The Aspen Writers' Foundation and Esquire magazine reveal the finalists' stories from the 2012 Short, Short Fiction Contest! .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Grand Prize Winner
Avenue B
by Kashana Cauley
Five years after the oceans rose and absorbed Manhattan into their flow, I failed to rescue a girl. The storm pushed my boat onto Avenue B. I spotted her clinging to a raised front porch with her right hand. She reached out with her left and we threaded our fingers together for a second while rain poured down our faces. I blinked and she released my hand and dove past the water to her permanent spot in my head.
The dog's eyes indicated surrender, a succinct pleading for relief. There should be no delay -- anymore. Two weeks went by before she could pick up the dog bed. Then, she moved out.
"No man will ever look at you like that," her bachelor roommate had said, when the dog was young, and she was younger.
But this beautiful man does (married man; married to another woman.)
Lie Down. Stay. Come. We are never trained to love well enough alone.
Back In summer 1983 my parents got divorced. I got super powers.
The meteorite hit the drainage ditch where I played; I rode my hand-me-down bicycle through a plume of silver dust and shit particles illuminated by the lonely, tired half-moon. Touching the bird’s-egg-blue sphere nestled in the dry Hazelton soil, I saw the future.
Some gift; I still see me in my grandfather’s spare room, his hand on my shoulder. “It’s alright. Tell me more about that space junk.”
She made lists for everything. On the back of bank statements, inside matchbooks, envelopes from old Christmas cards. Grocery lists. Grand life goals. Daily to-do’s she’d cross off with satisfaction: fold laundry, cut fingernails.
Her husband Rigby mocked them all.
“Find everything?” the checkout girl asked. Rigby dug for money, pulled out a receipt with the crumpled bills. On the back she had written:
Snoring
Onion breath
Sperm count?
He laughed uneasily and paid for the bread and milk.
Derek had been my roommate for five months when he shot himself. His things were in our room, but I left them alone after the police were finished.
His older brother drove down one afternoon to pack everything. We split the beer Derek left in the fridge and traded stories a while, realizing the man he knew and the one I knew were different.
I asked, “Which one did it, do you think?”
He drank. “Probably neither.”
On the only wall not supporting bookshelves he had hung framed fossils: sun-bleached bones displayed against black velvet. The room received no natural light; all windows remained shuttered on the outside, heavily draped within. At his desk each morning, beneath radiant blue light, he chiseled through rock layers delivered to him in crates. He broke open rocks to find creatures no bigger than his thumb, then cut and peeled back their dried flesh to extract perfect stone cold hearts.
A storm threatened. I took my boy to the Tuileries Gardens. Only three, he obsessed over butterflies. We sat near the fountain and he groped my breast, queerly. I was at my wit’s end.
Married at thirty, my world had fled: Paris was nothing like Dorset. My husband, forever on the Riviera, managed his hotel, but not his child.
When lightning touched ground, I threw off my boy’s hand. I ran for a clearing, holding my metal umbrella high.
