Nimrod/Hardman Literary Awards
The Geraldine McLoud
Commendation for Fiction
Janette Turner Hospital
from “The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon”
The first summer after Leela-May crossed over, Maggie spent the late
afternoons waiting out by the gatepost on Rural Route 3. She was watching
for a sign from Leela-May. This was when Maggie believed—she still had
reason to believe—that Leela would come back from the other side. It was
the summer before Maggie started high school and her sister’s
transfiguration, not to mention the turbulent front of Maggie’s own future
moving in, smoked like haze at the crest of the hill. The haze was shot
through with shimmer and gold, a cloud of gorgeous and tantalizing nothing,
but Maggie could not see through it.
She would bring a book and sit cross-legged in the grass, her back against a
fence post, but she could never concentrate. She would shade her eyes and
squint until she could just make out the hump of the Hamilton house, which
she was able to do by lining up her thumb with two pines and then looking
slightly to the left. Beyond the Hamilton house the rural route dipped
toward swamp, but long before the mailman’s white-and-blue van came over the
crest and floated onward like a galleon in fog, Maggie would see the
tell-tale halo of dust beyond the Hamilton chimneys and she would abandon
her book and start running.
The Hamilton house, built in the old plantation style, had been derelict for
so long that sections of veranda had come adrift and jutted like wreckage
from a honeysuckle sea. Maggie climbed on the rusted gates—the crossbar of
the H was her lookout point—until she could make out the driver of the van
behind his wheel. Then she would start shouting. “Hey, Mr. Boykin! Hey!”
She would spread her wings and loft herself out from the H and crash-land on
the unpaved road. “Is there a letter, Mr. Boykin?”
“One day you will either break a leg or get yourself run over, Maggie-Lee.”
“Is there a letter from my sister?”
“There’s something here from the County Council,” Mr. Boykin might say.
Or: “I believe I’ve got your utilities bill.”
“But have you got one for me?”
“Well now,” he would say, making a great show of searching through the
canvas bag on the seat beside him. “I don’t believe so, Maggie-Lee.”
“But there has to be, Mr. Boykin. It’s been a week.”
“Well, there is one here for your daddy.” He would hold the envelope
at arm’s length and squint. “Can’t rightly read this handwriting, but I
think it says—” He would squint some more and make a performance of
deciphering the script with difficulty. “Mr. Gideon Moore, Rural Route
3, Promised Land,
South Carolina.
Yes, that’s what it says, but I don’t have nothing here for Miss
Mary-Magdalene Lee Moore herself.”
On such jackpot days, Maggie would stand on tiptoe and lean into the van and
throw her arms around the mailman’s neck. “Don’t tease, Mr. Boykin, it’s
mean. Just give it me, please, pretty please.”
“It’s against the law,” he would say. “It’s a Federal offense. I
have to put this letter in the box at your gatepost, and nowhere else, or
the sheriff might could string me up.”
Maggie would whisk the letter from his hands. “He can string me up
instead,” she would call. She would run alongside the van to the double
gates and then race up her long dirt drive, gasping, laughing with
excitement, leaping over sink holes and nettles, clutching at the stitch in
her side, and hand the envelope to her father—“It’s here, Daddy. It’s
come”—but the summer of that year was not propitious.
“How many letters does this make, Mary-Magdalene Lee?”
“Um, five, no six now, Daddy. Four that we’ve read and the one that you
wouldn’t—”
“Six. This is her sixth.”
Gideon Moore studied the envelope, inspecting postmarks and stains. He
turned it over and held it up to the light. Maggie chewed her fingernails.
Minutes passed.
“Look at this, Mary-Magdalene Lee,” her father said somberly. He pointed
to the spidery postmark. “Read it out loud.”
“June 6,” Maggie read. “Cambridge, Mass. 02138.”
“Six, six, and this is your sister’s sixth letter. What does that tell you?”
Maggie knew what three sixes told. “Mark of the beast in the Book of
Revelation,” she said sadly, and her father nodded and they both
contemplated the sorrowful off-white object. It looked, Maggie thought,
like a stricken dove. Then Gideon Moore spat on the Yankee stamp and peeled
it off and put it in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed.
“Daddy,” Maggie begged sadly.
“It is not that which goeth into the mouth that defileth a man, but that
which proceedeth out of the mouth, coming forth from the heart in darkness,
that defileth. Matthew fifteen, verse eleven.”
He dropped the letter on the barbecue pit beside the screen porch and struck
a match on his shoe and bent to set the paper on fire. He and Maggie
watched Leela-May’s words burn and curl. Black shavings twisted in the air
and Maggie lifted her hand and let scorched words settle there, fragile as
feathers. She closed her fist over them.
“We are going to pray for Leela-May,” her father said.
Maggie pressed her lips to the ash in her palm. She pressed her palm to
her forehead.
“Here and now,” her father said, kneeling on the stony weed-crusted ground,
and motioning for Maggie to kneel beside him. Maggie, in cotton shorts,
surreptitiously brushed at pebbles with one hand. “Now if Leela-May had
mailed this one day later,” her father said, “that would have been a whole
other story. Of course, if she had mailed this one day later, it would have
been because she had been stopped on her road to Damascus and she would have
written a different kind of letter, first sentence to last, than a letter
mailed on the sixth. Seven is the Lord’s favorite number. How do we know
that, Mary-Magdalene Lee?”
“Because God created the heavens and the earth in seven days,” Maggie said.
“And because there were seven years of plenty in Egypt, and seven years of
famine, and seven priests with seven trumpets marching around Jericho, and
seven seals in the Book of Revelation.”
“And because the Lord said we must forgive our brother seventy times seven,
Mary-Magdalene Lee. Could you forgive your sister seventy times seven for
crossing over and leaving us to manage by ourselves?”
“I’d forgive her seven million times,” Maggie said fervently.
Florence Weinberger
He Left Me Hundreds
He left me hundreds,
hundreds of hundreds in bundles of ten
sectioned off with paper clips; I stuck them
deep into the toe of an old sock,
which I then secreted in a pocket—
his old sock, of which I wrote rueful poetry,
about his thrift, his big hunger,
his inability to gain weight…but I digress.
The cash is still rolled up, what little’s left
seven years since his death, crises
biting it down, one at a time, to a tight
cigarette: a leaky roof, a grandchild’s shoes.
I didn’t know cash could fade
in the dark, but the rust around the clips
is no surprise. Some nights I fret
the Feds will call them all in, hundreds
hidden in musty cupboards, forgotten boxes,
they’ll want to shred them, issue
new ones, they’ll want to know
where I’ve been keeping this stash.
Or even worse, I’ll die before it’s spent
and my kids will gather my clothes
for Goodwill and never poke around
in the pockets, knowing I keep crumpled tissues,
movie stubs. Maybe not so bad a dénouement,
his hundreds spinning out like stars
into an expanding universe,
ransoming the wretched at the edge of hell—
the way his life got saved by American soldiers
unlocking the gates of the death camp.
The way he tried to salvage mine.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
What She Rote
You would understand perfection if I could teach you
times tables the way Gran taught them on chilly August
mornings down at the beach. I didn’t want to subtract
the towel from my shoulders but Gran was already
stomping through the shallows. Soon her fringed white
turtle head would beckon. I’d add my body to the sum
of cold-blooded swimmers barely breathing in Half Moon
Lake. I paddled out as she swam in, a clock ticking in
her belly. “8x9?” she sputtered through water. 72.
“6x8?” Her hands gripped my waist. 48. Don’t ask me 7s.
I’m bad at 7s. “7x7?” I gasped; her hands pushed me
down past the pleats of her Jantzen, past modesty panel,
past knees that looked like parentheses—wrong
subject—her hands planted on my shoulders, mnemonic
devices. My hair curled under water like it never did
in air. I watched it writhe as my knees ground sand.
I struggled only when I knew the answer, divided
about wanting to live if I had miscalculated but Gran
had it all figured out: perfection or death. 7s were stars
in Krazy Kat’s eyes as he drowned with me when she
yanked us from the drink. 49 I’d say with all the life
that I had left. She’d reel me to her cold flat breasts
and carry me to shore, my blue lips puckered O
release me from these ambivalent arms.
Melody Lacina
Counting
My family likes to count wild things.
Cardinals, yellow finches, a blue jay
brash at the backyard feeder.
Deer, though not as wild as they once were,
sometimes crossing the neighborhood roads
midday, or eating out of flower boxes.
In fields at the edge of town, turkeys
my father won’t tell his hunting friend about.
Hawks, always hawks along the highway
on telephone poles and wires
and the naked branches of winter.
My boyfriend visits and counts with them.
He’s a natural, his eye is good,
as if he’s been doing this for years.
I try not to act surprised,
not at his skill but at his fitting in.
I guess I was expecting trouble.
Yet the only trouble evident is my own
reluctance to believe the people I love
could love each other.
What binds them, besides me?
From trees by the river, an eagle rises.
A rare sight. Surely a sign.
One, we all say, beginning.
Alison Townsend
Beauty Lesson
One hundred strokes a day was what my mother
demanded, undoing the ribbons that bound my long
braids and running her fingers through the ropes
she’d woven that morning, binding them so tightly
the roots of my hair had seemed to tug at my brain
as I’d leaned into her body with each crisscross pull,
balanced for a moment, then swaying, my head filled
with the faint, rose scent of Cashmere Bouquet
that surrounded her like aura. Night was a different
story, my hair loosed around my body in a drifting,
silken veil she worked with her boar-bristle brush,
starting at the bottom to remove any tangles until
the brush slid smoothly through, then pulling
in long, even strokes (one, two, three, four)
from my scalp to the ends as if she were rowing
a boat single-handed through the sea of auburn
strands (twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight).
It was our ritual at the end of each day, this
brushing that prepared me for sleep as I stood
before the mirrored Victorian dresser as she had
as a girl, my head pulled back by the force
of each stroke (thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-
five) , my eyes half-shut, hypnotized by the motion
of her hands, anchored in the rhythm the brush made
(forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine), like a swimmer
at the end of a lifeline. As she curried and groomed
me like a filly, as she ran her free hand behind
the brush (fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three), rough
as a mother cat, spreading the natural oils, smoothing
down the strands, explaining that this was what a woman
did if she wanted beautiful hair (sixty-four, sixty-five,
sixty-six), her own blonde going gray from cancer
that would take her two years later. Which is why
when I brush my hair each night nearly half a lifetime
away (seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight), I
think of my mother, and how she pulled my young life
against her dying body, holding me close, binding
and releasing my hair, brushing and brushing
till it shone, stars of blue static crackling
around me like the Milky Way (eighty-one, eighty-two
eighty-three), in that chilly farmhouse room
that somehow became an ocean, where everything
rocked and swayed, where she told me what she knew
about being a woman (ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine).
Lore passed down from her mother’s
mother before her and saved, like a curl clasped behind
the small, oval door of a locket, or a strand of blonde
pressed inside a book and shining with life, its color
still bright and beautiful even a hundred years later.
1st Place Fiction
Toni Jensen
from At the Powwow Hotel
When the cornfield arrived, I was standing in our hotel’s kitchen, starting
Lester’s birthday cake. It was raining outside, foggy, too, for the sixth
day in a row, and there was flour all over my blue jeans. I was trying to
figure out what the book meant by sift.
Lester had been outside by the canyon all morning, inspecting bugs or
digging holes or looking into the sky. But then he was in the kitchen,
looking up at me, saying, Dad, it’s here, his hand on the dish towel I’d
tied around my waist. Lester had only spoken about ten words since his
mother died last month, so I put down the flour and followed.
We live in West Texas on a three-hundred-acre cotton farm at the edge of
Blanco
Canyon. We own the Blanco Canyon Hotel, all twelve rooms, though everybody
in town calls it the Powwow Hotel on account of Lester and me being Indians,
Blackfoot, more specifically. My wife, Charlene, she was Indian, too,
Comanche, from around here. There had never been a powwow out here to any of
our knowledge, but that’s just how people are in West Texas—what they know
about Indians involves the Texas Rangers, powwows, or pictures of Quanah
Parker they’ve seen in bars and restaurants, way in the back by the
bathrooms. We were never sure whether to ignore the joke or to capitalize on
it, to change our name and market ourselves that way. We talked about it,
Charlene and me, laughed over it.
But there hadn’t been much laughing lately, with it being just Lester and
me, with
Lester not talking and getting picked on at school for it. This kid had
said, Hey, Lester, I hear your mom died. I thought all you Indians were
extinct already? And then, according to his teacher, most of the other boys
in the class laughed. She said the kid who said it was a bully, that the
other kids were afraid. But I said when I was in school, fourth grade was
when kids started to get mean, that I couldn’t imagine things now being too
much different.
It was late fall, just before Thanksgiving, and most everybody had their
cotton in, except for a few late fools who now were having to wait out the
rain. Out here, where we live, it’s four miles to the nearest neighbor and
nine miles in to Crosbyton, the nearest town. It was a record rain year
according to the papers and the blonde girls with big smiles on the TV.
Lester followed the weather on the Internet, had been writing in his journal
about the rain—how we were over five inches for the month, how the
conditions might be right.
Lester was supposed to be using the journal to write down how he felt, what
with his mother being gone and his not talking much. But mostly he wrote
about the weather here in Texas, and north of here, all the way up to
Canada. It worried me, this obsession, because the only jobs I knew of where
you got paid to think about weather were on the
TV, and they involved being smiley and blonde and a girl.
Lester still had a hold of the dish towel, was pulling me toward the western
side of the property to the grassy area in between the canyon and the
biggest cotton field. He stopped about twenty feet shy of the grass, his
face turned up to mine, his eyes the size of silver dollars. At first, I
thought the grass had gone crazy, what with all the rain. But then, through
the thick fog, I saw something waving above my head, something tall and
green but not like grass. I stepped forward, kept stepping forward though my
heart stuttered and my throat went dry. I kept stepping forward until I was
in the middle of it, touching its rough edges, stalks towering over me, next
to me, short ones, too, some only knee-high. I was standing in the middle of
it, breathing in the new smell—green and raw and still like dirt,
somehow—when I felt his hand, on my arm this time.
Dad, Lester said, they’re going to be here soon.
And he led me back out of the corn to the hotel, and we started to prepare.
2nd Prize Poetry
Daniel Lusk
from “Deeds”
No song but breathing,
and no heat but bodies:
of this cow where she lies
steaming in cold window light,
of this hired hand who gathers
stout rope to secure her for the work,
of this tall man, worn satchel at his feet.
They strew clean straw
round her hindquarters, kneel
on either side, rub their hands warm
and nod, wordlessly,
across this county of her haunches.
One man cannot know
the other lost his first real job
bagging groceries at fourteen
for stealing a razor and blades.
One cannot know
his accomplice drowned
a litter of kittens when he was ten
to see how animals die.
Between them in the dim,
hay-dung chapel of this barn,
this cow will die in pain
if not relieved of her burden.
The veterinarian’s needle penetrates
the bony ridge of her spine
and, vertebra by vertebra, inches
upwards from her tail.
Places a broad hand firmly
on the white expanse of swollen belly;
the scalpel in his other hand unzips her hide.
Hired man holds the furred edges apart
with his hands, and his companion
deftly draws his blade again and again
across the fine grain of her uterus,
its translucent tissues
peel themselves away, one by one.
At last, there is the womb.
Unborn calf in its hot,
aromatic pool. Warmth mists
the wrists of the hired man,
fogs his companion’s glasses
as he lifts the bony form from its wet bed
and hands it glazed into the arms
of his assistant, who has taken down
a worn coat from a hook.
While the cow turns her head,
rolling her eyes white to see,
veterinarian clears the little one’s
nose and mouth with his hands,
wraps the newborn in its borrowed coat
and lays it by the mother.
1st Place Poetry
John Surowiecki
from American Stroke
The story so far: America is being treated for stroke at a hospital in a
small mill town in New England. He is attended by Gienka (his wife), Slim
(his son), and Mr. Szmykleszczwladeczeryniecki, who shares his semiprivate
room. The year is 1966.
The Nurse with False Teeth No. 1
Nurse Gail has a perfect new smile,
but her s’s whistle sometimes
and when she’s not talking,
she makes a clicking sound,
creating a vacuum under
the roof of her upper denture.
America wonders what it
must be like having a mouthful
of porcelain—all those little
toilets in there. Gail confesses
her real teeth had been misshapen,
yellow, brown, black, crumbling
from within; she used to think of
her hand as the moon and her face
as the earth and every so often
the one would cast its shadow
upon the other, a jittery eclipse
across a path that never changed.
Corrinne Clegg Hales
Late Summer Moratorium
This week I refuse to let anything die.
I water twice a day when it’s hot, pluck
fat, green worms off geraniums
and set them onto a pile of fresh
prunings. I take cuttings
from a leggy coleus, slide crisp stems
into a full water glass where they begin
to generate thin white filaments,
reproducing their own bodies
as I watch. I brush ants from the walk
with a soft broom and leave spiders
to their own dusky work in corners
and cracks. This week even the greedy
snails will survive: one by one I carry them
on the flat of my hand to a damp corner
near the fence. I drink my morning coffee
close to an open window, ready
to scare bluejay or crow from the nervous
hatchling dove balanced in a tangle of twigs
above the porch, and ready to startle
the neighbors sleek cat when she creeps
too near the fish pond in my yard. I spend
long hours separating goldfish eggs and fry
from their efficient parents,
who would eat them in a minute,
given half a chance. How do any of us live
in such a world? I’ve grown so tired
of the dead. They are so much work—
and they never sleep. I’m afraid
I won’t be able to care
for even one more. I’ve got too many
dead with me already, crowding
and pushing their way inside—as if
they have nowhere else to go—as if
they don’t see the slightest difference
between heaven and the human heart.
Leni Fleming
from "One Hundred Cats"
Not long after Steve died I took in a cat whose prospects for the
future seemed bleak. He belonged to my neighbor but was getting on her
nerves and she had decided to take him to the pound, which she referred to
as “the pet store” in front of her children. In addition to being allergic
to cats, I have never had much regard for them and this was a particularly
unappealing specimen: dull faded orange in color and quite a bit past middle
age, with one blind eye that rolled around in its socket at random and front
teeth that stuck straight out and acted as a cantilever, propping his upper
lip inside-out. My neighbor asked me if her children could play at my house
while she took Gene to “the pet store.” He was already in the car. I looked
at him through the passenger window, sitting upright as nicely as a dog with
his shiny pink upper lip plastered to his nose, his blind eye lolling, and I
think at that point I must have had a little seizure of some kind because a
minute later he and I were in my kitchen and my neighbor was re-parking her
car in her garage.
I placed an ad in the Free Classifieds, laboring for some time
over the wording.
LOYAL & LOVING COMPANION. Mature male cat. Irresistible personality.
Unusual coat, the color of sunset. Has adapted courageously to slight visual
handicap. Sensitive, kindly nature. A friend for life. Unique rosebud
mouth. Won’t last! Call
731-7272.
My telephone rang twenty minutes after the ad was published
and a thin, elderly voice asked whether the sunset-colored cat was still
available. When I said yes, the man asked for directions and told me he and
his wife would come within the hour. He must have floored it because they
were at the door minutes later, peering past me eagerly into the living room
until their eyes lit on the cat who was half-asleep on top of my TV. In a
moment they were bending over him, the woman stroking his fur while her
husband said loudly, “You brave, brave boy. Can you see this? Can you see
this?” He waved his hand in front of the cat’s face.
“Hsst!” said his wife. “He’s not deaf. Oh, what a dear heart.” She
turned to me. “We’ll take him.” She cupped the cat’s face between her hands
and leaned in close. “You with your precious little rosebud mouth,” she
crooned.
The man slowly bent and kissed the cat’s head. “You described him
perfectly in the ad,” he said to me, his lips trembling with emotion.
“Really captured the essence.”