Winners of the LongShortStories Short Story Contest
January 15th, 2010It is my honor and great privilege as the Writer/Editor/Digital Publisher of LongShortStories to announce the winners of the second LongShortStories Short Story Contest!
Competition was fierce! Submissions arrived from all over the globe! We carefully read and evaluated every one of them! We want to thank our friends at the Duotrope’s Digest Web site for steering many of you to our Web site and its contests.
Our prizes were fantastic! First Prize was a complete Eugene Barnes Basic Website Package and 6-month basic level fully managed Web hosting service, valued at approximately $800. Our Second Prize was $150 cash and a free One Year subscription (or renewal) to LongShortStories. Our Third Prize was $100 cash and a free One Year subscription (or renewal) to LongShortStories.
The quality of submissions ranged from the absolutely wonderful to the quite awful! Word counts ranged from 2500-word short stories to power-packed, take-no-prisoners Flash Fiction pieces, some less than 200 words!
A word to those of you who did not win one of our prizes this time around: You’re all winners in our book! Now it is 2010, a new decade, and you may submit your new, original, previously unpublished short fiction to us (no simultaneous submissions, please!) between January 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010, and/or enter our contest which runs from July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010.
We would suggest you continue honing your short story craft by following this advice:
Read, read, and read again from the best! Study the living masters of the short story form, like Alice Munro, Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Sherman Alexie, Bruce Holland Rogers, Benjamin Percy, and those found in the pages of each year’s The Best American Short Stories. Study the classic short works of Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other masters of the short story form who have gone before. Dissect their work. Emulate them. Create your own genre!
Watch those typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes! Sadly, far too many of you relied on your spell-checkers. Register for a short fiction course. Invest in a copy of 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. Learn how to punctuate dialogue! You’ll be glad you did!
Edit, edit, edit! Get that story idea down on paper! Then read it out loud to yourself. Is there a pleasing rhythm to your prose? Do we care about your characters? Does your dialogue ring true? Then, watch your point of view and story development. Does it make strategic use of pacing? Does it follow the “less is more” winning short story structure? In the immortal words of Antoine de Saint Exupéry: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away!”
Now, let us celebrate our winners!
LongShortStories is very proud to award our distinguished First Prize to Mike Jaynes of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for his 2,330-word short story “Gasoline Christmas.” This short story just blew us away with its creepiness and its tortured main character’s stoical determination. We were so swept up by this entry that our knee-jerk reaction was to consider calling the police!
LongShortStories is equally proud to announce that our esteemed Second Prize goes to Kendra Lisum of Missoula, Montana, for her 150-word Flash Fiction story “Neckties and Lilacs.” Kendra’s bio and her cutting-edge story will appear on these “Wayne’s Blog” pages on February 16, 2010. Mark your calendars!
After much gnashing of teeth and sleepless nights here at LongShortStories, we finally decided that we hadn’t found a story truly worthy of our Third Prize this time around. Keep writing, people, and try again! Some of the masters had their work initially rejected too! Remember that we at LongShortstories are here to foster the magnificent short story form; a writing form deemed by experts the world over as the most difficult of all forms to write. A form whose time to shine for an appreciative global audience is now!
Spotlight on Mike Jaynes!
Mike Jaynes is an American Short Story Writer living in the Southeastern United States. He is a university lecturer who teaches various English, Humanities, and Women’s Studies courses at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a non-fiction book focusing on captive elephants and animal advocacy. Relatedly, he also lectures across the United States on the troubling and complex subject of animal ethics.
In his short fiction, he seeks to write sparse terrifying stories. His fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Farmhouse Magazine, The Riverwalk Journal, Wordriver Literary Review, Four Corners Magazine, National Public Radio’s This I Believe Essay Series, All Creatures and other outlets.
And now, friends of LongShortStories, Mike Jaynes’ First Prize-winning short story:
Gasoline Christmas
A Story
Children never make eye contact with me. Christmas is just about here again, and there is plenty of red and green changing the landscape into a magical place. I love Christmas; it makes me feel happy. I hate Christmas; it makes me crave the coppery smell of blood. I need to find the place I’m supposed to drop off these apples. Trust me, not most people’s dream, my job, but it suits me fine. Sometimes I want to hurt people. Most people are busy with Quite Important Things, and I try to avoid those. Who imagines the typical American child saying Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be an apple delivery man? People want to grow up and be doctors, lawyers, pro surfers, or first basemen for the Red Sox.
But deliverers of apples?
Drivers of farm trucks? Sometimes people seem like hollow sculptures endowed with pointless movement. But my job works for me because I am trying my hardest to balance myself. Sometimes I hate breathing the same air as other humans, but I have it under control now because I think a lot about balance and I know I require it. Also, I have been happy. I have spent entire days lying under my favorite tree watching the shadows of the slowly passing day play out on its bark. I have sat under night skies and listened to distant hunting night birds and felt the warm essence of stars. I’ll never be famous.
Apples ride with me.
Red ones, yellow ones, baking ones, but mainly red delicious. The farm I drive for specializes in red delicious, and sometimes I want to see just how much C-4 could fit under the first two pews of the biggest Baptist church in town. But then I calm down and realize that things are perfect as they are and even if the world seems mad, the universe is perfect. Balanced. Most nights I lie under needles of night sky mica chips and listen to the universe. So far, nothing.
I don’t have any friends.
I used to be in love with a girl. But I hurt her and kept screwing up and she had enough and left. Then I was in love with a man and it ended the same way. They used to be happy, but I destroyed them. They still walk around and do things, but they are destroyed. I only have about forty minutes for lunch, so I park my blue farm truck in the Waffle House parking lot. I eat here often, and a few of the waitresses know me. None of them like me. The door creaks, swings, and lets me in. The restaurant isn’t crowded, it being two-twenty on a Tuesday. I hate the names of the weeks. I hate clocks and divisions of time. The door closes behind me, and I am overwhelmed by the orange, yellow and brown of the decor.
Hey there, Dolores says.
Workin’ hard, Dolores? I say.
Only if they make me. She chuckles.
I know that’s right, I reply. I sit in the cold plastic booth, and think about chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching. Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done. That’s what it says, chapter 29. Delores brings me a coffee.
You up to no good today? She asks. Good question, I think.
You know me, I say. Good answer. I order my regular, and she walks away. Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. Outside the holiday-painted windows, a mall sprawls just across the parking lot. Cars dot the landscape, people are hurried, and I marvel at the progress of humanity through holiday windows showing me Santa Claus, reindeer, and candy canes all in dull reverse. The top of the windows say syadiloH yppaH. I feel festive. I have to be back at work in a little over thirty minutes, and the restaurant is filled with the usual sounds of clinking forks, refilling teas, shouting orders, and properly functioning door chimes.
Three years ago, on the night she left, she called me a fraud. She asked me about the tyranny within me, and I didn’t like that at all. Sometimes the world is burning inside me and I don’t want it to. This holiday season has a theme of peace, and I plan to tap into a little of that as soon as possible. She brought me such joy at times, and then there were other times. Sometimes I was happy with her, and then sometimes I felt my veins leaving my body, traveling upwards and strangling me. My very veins, bluish and hollow, with me from my beginning, I felt them exit my skin, slither up my body, and strangle me. A gallows of thick, bluish veins knotted together in a fleshy noose. Strangling me. Choking. Can’t breathe.
No. Stop. I think. Control. I always think I can control it. There’s no reason to feel this. I vaguely remember sneaking into the crawl space below the Waffle House three nights ago. But what was I doing? I can’t remember why I was crawling under the restaurant, putting soft grey things here and there. Stop it. No idea at all. No reason to go back down this path when it is crisp outside, the sky is blue, and Dolores just sat a plate of double hash browns, just the way I like them, in front of me. My pulse slows. I can always think my way back to calmness. The noose of my thick waxy veins loosens and I can breathe a little better. What were those wires I ran under the building three nights ago? The dream fades.
The food is delicious, Christmas is almost here, and it is good to be alive. The food is warm and good. The hash browns are hot and tinged with jalapeños. The ketchup is good too. Through the inverted red and green images of holiday icons, I see the vista of the parking lot mall dotted with cars and I suddenly want to destroy them all. I want to stuff rags down their gas tanks and light them. Stop. I stop chewing and close my eyes. Burn them. The sound of the restaurant continues. Frying bacon, sizzling sausage, the low hum in my left ear. Stop it. I think of slaughterhouses, not bacon. I looked out the front row of windows and I saw my work truck silent and waiting for me to turn the key and go back to work. After lunch, I will get in and turn the key. Control. Start the engine. Going somewhere. The hum in my ears gets louder and I put my hands to my ears. I am the one who parked that truck full of apples. I want to rejoice in the backward snowman painted on the Waffle House window like children do. I want to smile when I see his painted grin and his arms lifted in greeting. I want to ignore the freight train full of rotting animals whose death I caused. I want to ignore its roaring in my head and enjoy simple pleasures like hot hash browns and cold sweet tea on my lunch break. I notice Delores is standing beside me saying something. I put my hands down, and try to look composed. I fail.
Buddy, you okay? she asked with deeper lines visible on her face. I avoid eye contact. I realize this may be the first thing other than small talk we’ve ever shared. I hear the low hum; I know those grey packets are below the restaurant…below this very booth, and that one, and the grill, and the restrooms over there. Godhood flows over me and I mourn the person dying inside of me.
I say Yes. I just get these crushing migraines sometimes that come out of nowhere. I’m fine, I assure her. I’m a fine liar. Sometimes I eat apples from my truck and don’t pay for them. That’s wrong. Delores looks scared. I never look in mirrors. I am alone. I know about the wires underneath us all. I start to laugh.
Baby, maybe you ought to calm down, she says. Delores turns up the corners of her mouth, but she is not smiling. I stop laughing and want to destroy. I want them to burn in metal fields of burning holiday presents and families and dreams. I want everyone in the mall dead. Dead and gone. Everybody in the Waffle House. I want to die. My mother would be ashamed. I wish I had Rusty, my dog from childhood. But he died.
You want to hear a story, Delores? I asked. She didn’t. She glances at her manager who is standing just beside her. Other people are looking now and I don’t care. I can get this under control by thinking about what needs to be done. I am a thinker.
Can I call you somebody? She asks. She looks at my shaking hands. My fork clanks on the cheap plate with its corona of blue. I feel nauseous.
Delores, there is nobody. I want to tell you a story. Can I? My voice sounds higher pitched than usual. I continue: I just want to tell you this story and then I will leave, I say. I want to hold Delores’s face to the hot griddle and listen to her flesh hiss secrets at me. Hear her fat face sizzle? Maybe in a minute.
She just wants me to shut up and leave. She speaks. Okay, honey. Tell me a story. She won’t like the story.
Well, Delores, when I was fourteen I had this dream. And it scared me, you know. And now and then I think of it and it scares me and I try to not think of what it might mean. I want you to tell me what it might mean, I say. My voice is high and fast. She starts to speak but my words bowl her over, run her down, stop her in her tracks. I am a force of nature, sitting at a Waffle House table craving the smell of burnt flesh and twisted metal and gasoline Christmas. My rage overpowers her good intentions and I continue: You see, I had this dream that I woke up and I killed my parents, I say. Delores looked pale now. She should. You all should. In my high voice I say Then I went from house to house in my neighborhood in the pre-dawn stillness and killed everyone in my neighborhood. The Joneses, The Smiths, The Adrianics. All of them. Now I can feel myself sweating and I know Delores is scared. My voice rises in pitch and gains intensity. Everyone in the restaurant is listening. I continued: So, after that I killed everyone in our town. The whole town, and then I blew up the entire state. All of Tennessee dead by my calm hands. Then I killed everyone in America, Europe, and the world. All the plants, the animals, the birds, the fish, the microbes in the soil. If it lived, I killed it. I blew the world up and then I went to distant planets and killed them all there too. I destroyed all life in the universe. I killed it all and I was still hungry for more. I wasn’t satisfied. I prayed, and God and Jesus came to me and said they forgive me and they love me and I killed them both and ate them. I ate them with one of those plastic spoon fork things from KFC. Then I realized there was no life left in the universe so I destroyed all the planets, all the stars, all the comets. We were studying physics and the universe in junior high, and in my dream I killed all the quasars, the meteorites, and even the black holes. I destroyed all the matter in the universe and then there was only darkness and me. Then I hated the darkness. I killed it too. I sucked it up through a long straw and it was cold going down my throat and it made me feel empty instead of full. So then I sucked up all the darkness and behind it was the void. I killed it too. And the void behind it and the void behind it and the void behind it. I knew that I would never be able to kill all the voids in the universe and I was pissed because I knew I would spend eternity killing and sucking the vacuum of nothingness through a long straw and feeling cold and empty and pissed and alone. Then I realized as long as anything existed there would be something and I wouldn’t be happy. I killed myself and then I ate my body. My soul flew in the void and I hated it too. I wanted to kill my soul, but I couldn’t. I am immortal in the dream and I know that I annihilated everything in the universe but I can’t kill myself. And I realized I had to spend eternity alone in an unbroken blackness with nothing at all.
The restaurant is silent, my story finished. I stand up, put twenty dollars on the table, and walk to my truck. I can barely see and I am shaking as I pull out of the parking lot with my truck loaded with apples. As I pull away, I see the cook standing at the plate glass staring at me and my receding apples. Then I push the blue button on the detonator in my hand and the middle of the store turns into a growing fireball rolling out and up and over the yellow and brown roof. Those buttons are always red in the movies, the ones on detonators.
The End.
Story Copyright of Mike Jaynes, 2009.
LongShortStories Editor’s Note:
Mr. Jaynes wishes to foster other deserving short story writers by humbly passing on the Web site prize package to future potential LongShortStories First Prize winners. This, to us, is the ultimate in authorial selflessness. Kudos, Mike!
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