-gnawed couches and record players and family photo albums. On Sunday afternoons, he opened the window to let the air in - even if it was cold - pulled out his tools and paint and wood and worked. He could work for hours without leaving that cement and cinderblock room, cutting out parts or filing down a wing or painting a tail. Occasionally she would call down to him and ask if he needed anything, a snack or some cocoa, but he never did. He was fine here, alone with his tools and his nails and his planes. One day he came home to find a rug and some furnishings in the basement, her attempt to make his space just ever so more comfortable and less cold. But that didn’t really make a difference, since for him it was fine the way he had first discovered it.
Behind the house lay hundreds of acres of land. Her family had owned it since the days of Jefferson and it had once been prosperous and extremely lucrative. Now little was farmed in the fields, but the land was still immensely valuable. Yet she would not sell it. Her parents had held the deed to it at one point and were in talks to put up a development on the property, but she had exchanged stock holdings for the land. He never really understood why she felt such a connection to the family farm. Especially since she had always lived in the suburbs. Almost immediately after moving in, he discovered how she loved walking the fields. Early in the morning, she would slip from bed, pull on her father’s old Wellingtons, and hike through the fields while the dew was still wet. He kept his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, and just listened to her noises. She hummed while dressing, but quietly so as not to wake him. She pulled her hair away from her face and twisted it into a neat bun at the base of her neck. She stepped from the room, calling softly to the dogs as she walked. In the spring, the grasses were tall and at some points reached almost to her knees. From the house, it looked almost as though the ground was swallowing her up and taking the Wellingtons with her.
Once he asked her why it was the mornings she walked in. The air smelled differently in the mornings, she told him, virgin and unspoiled by the heat of the day. The outdoors were more alive in the early mornings - the jays cackling between the trees, the grasshoppers humming among the stalks of grass, the frogs jumping from the water of a pond onto its banks or a lily pad. The feeling of renewal made her feel more alive, she said. So she continued to walk.
While in the fields one morning, she suddenly felt ill and was forced to rest on a flat rock with her head between her knees for nearly twenty minutes. He was concerned, but she told him not to be. In the days after, she arose and dressed but found herself unable to pull on her boots. Eventually she became too sick in the mornings to walk through her fields at all. But one morning he found her writhing in bed next to him, her skin pale and the veins in her neck nearly bursting through the skin. He rushed her to the hospital but nothing could be done. Feeling ravaged but secretly relieved all at once, he realized his obligation to her was gone, but now he could never leave.
He sat by her for hours in a cold, sterile room. Mostly she slept, which they told him was normal. They also told him she’d be fine. He didn’t think she looked it. Her face was ashen and her hair, which came to the bottom of her chin, was matted with beads of sweat around her forehead. Her body suddenly seemed tiny and frail between the sheets, as though even the faintest noise could shatter her into millions of tiny pieces. So she slept and he sat next to her, his head in his hands and weeping all the while, but quietly so he would not wake her. They never again spoke of what had happened. Still, he always hoped there would be another chance but never said anything, for fear of upsetting her; and she cried privately for reasons she did not know or understand. They had not told anyone else in the first place, so life slipped effortlessly back into its normal routine without any unnecessary commotion. Eventually, she took to the fields again, and he was relieved to see her do so. But never again could she find the strength within herself to walk in the mornings, and he did not need to ask why.
For weeks after, he spent much of his time in the basement, working. She never really came down the basement stairs, so he knew he was safe to work uninhibited there. It was a release for him, to smell the wood and the paint fumes mixing in the air. The paintbrush felt right between his fingers, forming a smooth indent on the tip of his thumb. The sand paper fit in his palm like skin. Day after day he toiled over the wood until his hands were rough and the surface was smooth as glass. He applied the paint, meticulously covering every inch with a cherry red stain and added stripes, milky white and glossy, along the wings and fuselage. Then came the waiting. He sat and watched the paint drying slowly, losing some of its sheen in the process. It took days. When it was finally done, he gingerly held each piece, fitting it into the others. Seeing his plane assembled, he recognized this was his best work yet. So he put it on a shelf where it would be safe and sat on the couch and looked at it from a distance.
She loved him, he knew. He could see it in her face from the first time he woke up next to her. Before she opened her eyes, he lay silently next to her, listening to the noises of the house. It was October then, so he could hear the heat running along the pipes in the ceiling and the floorboards stretching to catch the sudden warmth. He watched a deer sprint across the field behind the house, stopping only to munch tentatively on a stalk of something left on the barren ground and take off once more. He absorbed it all while she slept, taking in tiny bits and pieces of the house and the land and all the while thinking of how inviting it was. This place felt warm and familiar, as if he had reached home while lying in some foreign bed.
There had been other women, other opportunities for him. He worked in the city, far away from the farm and from her. His secretary was pretty in all the usual sort of ways, and they had worked many late nights together. Once he had met a lawyer in an airport while waiting for a flight; she was from Chicago and wore long, dangling earrings. But then there was the woman who worked behind the counter at the local market. She was small with dark skin and sparkling eyes. Every week he found a different reason to go to the store, driving fifteen minutes each way just to pick up a pimento loaf or some out-of-season fruit. For weeks she just smiled at him across the counter until one day she was not there. He walked out to his car and found her waiting for him. They drove to her apartment in silence, climbed the stairway in silence, made love in silence. He lay there in coldness afterward, surrounded by stainless steel and white walls, and felt alone.
Their unspoken dance continued for a time. He said he loved her and she asked him to stay, but every time he said no. He could not bring himself to sleep in that apartment with the black leather couches and the abstract painting above the bed. Lying next to her, all he could think of were the floorboards groaning out a welcome or the window boxes with lobelia or the oak tree that split the driveway into a fork. So one day he told her he could not stay, nor come back. She was angry and hurled insults and threats and curses at him, but he was not bothered. He just thought of his floorboards and his flowers and his tree, all waiting for him. He left her apartment for good and went back to his home where he belonged. Walking through the door, he felt warm and full inside, as though it was a Christmas morning of his childhood. The floorboards welcomed him home. She was not home yet, so he moved through the house alone, running his fingers across all the things he had missed. He had not been gone long, only since the morning, but it felt as though years had passed. And then he went to the basement, where a faint odor of sawdust and paint still lingered in the air, and worked on his planes until he heard the door close upstairs.
Now, years later, he watched her walk, in long strides, across the field and back toward the house, the sun setting behind her. She was a tall, robust woman now; her hips and thighs showed no evidence of ever being denied a meal. Her hair was long for a woman her age; nearly all her friends had theirs cut in shorter, more mature styles, but she insisted on wearing it past her shoulders. It made her feel young, she told him. The setting sunlight bounced off the crown of her head, igniting every strand with a certain brilliance in the evening light. It was only at rare moments like this that he ever stopped to think of how beautiful she was. Yes, perhaps she was more sturdy than other women he had been with, but that is not to say that she was not exceedingly lovely. She had a way about her, and it was unlike anything he had ever felt or seen before. They were not married, though all their friends and even their families thought they were. They each wore silver bands, purchased at a Mexican flea market on a vacation, and it was simply assumed they had eloped there. They found it easier to elude the subject than address it, and therefore did not correct this assumption. But it was at times like this when he watched her come in from the fields in the setting sun that he regretted never marrying her. It was not often that he took the time to regret anything, but when he did, it was most often this.
He twisted the band on his finger. It was comfortable, this ring; it had formed a groove around the base of his finger where it lay. But this was how all things were for him now. Comfortable. The regret was beginning to overwhelm him now, choking in his throat. He had never been an emotive person but suddenly he found himself weakening. He realized that, for so many years, he had not loved her; it was not love that kept him in that house, but comfort. At first it had just been the window boxes filled with lobelia in the summer, or the cool lake just over the hills, or the bay window in the front room. Now though, if it was possible, he felt as though he did love her. Yes, they may never have married or had a family and she was not the most conventional beauty, but he loved her nonetheless. He loved her in a way he could not have loved her years ago for he loved the way the setting sun flecked her hair with gold as she walked, the dogs nipping affectionately at her rounded ankles. He loved waking up before her and listening to her nasally breathing. He loved how the shadows fell into the lines time had etched into her face. He did not know why he could love her now instead of then; now all he knew was that he felt suffocated without her.
But he knew it was too late to say it, too late to tell her. Now was not the time for things to be said and feelings to be shared; it was too late in life and things could not be taken back. He was afraid that she would see him vulnerable, see how he could not even breathe without her around. Besides, there were no words he could say to describe how he felt, how he loved. If she still felt the same, he did not know it, but he could better cope with the unspoken. So this is how his life, their life, would be forever more - complacency without the talk of love, no show of emotions, nothing to disturb their comfort. And faced with the choice, this is how he would have it be.
A gust of spring night air whipped around the corners and down through the house, and he knew she had returned. She whistled low, calling the dogs in. In his mind’s eye, he could see her - stepping through the doorway and onto the rug, sliding one heel out of her boot and then the other, and tucking them next to the doorframe. He heard her walk softly in her stocking feet across the tile and down the stairs. More than anything now, it was the sounds of her that he prized most; the floorboards were irritating and the wind kept him awake at nights. But she made the soft, gentle noises he could not do without.
He turned his head to see her walking to him. She sat down next to him on the musty couch and looked for a moment at his collection of airplanes, all collecting dust along a row of high shelves. She sighed as though she too was content and rested her head on his chest. His heart raced at the sudden contact, but he coolly stroked her hair until his pulse gradually slowed, and he kissed the top her head. She let out a little murmur but said nothing, and together they gazed at the planes.