2024 Online Generative Workshop Short Short Contest
In the spirit of generating new work Writing By Writers held our 11th annual Short Short Writing Contest to win free tuition to the 2024 WxW Generative Workshops. The rules were simple. The piece could be fiction, non fiction, memoir or poetry but it must have included the name of a sea or an ocean, one sound a horse makes, the scent of something other than a flower, the name of a band with a female lead singer, and a constellation or other star cluster or night sky object.
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Winners: Stacy Bierlein, Annie Ellis, JR Fenn, Jessi Jarrin, Kathryn Kukula, Kathy Lanzarotti, Ibe Liebenberg, Anika Moje, Afton Montgomery, Lisle Thielbar, Geneva Toland, Randall Van Nostrand, and Erin Wescott
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All We Know if Falling by Annie Ellis
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I crawled into the bed of the truck. She clicked the key over once in the ignition. I arranged the blankets, waiting for her. The radio station crackled. Dirt hung in the air. Its grit landed on the pillows, stuck itself to the hairs on my arm. I tasted it on her lips, I smelled it in her hair, mixing with the cigarette she smoked on the drive, fingers dangling out the window. A satellite blinked above us, crisp and bright against the deep purple night.
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I pressed her braid to my face. I unwound the hair and shaped it around her head so it swirled like the Milky Way. She pointed up and told me the names she’d given to the stars. She said someday she would see the Aegean Sea and feel the salt of her ancestors on her cheeks. Neither of us mentioned these were our last moments. We held them on our tongues and wouldn’t swallow.
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I didn’t say I’m afraid of space and of the ocean. I didn’t tell her how at night I lay in bed and look at the moon and think how heaven must be a terrifying thing. Few things should know no end. All we know is falling, she said. I sucked in my breath, then understood she was whispering the name of the Paramore song drifting from the front seat. She sighed, blowing out her lips like a horse. I found the satellite again in the sky, traversing the stars.
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Message In A Bottle by JR Fenn
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We sat around the fire singing John Prine. Don’t hide your candle under a bushel, my mother always said, but I did, my mouth shut tight—the mouth, angelic in its sounds, that if opened would sing down the stars. Well, if you want to get rich... an acquaintance later said, on the other
side of the Atlantic after I’d somehow played and sung. But I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Around the fire, the Pleiades glistening above like spit in an oyster’s maw, sparks hissed and stung our skin, where the smell of chipotles and sour cream lingered; you clop-clopped your hand against the guitar, and a traveler from far away shook his head to the beat, handsome and reeking of his tent, and your fellow smokejumper—craggy-faced in the dark—hummed off key, and our neighbor from the next trailer over plucked her mandolin. You crooned so gently about our small panic attacks at adversity, and I wanted to complement the notes but didn’t, as if I’d forgotten wailing along with Fleetwood Mac the fall I’d learned to drive, riproaring beyond the speed limit and belting at full volume, catapulting through the fresh mountain air and shouting within, Listen to me, I love the world, and I’m dying too. So why do I send words out in my absence? If they’re found and read, they make a harmony now.
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Salt by Jessi Jarrin
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Dear Sam,
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We loved Penny because Dad said she was the runt. Remember? He’d take her out for extra laps because he said by winter, if she didn't grow enough muscle, the black cold would kill her. Late fall nights, after he thought we were asleep, we’d hear the stable doors open. Then, the whip. She stayed silent. No doubt she was scared of him. I just think she was like us.
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Lately, Dad talks more than when we were kids. After dinner, he sits in that old chair. “Grandpa was a quiet man,” he says. “But you could feel his rage.”
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The night I had my first dream, I sneaked into their room. Mom was already more cancer than herself, and Dad had had enough. They said go back to bed. But you knocked on my door. You said, “Jack, it’s okay.” That you had them too. I cried into your rough flannel, feeling better I wasn’t alone. Even when they got worse.
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I don’t blame you for leaving. Do you feel that way? You send letters but do not call. I’d really like to hear your voice.
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When Dad put Penny down, I remember your crying being more of a roar. I could feel your heartbeat in the temples of your head. I held you. We were salt and the smell of hay. The next day, I told you I was sorry. But you just stood there. I remember you said, “We have to get back to work.”
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The Beast Slouches Onward by Kathy Lanzarotti
There’s a hole in the sky.
Right now. Like God’s dog had picked planet earth for a game of celestial fetch and bit down a little too hard just a smidge to the north of Orion’s Belt.
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Internet is down, No radio or television. Somewhere, there’s an old man with a Ham radio. hunkered in his basement, wreathed in the vegetal miasmata of his own body odor and the chemical tang of Polystyrene from hoarded jugs of water. He snorts and nickers his I told you so’s with the other preppers on his channel.
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The rest of us are on our own.
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Off to the east the Atlantic Ocean is thick with waves. My neighbors and I head to the roof to stare at the phenomena above and below. Everyone’s brought something. Bottles of wine, a split of champagne, bags of leftover Halloween candy, cold pizza, and a half pound of pasta in a blush-stained Tupperware. There’s half of a chicken, four bottles of gin and a case of beer. Lonnie from across the hall has brought music. Hole’s Celebrity Skin. “Apropos, no?” he asks as he pops the cork and splatters a Pleiades pattern on the moldy concrete.
The screams rise from the ground, travel up and down the block. Until they come from members of my makeshift geographical family.
Because the hole is filled now. Stretched and pulled as a being ancient and enormous labors itself through.
The Luxury of Stars by Ibe Liebenberg
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the luxury of stars
over the pacific arcturus glitters
a mess of water and shore
happiness a brief squeal of heart
i fumble oceans breath
what a luxury taking my time
to slowly learn the names of stars
like i have nothing
more important i should do
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Great Circle by Anika Moje
You fly across sheer endless bodies of water on a path you just learned is called a great circle, tracing their irreverent blue shapes from the small oval of your window. Directionally challenged, if asked you would not be able to identify them without glancing at the flight map, but you love the ghost of their names on your tongue as you silently read them from the screen in front of you: Baffin Bay, Labrador Sea. You have made this journey dozens of times, often accompanied by the ethereal sounds of Mazzy Star, suspended between who you were and who you want to be, between the safety of home, and the untetheredness of living in a chosen country that even after all these years will always remain a stranger, albeit one you are a bit in love with. You realize this every time you get to ride a horse the color of Fall through a landscape bathed in a tapestry of gold that leaves you breathless. As you trot down a worn two-track under a moody September sky, cradled by snow-capped mountains and heady from the sweet late-summer scent of the open range, you feel whole again. Born under the zodiac sign of Sagittarius, the centaur, perhaps this is how you were always meant to be: in motion, part woman, part beast, and you feel the earth explode under your horse’s hooves as you pick up a fast lope, both of you snorting with joy.
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Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests, November 2024 by Afton Montgomery
Uncle calls his first car the Blue Bomb when he tells me about it, a ’63 Valiant. Up in Gunnison where he lived in a trailer outside of town, minus twenty was the cutoff, he says. “At minus twenty and above, I could get her to turn on, and that’s with a heat lamp on the engine all night. At minus twenty-one—” and there he just turns out the window of the truck and laughs. She wouldn’t even whinny. We’re up near the Wyoming border in Red Feather Lakes getting Christmas trees, and the black cows on the hillsides have grown in their scruff. It was 1970 or 1972 when Uncle walked the three miles to nursing school at Western—away from generations of ranching—in minus thirty. It’s not that cold now, but Dowdy Lake and Hiawatha and the small ones are iced over. Uncle never saw any big water till the Atlantic in the 90s. “The ocean just hits you with it. You can’t understand.” It’s all pine branches and leftover home fries’ smell in the cab, one trunk sticking from the bed through the back window between us. Cold and warm at once. There’s evanescence to us; Uncle flatlined twice this year on the table of the same cardiac ICU where he spent his whole career. Even though he was the one who used a night atlas to stick glow-in-the-dark stars in the shape of Orion and Centaurus on the ceilings of patient rooms there.
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Ten days Post Election by Lisle Thielbar
We are feeding damp kindling into the fire box,
Trying to get to 300 degrees by midnight.
It's the beginning of my first woodfire.
For 48 hours we'll be fortifying the kiln, every few minutes, until it gets to 2,200 degrees,
Where we'll hold it for six hours before we let it burn itself out.
Temperature has a color, Alex says, as we spread wood-ash mud, dense as the Dead Sea, To keep air from escaping through the cracks in the bricks.
A cool wind wraps itself in a quick hug around the anagama, and departs.
The fire nickers to itself,
And grows.
Prepare yourself, the woodfire veterans tell me, not all the pots will survive.
Don't get attached.
Embrace the violence of the process.
A super moon hangs overhead.
My hair and clothing carry the scent of burning pine.
I want to howl, I want to scream “Bad Reputation” along with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts While I race over the hills into the night.
Instead, I keep feeding the fire.
I won't know if my pots survived until the kiln is cool enough to open, in about 5 days.
We will be vigilant, stoke the flames when the temperature drops, let them burn out when it's time.
And hope the offerings we make will be enough.
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karaoke (n.): an empty orchestra by Geneva Toland
Arguably, I shouldn’t have laughed so hard at the woman attempting “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes on karaoke night at Chuck’s. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good—in fact, she nailed the “Oh my god, do I pray” bit, even getting down on her jeggings, hands in prayer over the static-laced microphone, eyes widened in what could have been real salvation. I laughed because the woman was my mother, and she had just told me I was adopted. I’d seen her do this exact song before, at 21, in the middle of the Aegean Sea at a tourist “club” in Santorini. That time she even stole an old man’s black hat to complete the look, and when the song finished, she spurted she would “be here all week!” Back at the bar, she sloshed a glass of cheap wine that smelled like rancid dirt and leaned closer, “Lucky you get your balls from me, kid,” which made her laugh so hard she snorted like a horse high on hay. I didn’t. But this time, at Chuck’s, I suddenly felt free—free of the constant need to associate with something so unlike myself—and this made me dizzy with a guilty glee. Swinging out of the sticky doors, she wobbled against me, trying to apologize, “Your father, hon…Hank…he made me swear.” I stopped and pointed above the streetlight where three small stars sat like dull marbles, “Look, Nancy, Orion’s belt.” She tilted her head way back and whispered, “Our favorite.”
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call it what it is by Erin Wescott
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call it what it is
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they’ve kicked him
out of the barn again
I find him in the dark
and stand for the last time
with my chest pressed
against his winter coat
what’s left of his molars
grinding softly
against my shoulder blade
as his sighing breath fills the air
with the scent of apricots
I pick the tangles from his mane
and he returns the favor
his lips gently pulling
at my best down jacket
adding darker patches
to some improbable color
called Sirius
or Sargasso Sea
something that lets them sell nature
instead of nylon
warm but nothing like
the warmth in the failing heart
that beats against my own
the others circle round us
their hooves nearly silent
just pockets of air pushed out of the world
gone without a sound
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I remember him most
on the day I lift my grandfather
for the final time
his flannel shirt
arms around me
while his fingers
trace small circles
on the back of my jacket
as we wait for the ambulance
and I think about Garbage
“the trick is to keep breathing”
until it isn’t
and I wonder again
why on earth
we can’t just call it
blue?​
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