Joy of the Pen 2024

The Verdi L. Tripp Fiction Award: Anne Britting Oleson for Pillow
Fiction Honorable Mention: Jodi Paloni for Leaving the Land
Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award: Paul Simpson for Grind
Poetry Honorable Mention: Poetry Honorable Mention: Fred Cheney for That Line I Wisht I Wrote
Richard F. Snow Nonfiction Award: Daphne Gregory-Thomas for My Affair With Medicine
Nonfiction Honorable Mention: Madison Ellingsworth for The Count
The Crowbait Short Play Award: Joe O’Donnell for Meltdown
The Crowbait Short Play Honorable Mention: Gwyneth Jones Nicholson for Mind Over Matter

Verdi L. Tripp Fiction Award

Pillow by Anne Britting Oleson

“You’ll know what to do,” he said, his eyes, brilliant green in the depths of his wrinkled face, locked on hers.  Still handsome, Genevieve realized, knowing he would not welcome the tenderness of her touch, but reaching out to cup his jaw anyway.  Surprisingly, he lifted a shaking hand to hers, and held it there for a moment before turning away.

“What if I don’t want to?” she demanded.  “What if I can’t?”

His laugh was the sound that had first made her heart leap, all those years ago in the deep night of the French resistance, a totally unwelcome sensation at the time.  “Can’t is not in your repertoire, Genevieve,” he said.

 The circuit’s first radio operator had disappeared one afternoon on a visit to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon; they’d found his bicycle bent and twisted in a ditch when they’d gone looking for him after sundown, and spots of blood gleamed darkly in the dirt.  It had taken one swift removal of the circuit further into the mountains, and several weeks, for the SOE to drop another radioman.

Honoré.

His French was beautiful and Parisian.  His English was Aussie.  The night had been black, and his eyes glittered in the darkness as they exchanged passwords.  Without questioning, he fell into step behind her, making no further noise, as they made their way six miles through the forest to the new encampment. 

He’d been in country before, he told her in hushed tones in the hour before dawn, when they were too full of the adrenaline rush to fall asleep, on their pillows of rolled coats.  In a circuit to the south, compromised when one of its members left a list of names in a briefcase on a train.  He and one other had escaped across the border, barely scrabbling through the Pyrenees into Spain.

“Why have you come back?” she had whispered.

“For the excitement,” he’d replied, almost daring her to question him.  But she didn’t, and wouldn’t, because she understood.  Because that was why she had joined the SOE, lying about her age to an agent who didn’t question, and didn’t care.  “And to bring you this.  From Commander Smithson.”

When he opened his fingers, a gold lipstick tube gleamed in his palm.  She took it, careful not to touch his skin, and his mouth quirked at her avoidance, almost as though he had known then.  She slipped the cover from the tube; the color was a vivid, shocking red.  She smiled despite herself.  The shade was a joke Commander Smithson thought funny every time.  She put the cover back on, and twisted off the base to check on the cyanide tablet hidden inside.  That part was not a joke.  That part was deadly serious.

“He seems to have a fondness for you.”

It was a trespass, and she felt herself harden.

“No.  Commander Smithson doesn’t have a fondness for anyone.”

He had begun to go silver at the temples, but oh, he was still handsome.  She wished she did not feel the strange singing in her blood when he looked at her with those startling eyes, in the midst of some conversation about history, or geography, or languages–she had found out early on that he spoke several.  It was as though he always knew the nature of the game:  lure her in with intelligence, then cast a look from under his brows that made her wonder what it would be like to take him as a lover.  Until at last she did, long after the circuit was history.

That’s how they came to be sharing the late afternoon in the room in the tower of an old hotel overlooking the Bosphorus.  Spent, she lay against him, feeling the length of him along her body, her toes hooked beneath the sole of his foot.  If she turned her head on the pillow, she could see the reflections of the water rippling across the cracked ceiling.  The window was open, and the curtains moved gently; she could hear the raucous cries of seabirds, could smell the mix of the salt of the Strait, and some spices she thought might be cinnamon, aniseed, jasmine, and clove. She fancied she could smell the tiny çay dükkani in the street below as well, it being time for afternoon tea.

She closed her eyes and moved gently against him when he ran a finger along the side of her face.

“I like the way you look,” he murmured, “when you’re learning a new place.”

“I’ve been to Istanbul before,” she objected.

“You’ve never been to bed in Istanbul with me before.”

She had to admit he had a point. The afternoon, the city, the sensations.  All were different, more intense, with him next to her.

They made love again, lazily, somewhat dreamily.  The world outside grew dark. From somewhere in the distance she heard the Adhan. 

At last he propped himself up on his elbows and gazed down into her face in the shadows.

“Marry me, Genevieve,” he said.

---

At A&E.  He’d fallen, perhaps breaking his collarbone.  He seemed smaller now, barely aware of what had happened.  What he had done.  He clutched her arm, looking for some sort of reassurance.  She patted his hand in the cubicle.

“Where are you going?” His voice was tremulous.  Such a difference from earlier in the afternoon, when he had hurled the newspaper containing the crossword to the floor, enraged that he was unable to solve a clue. Strips in a club.  Five letters.  His fury, so foreign to her, was becoming more frequent.

“Just outside for a moment,” she said.  “I’ll be back.”

“Shall I wait here?”

“Yes.  Wait here.”

Outside, the doctor turned to her, his eyes searching her face.  She kept her expression impassive.

“Did he do that to you?” he asked quietly, reaching a hand toward the eye she knew was nearly swollen shut now.

She jerked her head back, away from the touch.  “No,” she said quickly.  “I’m fine.  It’s fine.”  She took a deep breath of the antiseptic air.

“You need help caring for him, Mrs. Smithson,” the doctor insisted.  “You can’t continue to do this on your own.”

She drew herself up, steeling her spine; being taller than everyone else had its advantages.  “It’s fine,” she repeated, glaring down at his white coat.  She knew the doctor would add this to the records, but there was nothing for it at this point. 

She heard calling from the other side of the curtain.  “Genevieve.”  The voice was querulous now.

“If we’ve quite finished here,” she said, still glaring, “my husband needs to go home to his own bed.”

The doctor looked as though he’d say something else, but she turned away and pushed aside the curtain to re-enter the cubicle.

In the night she lay beside him, feeling the length of him against her body.  She tucked her toes beneath the sole of his foot.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“I know,” she said.  “I am, too.”

Later, when he’d fallen asleep, she climbed out of the bed, the only illumination the small nightlight by the door which he’d insisted on in the past several months.  His mouth was slightly open, his chest rising and falling gently with his shallow breathing.  Still handsome, she thought, and smiled softly.  Then she inhaled, exhaled, and lifted her pillow to press it to his face.

He struggled for a moment.

Can’t is not in your repertoire, Genevieve.

She pressed more firmly.  The struggles lessened, then ceased.

Then she set the pillow aside, kissed his brow, and dressed.

In the entryway, she selected a blackthorn stick from the stand at the foot of the stairs.  Then she turned, collected the keys, and let herself out into the night.

Anne Britting Oleson lives and writes on the side of a mountain in central Maine. She has three children, five grandchildren, two cats, and eleven books–three poetry chapbooks, and eight novels. She is a founding member of Simply Not Done, a women’s reading, writing, and teaching collaborative.

When she grows up, she wants to marry all the words.

 Top

Fiction Honorable Mention

Leaving the Land by Jodi Paloni

Roger Jewett had just about had it with the fisher that skulked the perimeter of his barn, Amity complaining about more lost chickens. Then her favorite barn cat went missing. Some SUV racing up and down the association road had probably killed the cat, but he had fifty-four years of marriage under his belt to know not to argue with his wife. When Amity said a fisher took the puss for its winter cache, Roger nodded. They were getting on in years. More and more, he found he would rather please her than cross her.

But he knew for certain it was a fisher killing the chickens. He’d found blood-stamped tracks on the side of the coop just beneath the window with the busted pane, proof enough to send him trapping. He’d seen the perpetrator, too. He snapped a picture of it with his daughter’s old flip phone, but the shot was blurry.

Amity didn’t believe him when he said he thought it was a good twenty-pounder. How a great big male could squeeze through a 4×6-inch gap never ceased to amaze Roger, but fishers were weasels, and a weasel wasn’t called one for nothing.

In the attic, he rummaged for his rucksack. He found his pole running traps, too. He planned to set them up in the high woods, use cunning to nab the vermin like his grandpa taught him when he was a boy. He was only seven the summer he’d been told not to come home until he bagged at least one, even if he had to camp out a night or two on his own. It was how things were done back then.         

“Heading out in the morning to trap the fisher,” Roger said to Amity at the supper table.

“Good luck with that,” she said.

Well, that’d stung, but he’d show her he still had it in him. He’d make a nice pelt for her out of the little fucker, something she could sit on top of in her chair by the stove to keep her bottom warm, or drape over her lap and pet like the one he’d made her when they were first married but was starting to look mangy.

Amity rose from her seat at the kitchen table. She dug a package of soup bones out from the bottom drawer of the fancy new freezer. She threw the package of bones on the table in front of Roger with a clatter.

By sunup, Amity hadn’t come down to the kitchen, which was unusual. Normally she stirred with the rooster, set a pot of oatmeal to simmer. Of late, she’d taken to shuffling down the hall to the girls’ room in the middle of the night to sleep in Jolene’s old twin bed under the eave, said it wasn’t anything to do with Roger, personally, but his snoring had gotten worse. Last night she left him because a rash was driving her crazy. A brown tail moth infestation had swept through the coastal counties. Caterpillars had turned Roger’s apple trees to skeletons, but worse, they threw toxic hairs to the winds that lingered, caught folks off guard. Some got the barbs in their lungs and landed them in the hospital. Not Amity, though. It was her skin that was reacting something fierce.

Roger checked his traps at the kitchen table. He threw a couple of tins of sardines and a box of crackers along with the thawed soup bones into his rucksack, filled a canteen with water, and went upstairs to say good-bye to Amity. She lay on top of Jolene’s bed on her side, her back to him, her cotton shift hiked up over her hip. Despite her legs covered with blisters raw from itching, her bottom sagging and puckered and speckled with age spots, he thought about the tuft of coarse hair nested between her legs. After all these years, he still wanted her.

He cleared his throat to see if maybe that would wake her, but she kept on snoring in uneven purrs and snorts. He felt strange about leaving the house with her conked out and exposed like that and got the idea to cover her with a quilt. But Amity slept hot. A quilt might agitate the boils. She’d want him to leave her be.

Roger looked around the girls’ bedroom. He hadn’t been in here in years. It was like some sort of time capsule, Jolene’s Life Magazine covers tacked to the wall, one of Neil Armstrong––––and what a day that was––––and photographs of the casualties of Vietnam. ’69, more than fifty years ago, had been a summer of turmoil everywhere, and turmoil for their family, too, Jolene laid-up with a broken leg that summer, obsessed with the news. Why the hell had she wanted to look at the faces of those poor boys, day in and day out? Why would anyone? Roger turned his gaze to a photo of a flower child, a woman in a long white dress, daisies in her hair, dancing in the mud at Woodstock. The image landed a knot in his gut. His cheeks went hot. It could have been Amity in the picture for the world to see. She’d left them that summer. Went all the way over there with a carload of strangers, told him she almost didn’t come back, but she did.

On the far wall, May’s 4H ribbons were strung with clothespins on a piece of cotton line. She’d outshone all the others with her little Jersey calves the color of buttermilk. She’d even gotten her picture in the local paper. Roger remembered when May asked her mother for something she could use to hang up her prizes. Amity told her she shouldn’t boast, but gave the clothesline to her anyway, just like she gave Roger the soup bones last night.

Next to the dresser, hanging on the wall, was the full-length mirror the girls had begged him to hang. When Roger saw his reflection, he was startled to see how small he’d become, stooped and thin, his clothes hanging off him except for around his belly where the fabric pulled. He looked like a scarecrow with a hay-stuffed gut. No wonder Amity wanted to escape their bed. Or maybe she just liked being in here. It waspeaceful. He could image it felt the same to her as he felt alone in the woods. Amity loved those two girls, their two boys, too, although she had never quite worked out how to show it. It couldn’t have been easy for her to watch them all move on.

Roger welled up with tenderness then, standing in the girls’ room looking down at his sleeping wife, or maybe what he felt was regret, how he could have tried to love her harder, more openly. Something about the time she went away to Woodstock had turned him cold and unforgiving, but now he all he wanted was to touch the gray ringlet on her neck at the base of her braid. Let all the hurts slide off both of them.

Instead, he ran his hand through his own thinning hair. Best to moved along, off to the woods, where that bastard fisher was waiting for him.

Roger struck out into the fair bright morning. He took his time following the mown trail around the fire pond and climbed the sunlit hill. He crossed Old County to the upper field. With the aid of the fancy walking stick his kids had given him for Christmas, he hiked to the woodlot where there was an opening in the stonewall. There stood a line of red oak his grandfather had selected for lumber back in the forties. One of the trees had grown around a piece of wire fencing. A porcelain post insulator bulged out like a lone eye staring at him. That was the tree where Roger, as a young man, carved a heart and their initials A + R inside it with his buck knife. Afterwards,  he felt stupid and never showed it to Amity.

He liked to sit here on the wall from time to time. It was the best view of the farm––––the wide sweeping fields, the old house and the barn, and between the buildings, a peek of the lake, a ribbon of light on distant water.

Roger’s father used to bring him up here to discuss farm business while they looked out over all of this. He once told Roger that farming, at least farming the way they knew it, wasn’t going to hold in Maine. People were moving around. It was cheaper to buy food from the Midwest. He told Roger that he should think about a Plan B, maybe take up fishing. Tourists couldn’t get enough lobster. He told Roger he wished he’d had a Plan B so he could have sent Roger to college.

Roger might have liked being a history teacher, would have benefited in getting a pension, but he believed he did all right in sticking with the farm even through all the changes. In ‘68, he sold off some of the waterfront land to pay his taxes. It wasn’t as nice as the acres they’d kept, but it had still upset Amity. They’d lost their peace and quiet and they couldn’t offer the kids as much waterfront as they once could. Roger didn’t think the kids seemed put out by it, what with the high taxes. They’d made their lives elsewhere, came back to visit, seemed happy. He and Amity had been blessed and Roger didn’t have regrets. He was keen on looking forward. Hell, he looked forward to when the next opportunity came for him to crawl into bed next to Amity and lift her nightie while moonlight spilled through the east window.

The sun was climbing in its high summer arc by now. He looked up into the forest canopy. It was patchy in places where the caterpillars had hatched and fed. It was only July, and you could see through big gaps of leaves to the sky as if it were November. The brown tails seem to like the oaks as much as they liked the apple trees. He’d read about a guy who went house to house to climbed trees and torch the egg bundles before the caterpillars could emerge. People paid him cash to do it, but Roger didn’t have that kind of cash.

Lately, it seemed everywhere you looked there was some kind of trouble––––ticks making people fall ill, some never to recover, fish full of plastic, and now these goddamn caterpillars. His kids said global warming was wreaking havoc. Amity blamed the stupidity of people. Roger couldn’t say. He did wonder if perhaps he had lived most of his life through the best of times.

            With the sun shining down on him, Roger now felt the heat under his flannel shirt. He reached into his pocket for a bandana, but he’d forgotten it. He felt the weight of the rucksack on his shoulders and remembered why he’d come up here. Various scourges came and went, but fishers had always been around. He would follow the old road through the fir stand to the southeastern woodlot where he spotted a family of fishers last spring, four juveniles in all their innocence popping their little heads from a den in the hollow of a once grand sugar maple. He’d try and find that old stump, track down the culprit.

Before he moved on, Roger reached around that oak and felt for his heart carving, now distorted as the girth of the tree had expanded. He ran the tips of his fingers across the scars in the bark. Maybe it wasn’t such a stupid thing, carving those two letters inside that heart, and maybe it was just as well that he’d kept the handiwork his little secret. He suspected all along that he loved Amity twice as much as she loved him. Whenever he felt barbed by her words, dismissed by her off-putting ways, he’d hike up here and remind himself that he had made a commitment. It was foolish to expect more than she could give him.

Looking down over the farm, taking a breather from the grind, touching the bark of a tree older than his grandfather’s grandfather healed Roger’s injured feelings. Today, he was on a mission. He felt nothing if not strong.

When Roger couldn’t find the hollow on the wood’s road, he veered off trail like he used to as a boy, wandering around looking for signs. He’d bushwhacked for about an hour when he realized he was disoriented. He’d walked a pretty far piece from the house. His stomach told him it was time for sardines and crackers. His throat felt parched and scratchy. He should stop and take a swig from his canteen, but he couldn’t find a good place to sit.

Since Gil started coming home for a week every spring to cut their firewood, Roger hadn’t had the chance to come up here and everything looked different. As he climbed higher in search for something familiar, he realized he must be off his land by now, somewhere in his neighbor’s sugar bush. He felt the sting in his gut that wasn’t hunger, but rather a kind of turmoil. He had an urge to lean on his walking stick to steady himself, but it was no longer in his hand. He must have left it down by the old oak.

More often than not, whenever Roger left his land, even when he knew where he was, he became uneasy. He felt chiggers in his gut and lead in his bones. More recently, he even felt it when he went to town to run errands. Lately, he deferred leaving the farm for as long as possible. Sometimes he paid the Deering’s grandson to do things for him––––bring him a roll of fencing or a box of nails from Hammond’s or run up to Farmington to buy potato seed––––but that made Amity grumpy. She called him lazy, wasting good money to pay a boy to do his work. When he tried to describe the feeling of going off the land to Amity, that it was like a swarm in his gut that rose to his chest, she told him to count his blessings, said he had two working legs and a driver’s license which was more than some their age. Roger guessed she was right.

Last Thanksgiving at the table, his kids all middle age, now, and graying, their kids grown and gone, he told them about the odd feeling that sometimes festered inside him, called it a terror, said he’d found it hard to take in breath. They’d all stopped eating––––Jolene and her husband, Grant and Gil and Gil’s girlfriend, and May. They’d actually stop to listen, real close it seemed, a tight expression on their faces. They looked at their mother. Amity only rolled her eyes and wiped cranberry sauce from her mouth with the hem of her apron. When May said it sounded like an anxiety attack, that he might want to talk to his doctor, Amity had barked at her to stop pretending to be such a know-it-all. They all looked down at their plates and started eating again, but when Roger got up to put the water on for coffee, May followed him into the kitchen. Dad, she’d said, next time that happens, find a place to sit. Focus on your breathing. Deep breaths in and longer breaths out like I showed you.

In the woods that day, Roger was afraid if he breathed in too deeply, he’d inhale the caterpillar barbs. He heard Amity’s voice drowning out May’s. You’ve got two good legs. Use them.

He kept climbing towards the top of the hill. When he reached the flat, he would try to get his bearings. Figure out what to do next.

At the top of the hill, there was a felled maple that created a hollow at the base of the trunk, not that different than the hollow he’d originally come to look for. Roger sat on the trunk. He felt a little better having reached the top. He could smell the ocean in the air. Gulls flew over and he knew he was probably correct about where he thought he was, on the other side of the hill from his farm about half a mile from the bay near Bunker’s Cove. Funny, how just like that, a trapping expedition in which he would return to Amity a victor had become the problem of simply finding his way back to her.

He took off his rucksack and set it down. The relief in his shoulders was pleasurable. The breeze cooled his sweat. Despite the threat of the caterpillars, he took a few breaths in the way May had taught him, extending his exhale until he felt a little dizzy. Once settled, he figured that from where he came from to where he was headed, if he walked as straight as he could, keeping the sun to the right of his shoulder, he’d come to Boyd Road. From there he could walk to the cemetery where Amity’s ancestors were buried. At the cemetery, he would enjoy his lunch with his ghost in-laws. After, he could cut back through the woods up and over the hill again to where the trees opened at the head of the association road, at the mailboxes, just down the way from his lane. He’d try for the fisher in a few days, perhaps on a cooler day, after he retrieved his walking stick.

Decision made, he felt lighter walking down the hill, swinging his arms at his side, when he heard the sound of a generator. He kept walking and came to a clearing. Through the trees he saw a house he didn’t know existed, one of those off-grid places, some new family. Young people had ideas about cooling down the planet with their solar power then running the generator all day and night to supply their strings of twinkly lights and computers. Noise was all it was to him. Houses like that were popping up left and right. Well good for them. Best to take the young into the community however you could get them.

Above the din, Roger heard voices that, at first, he thought might be a radio playing, but decided they were actual people, females. Having two daughters, he recognized the cadence, the pitch. Perhaps they could direct him to the road.

As he came closer to the clearing, he saw six teenage girls standing shoulder to shoulder in a row on a small hill behind the house, probably a septic mound. They were dressed in white from head to toe, long silky nightgowns or dress slips of some sort. One wore white pants and a man’s t-shirt. She seemed to be in charge. They were a sight to see, like a vision, but they were actually standing there in real life. He remembered how his girls used to play dress up in the barn.

They began to move. The leader was directing a dance. Roger couldn’t hear too well, but he didn’t mind. The whole scene was lovely to watch, something he didn’t want to disturb. He felt more content than he had felt in a long time when venturing this far from the farm, but he was also desperate to clear his throat, which burned. He still hadn’t had any water. He hid behind a maple tree and swallowed his own saliva in hopes that could satiate him.

The leader started to walk into the woods. The others followed her in a line. They held bouquets of flowers, weeds, really, Brown-eyed Susan and daisies. Some had Queen Anne’s lace and early goldenrod braided into crowns they wore around their heads. Their hair came in all colors, long flowing brown and short-cropped yellow. One had red hair piled high in a mess. She had to be a Lash from up in Salt River with all that red hair.

The girls, or young women as May was always telling him to call females of a certain age, began to twirl as they followed their leader along a snake-like path. They moved their arms up and down, undulating, fluttering, human-sized moths flitting in slow motion. The rhythm of it was enticing and Roger had an urge to follow them but felt strange for wanting to.

The sun was blazing hot. His current thirst was like no other. He reached for his canteen. He no longer had his rucksack. The ease he’d felt before, the peace at the sight of those girls, those women, left him. His heart knocked a little harder. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to find his last resting spot again and the moth women were flitting off into the woods, the last one disappearing into the trees.

Roger was thinking he could drum up his old tracker skills, study the rumpled ferns and broken twigs, find his way back to his rucksack, take a path towards home, to Amity, or he could see what those flittering females were getting up to in the woods when he heard the sound of a wooden flute come from within the darkness. The notes were floating towards him, beckoning him. Was this what Amity felt like the summer she took off for Woodstock?

He stepped away from his hiding place and stalked into the yard behind the new house into the clearing where the dancers had been, the sun creating a circle of light around him. He closed his eyes and listened to the nearby music. He lifted his arms to the level of his waist, and as he did it, felt his chest expand. His belly was empty, his body almost weightless, but the heat was dreadful. Sweat dripped down his neck. He unbuttoned his flannel shirt and removed it. He let it fall to the grass. He didn’t care what happened to the flannel or if he ever saw it again; the heaviness of it had become unbearable. He pulled his t-shirt from the waist of his trousers and felt more coolness still, and so leaned down, untied his boots, and pulled them off. Next, he shed his pants. He now wore only his white undershirt, white boxers, and white socks, Amity being a believer in the decency of bleach. He was all in white like the flittering women.

Roger was not a flutterer, but he could raise his arms over his head as if he were throwing hay, feel as if he were young again. When he tried it once, then twice, he recovered the feeling of contentment he’d first experienced when he discovered this strange coven, for that was what it seemed, a coven of kindly witches, or perhaps they were angels. Woods angels. Maybe his daughter, May, was onto something with all of her breathing and stretching. He lifted his arms for a third time and pumped his wings as he walked into the forest.

---

Inside the woods, the music stopped, and Roger now felt frightened and alone. He flashed on a vision of Amity lying in Jolene’s bed, wished he was there with her. He heard rustling in the sticks and leaves ahead of him in the pine grove, the lower branches trimmed to create a park-like setting, clearly managed for some sort of beauty as this, seven flashes of white, each of the dancers partnered with a tree, blissful, as if she were in partnership with a lover.

Did they not know about the caterpillars, their poisonous barbs floating invisibly in the air all around them? He should tell them.

The red-haired girl twirled out into the clearing and began making waltz-like movements while the others sang. Their throats lifted like loons sending out wavering operatic and guttural tones. It seemed as if they were creating the woodland theatre as they went along, and at the same time it came off as if they had practiced. He’d heard the Lash girl, who was the daughter of a friend of May’s, was a fine dancer. She knew what she was doing, her dips and leaps, her landings and curls. Roger was transfixed. Then the leader stepped from behind her tree, carrying a fat skein of red yarn and began to unravel it, passing it from girl to girl, who each wrapped the yarn around her tree, creating a woven ribbon of red that contained them. They came together and circled the red-haired dancer who passed the skein between her legs, pulled it up against her belly and chest, separating her bosom, and wrapped the yarn around and around her throat. Roger became alarmed. He wondered if maybe it wasn’t right for him to be looking at whatever this was, this strangeness that these girls were up to. It made him think that maybe it wasn’t right how he had gone into Jolene’s room this morning to study his wife and think the thoughts he had when she didn’t know he was standing there thinking them. What was wrong with him? Wasn’t he out here to hunt down lowlife vermin? And what a contrast the clink clank of the metal trap, the musk stench of the victim, the crack of bones, the blood, the guts, the skin would have been compared to what he beheld before him. Then the feelings came again, not the terror, but the regret, caught inside his dry throat, which he must clear.

The Lash girl stopped dancing. She looked in the direction of the tree where Roger was hiding. She resembled a doe made suddenly aware of her hunter. The others kept swaying, trance-like, singing, but the Lash girl stood as still as a post. She could hear him. He was no longer clearing his throat; he was wheezing.

He’d had his first attack like this, a mere boy left alone in the woods to trap and bring home a fisher. It had been pollen in the air that spurred on asthma, they’d said when they found him pale and afraid, sitting with his back agonist a tree. Later in life, it was a different kind of tightness in the lungs that came on with the worry of holding on to the farm, the stress of being a parent in a changing world, nothing an inhaler could correct. He’d had an attack at the hospital the day in ’69 when he took Jolene to the emergency room after she’d crashed from the barn swing to the ground. In the waiting area, he’d puffed on antihistamine while Amity screeched at him to stop making everything about him. Hadn’t he only ever made everything about her?

Roger could no longer hold himself back. He fell from behind the tree to his knees, exposing his hiding place to the angels of the pines. The singing stopped. The dancers were looking at him, the main dancer still wrapped up in red yarn.

What a sight he must have made to them, kneeling in the middle of the woods in his underwear, clutching his chest, tears flowing down his cheeks. This behavior, what Amity would call more of his piss poor judgment, would surely get around town and it would most definitely get back to Amity who already thought he was a ridiculous old man. He’d lost his walking stick from May. He lost his lunch, the soup bones, and his traps. Instead of bringing back a prize pelt to his love, he’d end up bringing her nothing but shame.

He fell forward in weakness and rolled onto his back, flinging his arms wide, his body the letter T. He could feel the prickle of running pine through the light cotton of his undershirt, his chest constricting, tighter and tighter. He clutched at the ferns laden with tiny spores up and down the underside of their fronds and felt momentary joy. He could still feel. He pulled the ferns up from their roots, raised his arms, and shook his fists at the images he saw forming in the sky, the faces of his family––––Amity, Jolene, Grant and Gil, and May––––in the clouds. He saw only the heads of his four children on the bodies of baby fishers clustered and popping out from the hollow of an old tree. When he shut his eyes and opened them again, anything left of their images were gone; they’d had become fishers, cute furry little creatures. He recalled himself as the seven-year-old boy, alone in the woods, the time he saw his first fisher family. He remembered wondering that if he murdered their pa, how would ever they manage? But it was too late. A twenty-pounder hung in his trap. His grandpa, when they found him, had been proud.

Now, he saw the Lash girl, her face, and she no longer looked feral or stolid. She looked kind. She’d pulled the yarn from her throat and her shoulders. The neckline of her white dress was plunging, and he could inside where her skin was freckled, but creamy and smooth. Amity’s skin had been smooth and lovely once, too, when he’s first met her. He allowed himself this moment not to struggle to take in oxygen, but to suspend his breath, place his life inside the stillness, the grace in that which was pure and unadulterated youth.

He pressed a hand to his heart, which felt too large, his throat swelling and swollen, like the carving A + R in the oak in the tangle of wire. It must be the caterpillars, their wretched barbs, taking his breath, or was this it, was he dying?

He reached his hand to touch the tendril of hair at the base of Camilla’s neck, all that red hair, but she blurred. He reached beyond her face for the sky, which was bluer than any blue he’d seen in his life. The girl grabbed hold of him and began shaking his shoulders. He felt her ear pressing against his lips. He wanted only to climb now, climb up the trees and into the sky, all the way into that blue, to follow the white of the clouds towards home.

Jodi Paloni is the author of the linked story collection, They Could Live with Themselves, runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and an Indie Publishers Award Silver Medalist. She won the Short Story America Prize, placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and is a three-time finalist for the Maine Writers Literary Awards in the Short Form category. Her stories appear in Carve, Contrary Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Whitefish Review, North by Northeast I and II, Short Story America Anthology IV, and other places. Jodi has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives, writes, and offers generative writing salons, workshops, and retreats on the coast of Maine

 Top

Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award

Grind by Paul Simpson

trusting,
this mule of a man,
your hungover pal,
often fired co-worker,
not to drop you,
break your neck,
he's strong,
but purple faced today,
ripped up,
from last night,
deep in the bag,
every,
single, 
time,
the whole damn crew,
in tatters,
the show goes on,
dull,
fallow ground,
sun glowing death blows,
grinding away,
chipped wood in the eyes,
stump residue,
on sweat,
on bumps,
on top of hematomas,
stabs,
on top of cuts,
rug burn,
sunburn,
ropes,
pulling,
dull metal,
razoring down the bocage,
motor,
sputter,
ready to give out,
the gas,
fumes,
six dudes in a truck,
the stench,
oh, humanity!
cheapskate,
money grubbing,
boss man, 
at the track,
the ponies,
fleeting fortune,
boom or bust,
he'll appear later,
maybe with dough,
maybe not,
keep it up boys,
no babies down here,
c'mon now!
gimme some pace,
show some pride,
one day job,
tomorrow,
on to the next site,
six,
in six days,
gimme the cuss,
the dirty joke,
I got one for you,
The punch line?
Your mudda! 
Your sista!
Your thieving red-eyed cousin - still has a better job than you!
hateful laughter,
fistfight? 
why not?
Yucca,
poking,
bleeding,
poison oak,
for the millionth darn time,
stubborn stump,
liquid lunch,
then back up,
climbing,
cutting,
seething,
rats,
on the power line

Paul Simpson is a poet and adoring husband living in Downeast, Maine. Born in Los Angeles County, California, he is currently working on his debut collection of poetry and drawings. When he’s not writing, Paul can be found sailing in the summer, chopping wood in the winter, and hanging out with
his cats, Soup and Father Christmas. Paul keeps busy filling in backyard holes and tossing sticks with the help of his dogs, Hildegard Sparrow and Ron. 

 Top

Poetry Honorable Mention

That Line I Wisht I Wrote by Fred Cheney

Well, I can play guitar some but I ain’t all that good.
And I can’t sing in tune, that’s well understood.
So writing is what’s left for me a kind of a life boat.
But other writers beat me to the line I wisht I’d wrote.
“He sat there hillbilly pickin’ on a cracked and battered Gibson, 
and the songs that he sang were all his.”

So I get my pen and pencil nearly every day
And I try to write the songs that other folks will play.
And I listen to the great ones, songwriters of note.
But I always get hung up on the line I wisht I’d wrote.
“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
	They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

That line that seems so right even though it’s likely wrong,
The one that gives the purpose to the meaning of the song.
The one that makes the message, and will catch you by the throat.
I never seem to pull it off that line I wisht I’d wrote.
“I’ve seen the Mona Lisa I’ve heard Shakespeare read real fine.
	Just like hearing Johnny Cash sing ‘I Walk the Line.’”

I have these times I’m confident. I think my words will work.
And then I watch my listeners who think I am a jerk.
They all listen so polite, then hand me my hat and coat.
All because I didn’t write the line I wisht I’d wrote.
“Lived in Corpus with my brother. We were always on the run.
	We were bad for one another, but we were good at havin’ fun.”

I think I’m getting’ better. Sometimes it comes with ease.
I get the rhyme and meter that is sure to please.
But then comes the challenge to say something folks will quote
Them’s the times I just can’t write the line I wished I’d wrote.
“We’ll get good and greasy, and we can come on home.
	Put the cowhorns back on the Cadillac, leave a message on the chord-a-phone.”

I’m gonna keep right at it. I pray it won’t be long
Until I can come up with a more than passable song.
And I don’t need songwriting money to keep my books afloat.
I’d get more satisfaction from the line I wished I’d wrote.
“It’s amazing what a man can see by the light of a burning bridge.”

Fred Cheney lives in rural Maine (USA) on the property where he grew up and where he learned to read and write helped by a kerosene lamp. Fred plays pidjin bluegrass on his guitar. Now retired, he divides his time between volunteering at the local elementary school, a nearby homeless shelter, and with a veterans’ project. And he writes some. 

 Top

Richard F. Snow Nonfiction Award

My Affair With Medicine by Daphne Gregory-Thomas

At 5 years old, I always want my mother, once so badly I get hit by a car. She is choosing fruits and vegetables from the truck that comes down the street once a week. A neighbor watching me turns for a bit of gossip, and I dash. I see my mother’s green dress, the vegetable man filling her bag, the headlight of a black car barreling toward me.

 I hear her screams, “Stop! No!”, too late to matter.  

Thrown in the air, I land with a thud, unconscious. My mother scoops me up, jumps in the car that hit me. She has no license, no car of her own, no other recourse.

“Hospital!”, she commands

I wake up howling in a sterile room. A man in a white coat assures my mother.

 “No broken bones, but a severe concussion. We will set up appointments.”  

Shaken, my mother is much relieved I am not dead or too broken. She then thinks to ask, “What is the cost of such a plan?” Money is more than scarce.

The doctor peers over his glasses. “I am a medical man, not involved with such matters.” Once again, she lifts me into her arms, promises to arrange payment for his day’s work, on a weekly schedule.  

When informed of my accident, my distant father is grateful I am alive and relatively intact. My mother is thankful he refrains from his pointy-headed declarations, a result of the education he is relentlessly pursuing, rendering him too busy to get more involved anyway.

Rather than setting up “the appointments” the man in the white coat has prescribed, my mother quickly runs to the best medicine people she knows: her aging father, a myriad of elderly relatives, her six siblings.

My erudite father hears of this and proclaims “Voodoo!” Though not formally educated, my mother turns from his judgement, trusting more the wisdom of her clan.

Born into a family of poor Greek immigrants who fled poverty, war, and suffering in the old country for jobs in textile mills on the rocky coast of Maine, she has grown up with their legendary home-grown remedies and natural prescriptions for better health. Peculiar herbs, mountain teas, and specific foods are always in the mix. Fish caught that day, fresh killed chickens, and home-grown garden vegetables are a must.

Each year, she and her four sisters free themselves from their hard-working, narrow minded -husbands and the urban cities of New York and New Jersey where work and marriage has scattered them. They bring all of their young children to spend the summer in the Maine fishing village where they were born.

“Important to keep the children healthy! ” they claim when they pack up and leave each year.

Their patriarchal husbands, wise to the conspiracy of the sisters who long for each other’s company in the clean air of the rocky coast free from their demands, are annoyed by the loss of their service during this annual interval but grateful for a respite from their bothersome children.   

We stay in the rickety beach cottage of my gruff and weathered grandfather, where he lives year-round. It is small and crowded with all of us sharing beds, one pull chain toilet, a pot belly stove, a copper tub for collective bathing. Our ranks include his skinny dog and a suspicious cat. There are cooped chickens and ducks we feed as pets and sometimes mourn on the occasion of their appearance, plucked and roasted, at our communal table.

At his direction, we spend our days catching fish, digging clams, netting crabs, while he tends to his eccentric garden, growing vegetables we recognize and some that scare us. We never dare to question his edicts of eating, often holding our noses when he sits us all down to concoctions of strange boiled greens covered with mountains of mashed garlic, claiming in his very broken English,

“Eat! Eat! Gonna make you strong like bull!”

When we step on fishhooks or cut our hands on sharp edges of razor clams, he soaks our injured body parts in the cold, healing salt waters and we carry on. When we burn our skin in the high sun, he covers us with vinegar and stops the sting. A water-logged ear is cured with heated drops of the thick Greek olive oil he uses for cooking everything.

 In spite of our crowded, clamorous living circumstance, we never get sick.

In the colder months, after we tearfully leave our place of health and protection from all illness to head back to our grumpy fathers and cloistered lives of school and too many rules, trips back north are always in the mix when sickness emerges.

 When a cousin contracts scarlet fever, a mystical great aunt reads the grounds at the bottom of a muddy coffee cup, pins an evil eye on an article of clothing, spits three times on the ground by her feet –“Ptou, Ptou, Ptou” – and prescribes travelling north.

“Take her to Maine to breath the air. Be sure to soak her feet in the ebb tide.”

An uncle suffering a pneumonia is advised the same journey with explicit directives.

“Take food from the ocean. Suck the meat from a sea urchin! Eat an oily mackerel and pick on the bones!”

 A young relative, worried over a difficult pregnancy, is driven fourteen hours to face the full moon at low tide while a withered, revered elder swings a scissor on a string back and forth over her belly to hold the baby that is coming.   

So it is soon after my early childhood run in with a speeding black car, I am carried off to Maine in the spring for the medicine I need most. After arriving, I eat fresh caught fish and vegetables canned from the summer before. I help my grandfather plant his new garden for the upcoming season, fertilizing it with the skeletons and heads of the fish we have just consumed. I have him, my mother, and visits from wrinkled old relatives all to myself while I heal and wait for summer and the arrival of my cousins and their mothers to join me.

My wizened grandfather rows me in his leaky, old wooden rowboat to explore small islands covered with seals, gulls, and blankets of shells, proclaiming,

“This ocean all for you! Look Here! Look There! You learn everything!”providing lessons that encourage my damaged head to be curious, think beyond, and repair.

As with most affairs, mine with medicine begins in the need of a moment. I am too young to understand that the time and way I spend my childhood summers protected from sickness and when I am wounded flies in the face of conventional medical advice, instead reliant on the healing hands of the folk medicine of my heritage. I am cheating on progress, entering into an affair I will come to rely on, that will one day save me again.

Eventually, my grandfather, the old sages, and the five sisters dwindle to natural deaths, voices fading in the distance. As life continues without them, I hold their legacy with the same fierceness they instilled in me, believing in the powerful medicine of the rocky coast and salt air that informed my healing as a child.

Years later, when I am diagnosed with a killing disease, new doctors in white coats provide me with medicines and treatments that, in spite of their modern powers, indicate I will have but little time left.  

“This may buy you some time”, they say. “Just enough to get your things in order.”

I thank them for their honesty, just as my mother did a medical man in his white coat so many years ago.

I follow in her wise footsteps, continuing my yearly journey to the same Maine ocean and salt waters, the same fish to catch and air to breath, to the place where my affair with this medicine began.

I continue to defy my doctors’ predictions, leaving many who made them scratching their heads.  When they ask me, “How?”, I tell them of the affair that I will never quit and invite them to do the same.

 “Try it,” I say. “Go north. Plant your feet in the ebb tide, breath in the salt air, eat what you catch and pick the bones! You never know. You may just want to start an affair of your own.”

Top

Nonfiction Honorable Mention

The Count by Madison Ellingsworth

The Parkway had once been a pleasant trail for the community to use. With views of the bay and paved paths tucked behind large fences, it was perfect for biking and roller skating. However, being hidden and paved meant that it was also perfect for people to camp along.

First one tent had popped up, then two, then ten, and now they numbered close to fifty. The Parkway outranked the other encampments in the city in both size and level of danger. It was often in the news. A month ago, a man had been murdered there—stabbed to death in his tent. My boss, seventy-year old, six-foot Tim, told me that someone only called the police because of the stink.

“Though this is a park, it’s not our territory anymore,” he said, looking down at me. I nodded. “We walk through, we count the tents, but we don’t engage at all.” His tone was stern, and his attitude was bleak. He was a hardened city ranger who had spent years tallying the campsites every week. “You never know who is being nice and who is pretending.”

Tim had been on good terms with the tenters at the Parkway when their grouping was small. Their sites had once been neat and all were friendly. But the people he had known by name had disappeared, replaced by a nameless mile-long stretch of structures, tarps, and miscellaneous furniture.

Back in the day, when camping in the park was illegal, the rangers tagged the tents and threw them away. Now our job has become the count. We keep tally in tiny notebooks we store in our breast pockets, and then we send the information to city officials. They learn how many tents there are without ever having to leave their offices.

“You do your own count, and I’ll do mine. We’ll compare at the end,” Tim said, pulling out his notebook.

At the trailhead parking lot a Good Shepherd Food Bank minivan was parked. Volunteers in white shirts bustled around with paper sacks filled with food. A large dumpster had been left in the lot and was piled high with stained, broken, eaten, torn, and abandoned relics. Bags of trash were heaped next to it, and people from the encampment were digging in them for gold. Others were loitering around or sitting in camping chairs as they ate.

Tim and I hopped out of the ranger truck and started on the trail. I made a note to ask later about the trash. I wondered if we would be responsible for picking it up at some point. Reaching the tents, another question came to mind.

“What counts as a single campsite?” I asked Tim, eyeing three tents, all pushed and held together with an amalgamation of planks, tarps, blankets, and fencing.

“Go with your gut,” he replied, fixated on his own tally. It was my third week on the job and I had seen many campsites, but these were far more solid than I was used to. Some had “Keep Out—Private Property” signs hanging up, others had welcome mats at their zippered entrances, and some even had fenced-off areas meant to serve as yards. Each had its own barrier, whether made of wood, plastic, or metal, and inside lay at least one large tent. When people saw us coming, they whistled to alert one another. A portly man unrolled his tent door and eyed us as we walked by.

“You need somethin’?” Empty water jugs were scattered next to his welcome mat, which read: “Home Sweet Home.” The angry voice of a woman trickled out from behind him. The man leaned his head back, calling out “Shut it—the rangers are here.”

“You’re fine,” Tim assured the man, informing him that we were just doing a walk through. With a grunt and a zip, the man disappeared. As we continued, others stared or nodded at us. Their dislike was palpable but they were reserved.

After the first dozen or so tents, though, the atmosphere changed. The structures were no longer quite as solid, and the people were not quite as robust. While the people at the Parkway were clearly using, as indicated by the drug paraphernalia scattered around each site, this group appeared to be in the debilitatingly addicted category. They were thinner, with unhealthy skin, pockmarked with sores and blemishes. Their spines were hunched as though they carried backpacks filled with dumbbells.

Many were gathered ahead, at an intersection of two trails, where an instant canopy had been set up. Underneath it were two chairs and a table. At first glance I thought it was for another volunteer organization like Good Shepherd, but this assumption was disproven the closer we got. A man sat behind the table, a cash box and an array of medical equipment spread in front of him. Another man stood by and kept watch. People milled around, not quite waiting in line, but not having a fun get-together either. Across from the sitting man was a woman with a needle hanging out of her arm. The classic blue tourniquet was pulled around her bicep.

“Don’t pay too much attention,” Tim reminded me. “People get on edge if they think that you’re looking.” I set my eyes on the other side of the path, counting a different row of tents. I was annoyed; the blue plastic tourniquets were one of the most frustrating things to pick up out of the grass. Once they got wet, they disintegrated, tearing into a million little pieces that took forever to pinch with a trash picker. “Would you mind using a belt?” I wanted to ask the woman. She was now slumping, forehead first, onto the table.

The people in the canopy area were more vocal toward Tim and I. A man with a high ponytail and a wifebeater was dragging a wet rug out of a tent. Spotting us over his shoulder, he yelled at Tim, “You gonna come collect this shit or not?” He pointed to the rug, along with a mound of things he had moved onto the path. He was sweating profusely and the sweat slicked his ponytail into a point.

“Not my call,” Tim told him, his voice level. “It’s up to the city.”

“Well somebody better get it, ‘cause I’m not fuckin’ movin’ it over there,” he gestured in the direction of the parking lot dumpster. We continued walking. The man did not seem upset that Tim had not offered more information; he just kept shoveling things onto the sidewalk.

This kind of interaction was commonplace no matter where we went. At a park the previous morning, a drunk middle-aged man had thrown his bottles at me while yelling, “Take this shit!” Though a trash can was mere feet away, it was my responsibility to clean up after him. After running back to the safety of the ranger truck, I had penned a reminder in my notebook to return later for the broken glass.

A little further down the path we came to a shaded area spanned by a bridge, under which there were much denser tent groupings. An assembly of young men were standing around. Tied to the bridge railing was a rope, at least twenty feet above us, and a heavy bag hung at the end. It spun in the wind, suspended in the middle of the walkway.

As we passed by the men standing in the shadow of the bridge, they turned to stare and call out. Tim walked protectively between the group and I.

“Hey, where you goin’?”

“Lookin’ for somebody?”

“You happy to see me?”

“Come over here, I got somethin’ to show you!”

They each had something to say, but I avoided eye contact. I was glad that I wore my hair pulled back. If I needed to run again today, it would not go in my face. Tim and I skirted around the punching bag.

A person—more boy than man—blazed by us on a longboard. “Oh!” I yelped, jumping back. Tim tensed. Laughter echoed from the guys behind us. The boy wiped out in the grass on the side of the path, and he somersaulted into the bushes. As he rose I could see he had many face tattoos. They were hard to discern on his tanned skin, but each was poorly done, their ink bleeding out of its intended borders.

“Sorry. My bad,” he said with a goofy smile. “I was trying to show off.” I gave him a small smile. He reminded me of the class clowns I had crushed on in high school. Shaking my head, I suppressed a smile. No engagement. Tim, tense but not reacting, slowed to walk slightly behind me—willing to be a human shield if necessary. I could feel the boy’s clownish eyes on the back of my head as we walked away. I could feel all of the young men staring at us. Staring at me.

When we were far enough away, Tim gave me a once-over. “Good you didn’t respond to him,” he indicated with his head. “They flirt to manipulate you.” I nodded.

“I’ve known people like that,” I said with a shrug.

Tim stepped off the paved path. “I want to show you something. Just…” he paused. “Prepare yourself.” I frowned. He paced the grass over to where the treeline began, and stopped at a beaten trail. This was not something that the parks department had created.

Tim pulled his sock tops out of his boots and tightened them around his pant bottoms. “Ticks,” he explained, not looking up. I followed suit.

“What could be so shocking?” I asked jokingly. “A dead body?” Tim did not laugh, just shook his head no. We started on the footpath.

“Watch out,” he said, pointing to a pile of human feces. “Keep your eyes on the ground.” I made my way over the roots and through the thicket. There were juts off of the path where I could see larger puddles of refuse and trash. I was no longer feeling as excited to see where we were going.

I thought about earlier in the day, when we had visited a different encampment. I had seen a woman with oozing lesions coating her swollen, red hands. Constant injection had damaged her veins so badly, her hands might be swollen forever. This trail made me feel the same way I felt when I saw those hands: nauseous; blanching; flighty.

Tim called out over his shoulder, “There used to be way more people on this trail.” The smell alone was an indicator why they had left. As we headed further and further down, it became more and more intense. It was sour and fatty and made from flesh, like vomit and melted chicken.

The trees were growing denser, but the path stayed well-tread. It was hard to tell if someone had taken a machete to it, or if they had pushed their way through. There was an occasional needle on the ground, or can, or empty chip bag, but not much until we reached a clearing. Tim took a few steps out, then stopped. Emerging out of the brush, I wiped my hands on my canvas pants. I felt dirty. Then I looked up.

Around the fifteen-foot circle of packed dirt was a ring of flooded forest. The woods extended as far as I could see, as did the water, which seemed to be steaming off bugs. They honed in on us as soon as we appeared. Tim waved his hand around his face, casually, as if waving away a single fat house fly. All sorts of liquids, solids, and articles of trash were mixed into the water. No longer could I smell the vinegary rot that had been overpowering when we were coming down the hill. It had seeped into my pores. I was lightheaded.

Hanging from the trees around us were sweatshirts and blankets. From one bough someone had hung a pup tent, perhaps trying to be funny, or perhaps to keep it out of the muck. Scattered around our feet, sometimes several layers deep, were needles, needle tip caps, plunger caps, bloody gauze bits, fingertip-sized plastic baggies, rolling papers, round metal tins like tealights, lighters, ragged strips of tourniquet, or fabric, or plastic, broken glass pieces, broken crack pipes, broken weed bowls, cigarette butts, matches, clumps of toilet paper, filters, golf ball tees, empty vials, broken dab rigs, vape cartridges, clementine peels, pre-roll tubes, chip cans, candy bar wrappers, and more.

Tim made his way through it all, following the steps that others had formed in the mess, like footprints in snow. I thought about following him. In fact, that was all I was doing: thinking. I was thinking about when I applied for the job, and about my mom. I was thinking about how frightened she had been when I told her I had to pick up needles as a ranger.

“I picked up needles in the supermarket bathroom when I worked there,” I had reminded her. “At this job I won’t even have to use my hands to do it.” I had not been wrong and yet, standing in that city-sanctioned, modern-day opium den, I would not say I was right.

Tim had reached the edge of the marshy, spoiled water and was peering into the woods up the way. I wondered what he thought of me. He was self-assured and unbothered, while I stood like a coward on the other side of the clearing. I reminded myself that the needles could not jump up and pinch me. The diseases creeping on the ground were not going to crawl inside of my boots.

I made my way over to Tim, chastising myself. A ranger should be discerning, but stand strong in the face of a threat. Yet I could see nothing but small, mangrove-type trees wilting in the scummy water ahead of us. They condensed into one thick wall of grayish brown as my eye traveled further.

“What are you looking for?” I asked Tim, following his gaze. He shushed me with his eyes.

“Nicky!” He projected his voice. “Nicky, are you out there?” We stood silent, waiting. The bugs pinged off of my face; my arms; my neck. “Nicky, it’s Ranger Tim!” I scratched my leg with my knee. Tim loured. “I don’t see her.”

“Out there?”

“She must not be home.” He seemed irritated. My mouth hung slightly open. I could not imagine how a person could get into those trees, let alone pitch a tent.

“Let’s head out. I’ll count her anyway.” Tim traipsed across the needle bed and back up the path. I had one last look. Could that be camouflage in the distance? A submerged platform? A woman’s shoe floating atop the water?

There was no way to tell. I turned and trudged behind Tim. I added a tally mark to my notebook. A lone line on a page nearly filled.

Back on the pavement I glanced at my watch; we were over halfway through our ten hour day. So close to lunch time, but I was no closer to feeling hungry. We proceeded along the last bit of the Parkway. It seemed this was not as popular a spot to pitch one’s tent, for only a handful were left. A woman walked by. She was tall and had an androgynous face. Her red lacy bra poked loosely out of her shirt, and her skirt fluttered above model-thin legs. She gave a shy hello as she passed, eyes down and smiling.

I turned back as we rounded the corner. It scared me to see the woman walking alone. I knew what she was heading towards and wanted to call out to her. To ask her to leave behind whatever she was hoping to find at the other end of the trail. To walk her back to the road, knowing she would be okay, if only for those minutes of that day.

But even if I had implored her, it would have made no difference. I was wearing a costume; a child wearing a uniform with a badge for Halloween. I felt ridiculous.

We finished the rest of the trail system and were spit out at a crosswalk leading back to the parking lot. Tim stopped to debrief.

“I got forty-three,” he said. “Forty-three sites and one punching bag.” He gave a chuckle.

“Forty-four for me, I think.” I was not sure. I had lost count when we went off-road.

Tim was pleased. “Let’s go with that.” I opened my phone to write an email, and a pair of people walked by. One of the men had receding hair pushed under a poker visor, and the other was wearing baggy, food-stained pants. They gave us a look, then went into the gully next to the road. They sat together, talking quietly. Visor man took a ziploc out of his jacket. I assumed they both lived in the park, but then I noticed the watch the visor man was wearing, and the cash the baggy pants man was giving him.

“Let’s head out,” Tim said, thumbing towards the parking lot. We did not want to attract any attention during a drug deal. I hit send on the email as we climbed in the truck. The Good Shepherds were gone, and the bags of food they had handed out were now empty and discarded. They blew around the lot like tumbleweeds. I clicked the truck into reverse.

The cars did not want to let us out of the lot. They raced by on the main road, heading towards downtown. A bus stopped across the street, letting a few people on. I could see them shuffle through the aisle and take their seats. Finally there was a break in traffic and we turned out.

“I think I’ll get a lobster roll for lunch. I’m starved,” Tim said. “You want in?”

“Yeah, totally,” I lied. In the road ahead was a half-full, extra-large iced coffee. I could not avoid running it over. I heard the snap of the lid, and the splat of the coffee on the tires.

“Pop!” Tim mimed with one hand as he gazed out the window. In the side mirror, I could see the liquid running along the asphalt and into the sewer grate. I could see it picking up little bits of rock and sand. I could smell the coffee roasting in the air. The liquid was dripping down down down, bringing the ice with it, winding through the pipes and mixing with the slime of the city. Making its way out of the underground and dissipating into the bay. What had once been good was gone. All that remained was the crushed cup in the middle of the street.

Madison Ellingsworth likes walking. Her writing is forthcoming in several publications, including FRiGG and Apple Valley Review. Links to Madison’s other works can be found at madisonellingsworth.com.

Top

The Crowbait Short Play Award

Meltdown by Joe O’Donnell

You can read it here (pdf to preserve original format):

Joe came with his wife Jennifer to Maine from Ann Arbor, Michigan over 30 years ago because, well, Maine! And someone offered him a job at IDEXX Laboratories where he managed government approvals for new products for 25-ish years. That required a form of creative writing. Retired now, he has been writing short plays since 2019 and taking them to the Crowbait Club, where several have been voted the favorite play in the monthly “deathmatch.” His plays have been selected for production by the Maine Playwrights Festival and the Monmouth Community Players, and for staged reading at the Chocolate Church. Most recently, the Topsham Public Library “Joy of the Pen” online journal selected his submission as winning play of their annual writing competition. His goals in play writing are to create some humor, often touched with a few thoughts of value, and to let the actors have a good time.

Top

The Crowbait Short Play Honorable Mention

Mind Over Matter by Gwyneth Jones Nicholson

You can read it here (pdf to preserve original format):

Gwyneth Jones Nicholson (she/her) lives in Portland with her husband Dave and their two cats. She raised two spectacular children and sent them off to live in Pennsylvania and Michigan, for all the good it did.  Gwyneth is an English teacher and theater director at Casco Bay High School where she teaches students that their writing can change the world. 

Top