Tuesday

The Winner of the "Thalia" Flash Fiction Challenge: Patrick Nelson


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Again I had a hard time choosing which story I thought was “best.”  It’s kind of weird because as a professor I grade stuff all the time for classes and I really don’t have a hard time assigning grades to students.  In this instance, I don’t feel like I’m really choosing a best story but rather which one might fit in best with the overall theme of the image, the book and the show I have planned to exhibit the work.  For this reason I chose Patrick Nelson’s story.

I think the biggest reason why I chose his story because it was a kind of collage of texts, fonts, and ideas.  It was sort of a textual version of the image of Thalia.  Second, it was kind of creepy and shocking, especially with the obituary at the end.

I also struggled with the idea of a joint award.  Stephen Rogers and William Greene’s stories both really seemed about the same little girl and had sense of humor and a touch of angst.  I was compelled by the racial component of “Epicanthic Fold” I identified with how kids see stereotypes that kids and unwittingly believe in them.  Not to be too maudlin, but Greene’s story was very close to my own experience of my relationships with parents and the world.  I also loved that it read a little bit like one of Mark Helprin’s descriptions of characters in his novel “Winter’s Tale.”  It was prose but read like poetry.

As usual, I really dig Dee Turbon’s story!  Sometimes he seems to live in a “My Name is Earl” crossed with “To Kill a Mockingbird” world.  The idea of poetry of a sort of trailer park variety, early sensuality, drunken parents, was a bit creepy but also, I could really see it happening!

Read them all here:

For more competitions please visit my website:

I will post the winner to the Thalia Contest Late Tonite!

Hi Guys,


I'm a little behind at work right now and won't be able to do all the stuff I need to post the winner until late tonight!

See the entries here.
http://kenney-mencher.blogspot.com/2010/11/flash-fiction-contest-thalia.html


Sorry!

Kenney

Meantime, here's something kind of fun! 
ArtHaus (the gallery who represents me in San Francisco) got a great article written about them in this magazine and on their blog.  Check it out!
http://artbusinessnews.com/2010/11/30/gallery-profile-adhering-to-three-key-principles/

Sunday

Flash Fiction Challenge: Clark Barr aka Young Master Newlin

Write a story about Clark Barr (aka Young Master Newlin) 
and Win the Drawing on the Right
Two Chances to Win!
The contest closes Monday December 13, 2010

Clark Barr 
(aka Young Master Newlin)
10"x8" oil and mixed 
media on masonite
Click on pictures to enlarge

The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words.  Please post the story in the comment section, you will have to provide your name and an email address in order to be qualified to win or you can e-mail me at kmencher@ohlone.edu with your info.  There is a problem with how many characters can post (only about 4,000) so if you cannot post it.  E-mail it to me at kmencher@ohlone.edu

Go to my website for more contests: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/

Winning flash fiction stories will be integrated in with an exhibit in San Francisco at ArtHaus Gallery (April 8th for the reception).

The show is called:
Renovated Reputations: Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs

The exhibit will include a series of 20-40 paintings and mixed media works ranging in size from 8”x10” to 18”x24” framed with thrift store and vintage frames.  In addition to the exhibited works ArtHaus is publishing catalogs signed by me and as many of the authors as possible.

Catalogs/books will consist of image of the painting with the text of the “flash story” surrounding the image.  If I can get the authors to come to a book signing/party, authors would sign their pages for some of the printed stuff.

We're going to have a photobooth for the show for participants to play with and vintage costumes.

Of course I'll send the authors free copies of the catalogs. I will announce the winners the day after the closing deadline for the competition. I'm planning on doing one flash fiction competition a week every Monday from now until April. 

(If the conditions in the side bar are not to your liking, I'm totally flexible.  Send me a contract that you like and I will mail it back to you.  I just don't want to chase people for signatures when I publish the catalog!)
______________________________________________________________
This was sent by email.  It made me laugh out loud.

BARR NONE by Stephen D. Rogers

Of all the things I bought from comic books -- the sea monkeys,
the magic tricks, the exploding pens -- the most interesting item
I ever, ever received was the human head.

First off, as soon as I unrolled the bubble wrap, I discovered
the head was real.  It wasn't plastic or rubber or painted cast
metal.  It wasn't some piece of junk made up in the ad to look
cool.  It was cool.

There I was, sitting in my boring room at my boring desk holding
an actual human head.  I poked his cheek, and the skin turned
white.

His eyes opened.  "What?"

"What what?"

"What do you want?  You didn't just wake me up to stare at me,
did you?"  He wrinkled his face to push his glasses back in
place.  "If that's all you can think of to do, hurry up and get
it over with because I was having a really great dream and really
great dreams don't happen every day."

I rotated his head.  "How are you talking?"

"Not so fast!  Keep whipping my head around like that, and I'm
going to puke."

"How can you puke?  You don't have a stomach."  I slowly tipped
him to examine the flat area at the bottom of his neck.

"Believe me, you don't want to know.  And you don't want me to
puke all over you, either.  I puke blue."

"Blue?"

"Yeah, it's a color.  Perhaps you've heard of it."

Exercising a self-control my mother said I didn't even have, I
returned to his earlier question.  "So what did you mean, what do
I want?  Can you, like, grant wishes or something?"

"What do you think, I'm just a talking head?  You don't think I
have special powers?"

"So you can make my wishes come true?"

"That's the idea, Einstein."

Considering that I could spin his head until he puked, he was
pretty sarcastic.  "The comic book didn't say anything about
granting wishes."

"You believe everything you read in a comic book?"  He rolled his
eyes.  "You must be some kind of moron.  You probably have a
medal for 'Moron of the Year' mixed up on your shelf with all
those models."

"That's right.  I'm so stupid I'm sending you back."

His eyes went wide.  "No, wait!  I think we got off on the wrong
foot, which is easy since I don't even have a foot.  My name is
Clark."

"Yeah?  My name is Return to Sender."  I plopped Clark into the
shipping box, and he went silent as soon as the flaps closed.
That would give him a chance to think about his attitude while he
bounced around until he puked.  Blue?

I taped the box, wrote "Cancel" above my mailing label, and ran
the package out to the mailbox.

Back in my room, I popped the bubble wrap, which took like an
hour and a half.

The second best thing I ever got from a comic book was the sample
pack of free postage stamps.  I collected those things for years.

Thursday

Flash Fiction Challenge Winners: Dee Turbon and Lori McDole

Diamond Girl by Lorri McDole

John’s pretty much a grab-the-Kraft-bottle-and-squeeze kind of guy, into all those so-called ‘improvements,’ so when he brought home the jar labeled ‘Bar-B-Q Sauce’, I gave him my eyebrows-up look.  

“Just read it already,” he said. 

“Bar-B-Q Sauce,” I read, trying to figure out what part to emphasize.  “So?”

“So, Bar-B-Q.  Bar-B.  Get it?” 

My name isn’t Barbara, but John started calling me Barbie after his niece showed him that new doll she got, because of my blonde hair I guess.  I know it sounds silly—I’ve always been the serious one, first about school and then my career, if you could call it that, as a nurse—but I was kind of flattered.         

“Hey Blondie,” he said.  “Hey Barbie.” And it stuck.   

After John brought home that jar, I was never just Barbie anymore.  Barbie Queen, Barbie ‘Q’tie—I was surprised by the little thrill I got from the names he came up with.  By the time he got to Barbie Q-ball I was usually laid out on the kitchen table with him brushing whatever he’d put in the jar that night—whipped cream, honey, chocolate sauce—all over my body and licking it up.  I didn’t have a lot of experience at it, being sweet or sexy.  I kind of liked it. 

At parties, he introduced me as ‘my girlfriend, Barbie Q,’ as if the Q actually stood for something, and after a few drinks, he’d start joking about how he liked me ‘done,’ how messy I made his face, things like that.  It got awkward when he and Paul would disappear into the garage to play their music.  Their friends would stand in the corner, drinking beer and whispering and looking over their shoulders at me.  Who knows what they were saying.  But then one day John called me Celia in front of everyone (“Seal ya up and ship ya off,” the kids used to tease me at school), and just like that, Barbie was gone.

So was John. 

When I found out he had a new girlfriend, names started buzzing in my head—Angelica, Isabella, Theresa—and I couldn’t help imagining the little trinkets he’d bring home to them:  angels that leave glitter all over your hands when you touch them, oxidized bells, nuns with ‘nasty’ habits that fly up when you push a button.  I thought about cupboards all over the city filled with these souvenirs, just like my Bar-B-Q Sauce jar.     

But then I heard John’s new song on the radio—Lucy N. DeSky with Diamonds—and damn if I can think of what you could give a girl who seems to have everything, or how you could ever leave her.

___________________________________________________________
CROW BACK, CROW BLACK by Dee Turbon

She had not let the porter carry the package, even though it was a struggle for her and she had to stop often to catch her breath. Her cases and her bags he could carry, but the package she carried herself, cradled it in her arms as though it was something precious. The porter opened the door to her room and stood back to let her enter. Then he set her luggage just inside the door, placed the room keys on a low dark wood table and asked her if there was anything else.

She set the package down on the bed, gentle like it could break, and she turned to tip him. She pressed folded small bills into his palm and thanked him for his help, her voice all hush and hiss. She watched him go, backing away from her as though she was royalty, and closing the door behind him.

She sighed and a world-weariness was in the sound that she made. She drew the curtains shut and unbuttoned her coat. She slipped her shoes from her feet and kicked them out of sight under the bed. Then she turned her attention to the package. Something it was wrapped in layers of cloth and the whole bound with silk cord. She unpicked the knot in the silk and unwound the cord. She folded back the heavy monk’s cloth cotton outer wrapping, and a layer of mackinaw, and finally a soft and softer flannel.

She lifted the framed picture out of its nest of cloth and held it at arm’s length. ‘Crow back, crow black’. That was what he had called the picture. It was something he’d said to her at their first meeting and it was a description of her hair. ‘Crow back, crow black, your hair. And eyes like a blue-grey day and a maybe-storm in them. I must paint you, I must,’ he said. She held the picture at arm’s length seeing herself as he had seen her then, and she sighed again.

Looking at the picture she thinks she can smell the paint of his studio, though the picture is glazed, thinks she can hear him whistling the one tune over and over, something about Lucy and sky and diamonds and all because she’d told him that was her name, Lucy. And he made her wear a fur collared coat though it was summer, and he threw open the windows so she wouldn’t be too hot, and he sat her on a high stool.

‘Crow back, crow black. Like the night with ribbons of aurora borealis adrift in the blue-dark of the sky, or like new-mined coal and the oily skin of rainbows on its cut surface.’ And he leaned in close to make it hang just right, her hair, and the brush of his hand against her cheek and she gasped in surprise and something else besides. And he was close enough for kissing, and she wished now that he had or she had, a hundred years of that wishing, that’s what it feels like. And that moment gone, except in an old woman’s memory.

Older now, that one-time Lucy. Hair like smoke or mist these days, and her eyes more grey than blue, like the sky when the colour has drained from it and the sun is going down on the day, on her day. And she is back in the city, one last time. And he said he’d come see her, he’d love to. And she weeps to look at who she once was. ‘Crow back, crow black,’ she says, and she sets the picture next to the mirror above the fireplace and walks away from it looking over her shoulder, looking back at who she once was and who she now is, and wishing again that he had not made a gift of it to her.
__________________________________________
All three stories for the Lucy N. DeSky contest were incredible.  It was pretty remarkable that all three had a kind of melancholy and underlying pathos.  I’m really glad that I’m able to give a drawing to two of the participants even though I kind of feel like all were equal in quality.  So splitting the difference I’m giving the drawings to Dee Turbon and Lori McDole.  I’d like to give an honorable mention to Heather Ryan and I’ll be sending her a special drawing as a gift.

All three stories almost seem to be related in a way.  Did you know that John Lennon was also an art student at one point.?   McDole’s story and Ryan’s stories had an interesting and related kind of twist in the lost love department as well and almost could be a strange magic fiction continuation of each other.   

I’m really delighted by how good these stories were and how the combination of the three have given me a point of departure that makes me day dream my own continuation of the stories.

Thanks Guys!

Kenney Mencher

Wednesday

Flash Fiction Contest: Benton and Eva Destruction

Write a story about Benton and Eva Destruction and Win the Drawing on the Right
The contest closes Wednesday December 8, 2010



Benton and Eva Destruction 
11"x14" oil on masonite 
with found objects

Click on pictures to enlarge

The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words.  Please post the story in the comment section, you will have to provide your name and an email address in order to be qualified to win or you can e-mail me at kmencher@ohlone.edu with your info.  There is a problem with how many characters can post (only about 4,000) so if you cannot post it.  
E-mail it to me at kmencher@ohlone.edu

Go to my website for more contests: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/

Winning flash fiction stories will be integrated in with an exhibit in San Francisco at ArtHaus Gallery (April 8th for the reception).

The show is called:
Renovated Reputations: 
Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs
 
The exhibit will include a series of 20-40 paintings and mixed media works ranging in size from 8”x10” to 18”x24” framed with thrift store and vintage frames.  In addition to the exhibited works ArtHaus is publishing catalogs signed by me and as many of the authors as possible.

Catalogs/books will consist of image of the painting with the text of the “flash story” surrounding the image.  If I can get the authors to come to a book signing/party, authors would sign their pages for some of the printed stuff.

We're going to have a photobooth for the show for participants to play with and vintage costumes.

Of course I'll send the authors free copies of the catalogs. I will announce the winners the day after the closing deadline for the competition. I'm planning on doing one flash fiction competition a week every Monday from now until April. 

(If the conditions in the side bar are not to your liking, I'm totally flexible.  Send me a contract that you like and I will mail it back to you.  I just don't want to chase people for signatures when I publish the catalog!)

Go to my website for more contests: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/

_____________________________________________________________
This was sent by email
Benton and Eva Destruction by D. Charles Florey

Three inches of dirt.  That’s all it takes to cover anything up, three inches of dirt.  That was Benton’s motto and it served him well those thirteen years he and Eva robbed banks together.  
He had a thing about him that wasn’t quite right.  The teachers in grammar school had a name for it, but hell if he could remember what it was.  All he knew was that he couldn’t write so well.  Always writing something backwards or using the wrong letters.  He liked to draw though and he fancied himself quite good at it too.  
Eva was a minx.  Got anything she wanted, that Eva.  And the first thing she wanted, from the minute she laid eyes on him, was Benton.  She couldn’t resist him, she was drawn to him, and he didn’t have a prayer at ditching her, well...
So he had this chip on his shoulder from the day he learned he wasn’t all that bright.  At least that’s what the teachers would tell him and his parents.  Then his pa would take the switch to him, because that’s what he figured he needed.  He certainly wasn’t going to help Benton with the arithmetic or learn him about Gulliver and his travels.  That wasn’t the sort of pa he was.
At twelve, Benton stole the family Buick and left town.  He had to tie a brick to his shoe and sit on two bags of feed just to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel, but he reckoned he had learnt about all that switch and those teachers were gonna learn him.
Eva was sixteen when he met her.  She was a waitress at the only diner in a town too small to mean anything, except to them two.  
He’d been at it for three years when they met.  Robbing and conniving for every nickel he could, and he was good at it too.  And he knew he was good at it.  A fortune teller once told him as much when the card of the bear track appeared.  The animal that takes what he wants asks not for permission.  So to hell with the teachers, teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, who needed that?  They should spend more time learning about the kids, fostering their natural talents.  If they had with Benton, they would have learned that he was a fine thief, the dandiest around.
And Eva wasn’t half bad herself.  Her ma called her a klepto, whatever that meant.  All she knew was she liked things and she took what she liked.  It seemed right and natural, the proper thing to do.  Eva didn’t see anything so wrong with it, and neither did Benton.  And that’s why she loved him, because he just loved her.
They bedded and pilfered about until they were twenty-two, the pair of them.  They knocked off liquor stores and grocery stores with guns or knives whenever they felt like it.  But most of the time, Eva just liked taking things from the stores.  
“Why go and trouble the folks runnin’ the shops and scarin’ them half to wit, Benton?”
“‘Cause we need the money Eva, we can’t go livin’ off the screws and hammers you swipe at every hardware store.  We gotta eat, you know.”
“I take food too.”
“Not enough, princess.  You know that.”
“I know, I just don’t like scarin everyone.”
They got married before anything sexual happened between them.  It was Benton’s idea mainly.  He was the sentimental kind, the type to draw her all sorts of pictures when he could steal a few moments away from her.  She liked to stick close, didn’t like being alone.
So it was especially hard for her when he wanted to do a job without her. 
“It’s a bank, princess.  These fellas wanted me to come along.  Not you.”
“But what will I do?”
“You gotta stay here and wait for me.”
And wait she did.  Her mind spun wild with thoughts of Benton and his pals.  They took him from her.  Who were they to do that?  She thought as she watched a Blue Jay outside their apartment window construct a nest, twig by twig.  
She waited until the nest was full of eggs, just a few days, but a lifetime without Benton.  When the bird had flown off to do whatever birds do, Eva climbed the tree, inched up it like a worm, and she took that nest and she dumped it out.  The eggs cracked on impact.  Then she took the nest inside and put it in the cupboard.  If she couldn’t have Benton, that Jay couldn’t have her nest.  
Benton came home that night.  He dumped bags of money on the bed and they made love in it.
“Never leave me again.”
“I promise.”
They buried most of the loot in the backyard under three inches of dirt.  “That’ll make it easier to find, you see.”
“Ok, my love.”
Together, they heisted.  Benton showed her how, and she learned quickly.  She didn’t care anymore about scaring people.  In fact, she liked it.  At one bank, she even took a small toy from a boy: a die cast knight in shining armor.  “This is for you my love,” she told Benton.  The boy cried, and she smiled.
Benton grew concerned.  His goal was always simple - steal to live.  But Eva was turning into a monster.
The night in the desert that she killed an eagle just to pluck a single feather from it and give it to Benton was their last night together.
“That’s the symbol of freedom, Eva. You can’t kill an eagle.”
Eva gripped the gun, “But you love America, so I thought this feather...”
“Eva, you just can’t.”
“You don’t love me anymore.”  She held the gun to her head.
“No, Eva!”  He tackled her, but it was too late.
Three inches of dirt was all he covered her with.  Three inches, so he could always find her again.
____________________________________________________________________

This was sent by email

TWO EGGS FROM THE SAME NEST by Dee Turbon

Two eggs from the same nest. That’s how she put it. That’s what we were, what we are. As close as that, so close we shared a bed when we were growing up, sneaking around the house so we wouldn’t be caught. Mom and dad had their own problems to deal with, always carping at one another, always worrying about money and how they’d make everything work out. So me and Eva, we had space and time to ourselves, and no one looking over our shoulders to make sure that what we did was right.

It got so that I looked forward to the star-startled dark and the games we’d play, dressing her like she was a doll and calling her princess and I was the prince or the knight in clink-clank armour, and dragons I slew, and all for Eva’s love or her kisses. Just a game to begin with, all in our heads, those swords and those dragons and those gift-kisses, and Eva felt left out, standing pretty at the dark edge of our imaginings, chained and waiting to be rescued, or dropping a silk scarf for the knight to fasten to his lance before battle.

‘I want to be the knight,’ she said. ‘Once, I do.’

But I told her she was a girl and that wasn’t how it was in all the stories, that it was against the rules.

‘Then the stories are all wrong,’ she said, ‘and the rules should be broken and the games should be more real.’

And I think that was the start, of everything, and the beginning of the end, too.

I was the dragon some nights, and some nights it was Eva, and we wrestled each other on the floor of her room and sometimes the dragon won and sometimes it didn’t. She was like an animal when she started, fighting for real, and my clothes were torn into ribbons and she scratched my skin and afterwards licked the wounds clean, really licked them, and rubbed her spit into the cuts. And once she bloodied my mouth, my lip split against her hard thrown fist, and she kissed me, sucking-lip to lip, and she said my blood tasted of iron on her tongue.

Then too old for dragons and princesses and still we fought and her breath hot on my face and she broke the bones of my fingers once, and afterwards she said she was sorry and she stroked the tears from my face with the tips of her fingers, gentle as feathers brushing against the skin, and she kissed me and it was worth those broken fingers for what she did afterwards.

‘We mustn’t tell,’ she said. ‘Not ever. And that’s a rule we can’t break. Like secrets sworn in blood.’

And there was blood on her sheets that first time.

Two eggs hatched in the same nest, that’s how she put it, and that’s what we were.

‘Just when we are alone, just here in the dark of ourselves, just then,’ she said.

And her favourite story was the one about Pandora and how she opened a box that held all that was evil in it and opening the box set those evils free and they multiplied to fill the whole world and would never again fit back into that box. She had a picture of Pandora on the wall above her bed, and she said what we did in her room was like being in that box and if we let it out the whole of our world would be crushed, and she had a scuttle black beetle that she’d caught in a jar just so she could show me what she meant, and she tipped it onto the wooden floor and squished it flat with the dance-twist heal of her foot, all so I could see what a crushed world would be.

‘Swear,’ she said.

And I did.

But swearing made no difference, not in the end. Came a day it was suddenly no secret. We got careless. Eva’s door left unlocked one night, maybe other nights, too, and sleep a little thicker on us than it was before, and our parents standing in the near-light of morning and what they saw was an abomination, that’s what they said. And they went to church together, speaking with the one soft fright-voice, and they told the minister and asked him what they should do. And he said they should pray for our souls as he would.

Two eggs from the one nest and they sent me away, far away, and Eva was just a voice in my head ever afterwards, fighting to be heard, dragon’s tooth and dragon’s claw as only Eva could fight, but no knight to rescue her from the dark she fell into, and mad she became, that was what they later said. Eva, all her screws loose, and she was right about Pandora’s box, for the evils multiplied beyond reckoning, till she could bear them no more, and at last she ran away from everything.

They say she was on her way to me when she was hit by the car, and I swear I knew before ever they told me, we were as close as that.  
___________________________________
This was sent by e-mail

WHEN WISH UPON A STAR
Stephen D. Rogers

"Starlight, start bright, first star I see tonight.  I wish I
may, I wish I might, get the wish I wish tonight.  I wish that
you are my shining knight and I am your princess, waiting to be
saved so that she can reward her hero.  That like birds of a
feather we build a nest to start a family.  That you're not so
chivalrous that you forget to be a tiger, a lion, a big old bear.
That's what I wish.  What do you wish?"

That I get screwed tonight which seems really, really likely. 
"What you said."

Tuesday

The Winner of the Flash Fiction Challenge: Patrick Nelson

Owen D. Bank by Patrick Nelson

I tell you one thing; no man is gonna turn down a chance to be with that woman right there if it presents itself. I don't care who you are or what your situation is. You better check your pulse if she doesn't stir something in you when she looks your way and smiles. Well, that's just what happened. 

I'm a realist. I know when a woman glances at a man on the street and gives him a little half grin, nine times out of ten she's really thinking about the laundry she still has to pick up or "I really hope he doesn't talk to me". Y'know? look, I'm not the kind that tells all his friends "she wants my shit real bad" or "I'm gonna get some of that". . . Well when she walked  right up to me and said "Hey handsome, what's your tune?" I almost fell right out. "you speaking to me Ma'am?" I stuttered like a fool. "Who else is standing here but you, slick? And who are you calling  'ma'am'?" she came back. Yeah, love at first sight , I tell you. At first I thought she might be a pro, but there was something about her that made me forget that notion.

Once I caught up to my mouth, I shot back "I just been waitin’ for you, little lady." Real Romeo shit there. 

"Is that so? well, the funny thing is I had no Idea that I was even going to speak to you at all until I was two steps in front of you" she said.

Still a little shaken, I wondered aloud "Yeah, what can I do for you? It isn't every day a beautiful woman like you steps right up to a man like me and says 'boo' let alone act like I might have something she might want to discuss. . ."

"Look, I'm gonna cut to the chase. I need a handsome young man like you to make my husband jealous"

"Whoa, you're just gonna have to pull that train back into the station, lady! What the hell are you talking about?"  I heard myself say. 

"It's not like you think. It's very innocent and no one's gonna get hurt. I just want you to pretend like there's something going on between us so my husband will finally pay some attention to me."

"Oh, no you don't!" I told her, "I heard about this kinky shit and you two are gonna just have to get off with some other dude." Yet a certain sweaty part of me was flashing past the idea of it in my head.

Kind of irritated, she shot back "It's not like that and you're just a little sick for even thinking what I think you're thinking. No, my husband and I live a couple of blocks away from here. We just moved in to town for his new job and for the last two weeks, he has been so busy with his work that he hasn't even paid any attention to me. I just want him to see me talking to you and get some of his brain working on me again. . . I don't know anybody here, but then again, neither does he. I can make it worth your while. . ." She explained this part while holding her purse in front of her and lightly grinding the tip of one shoe on the cement. A little innocent .

"Wow. That is some definite crazy lady shit you just laid out for me, you know that? Of course you do. You're the crazy lady who just walked up to a complete stranger and got even stranger. This shit has jail cell written all over it." I wasn't sure if I should walk away from her right then - or run. Still that other voice just started to whisper shit to me: "C'mon man! What could it hurt? This way you could at least spend a little more time near her. With her." 
Riiiight.

"You just seemed like a decent guy from the look of you and I thought you would help. Please? He's normally such a good husband, but when he gets into his work, he just kind of 'goes away' a little. I love him and realize he needs to concentrate but I'm still right there next to him. . ." she said. "I'll pay you and you don't have to do anything really. Just stand on the street outside our apartment and talk to me. We just stand and talk until he takes a break and looks out at us and sees us together" she said.

"This is just too weird. You realize how nuts you sound? Let me get this straight: you want me to just stand in front of your place and chat with you so your husband sees us, comes running downstairs and tries to kill me? Right?" I said.

"No! It's not like that! -He's not like that! This IS sounding crazy, isn't it?" She was backing away a little. I didn’t want her to. She added "Maybe you're right and this was just too nuts, but I'm so afraid and I don't know what else to do. We haven't been married for very long and I have no one else to talk to. I don’t know what to do."

OK, here were my options starting to become solid in the fog: Be a dog or be a man. Take advantage of the lonely woman or be a friend to the helpless little girl. Tip her into my arms with guilt; "you just figured you'd make your husband really jealous and it wouldn't be less effective if you chose a black man." Or tip her back to her husband with reason; "you need to get your ass off the street and back up to that apartment and talk that shit out. . ." 

Decisions, decisions. . .
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I chose Patrick Nelson’s story because it satisfied all the things that I look for in a story.  Nelson’s story had a strong story arc but still left me wanting to know what the next event was that would happen.  I also felt like his story felt genuine to me.  His Owen D. Bank was exactly like some of the cool black men that I often see myself envying.  Owen was a real person and Nelson’s story felt a bit like a chapter out of a Walter Mosley story of the “Black Betty” variety.  I wished I was half as cool.
There was a lot to like in all these stories, which all had a power that reflected the gentleman in the painting.  It was really great the way that Pheyos’ story related to the one he had written earlier about Bob Frapples.  It had a strong sense of plot and was in some ways very similar to Notta Viking’s and Shervin Sahba’s.  Each had a sense of history, strong dialog, nostalgia and pathos.  Sahba’s in particular had a powerful, sense of place, with his reference to Canal Street, street people and lost dreams.

Jordan Robinson and Luz del Sol share in that they specifically dealt with lost dreams and some hopes.  I saw the possibility of a better tomorrow much in the same tone as Langston Hugh’s “Raisin in the Sun.”  The characters sentiments, that feel almost like grudges about dreams lost, were expressed effectively through internal dialog.  I knew I was in for a treat when I read Luz del Sol’s great opening line, “Mama never was my mother.”

Thank you all for writing such wonderful stories!

You can read them all on the earlier post: