Youth Fiction Winners 2006

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Chiggers

By Adrian Shirk

 

It was my first time in the South. We were one-hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia. An army town lined with pawn shops, 24-hour breakfast places and tattoo parlors as far as the eye could see. My brother was graduating boot camp at Fort Benning. My family and I had stuffed our left-wings deep inside our pockets and had come to show our support for the U.S. troops.

We stuck out like sore polka dots on a striped, aristocratic dress.

I'm from the Northwest, one-hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean. A hypothetically progressive city with less ethnic diversity than a carton of chicken eggs. Breathing was easy, oxygen was plentiful, and I'd barely scratched the surface of what humidity was. There were Douglas Firs and forty-three different bird calls. And we all had our "progressive" prejudices about everything Southern. But now I was in Georgia and the air was as thick as puddles, tropical almost, like a bird aviary at the zoo. It felt like I was breathing through soda straws, walking through swamps. Instead of Douglas Firs, there were sharp, stubby bushes and old, stagnate trees. And instead of forty-three different bird calls, there were bugs. Really loud bugs that sang from the thickets like an orchestra. We had to pull off the highway at one point because of a sudden flash-flood and I stood to the side of the road, listening to the haunting June bug screeches. There were God-rays streaming from openings in the clouds and the sunsets were purple and sudden, unlike the vain display of colors we went through every night back at home. Lush, sweet, simple. We stopped for a day in Atlanta and I'd never been so conscious of the whiteness of my skin and my hometown. Also, none of our preconceptions about Southern living turned out to be true. Georgia was exactly what all those old blues songs had been telling us for years.

We'd gotten discount airfare for the trip on account of a family friend. The only catch was that they were "stand-by," and we'd be on a waiting list for the next available flight. Supposedly this wasn't going to take very long.

My mom, step-dad, younger sister, and I spent three days in an airport trying to get home.

I was almost fifteen, and the summer was being consumed by lost time. After the first day, I forgot all about the fascinating beauty of Georgia, and fixated on one repeating thought: Hurry, hurry, hurry. You're going to miss out on everything back at home! This made me crazy and rabid. I paced barefoot in the terminals, muttering to myself. The more I thought about it, the slower the days got, and the number of flights we missed increased. On the third day, my step-dad and my sister made it on the plane, leaving my mom and I dumbstruck, without our luggage, dressed in three-day old clothes.

"Onwards," my mother said.

As we jerked through the doors of yet another hotel, impending of yet another mind loosening day of arrivals and departures, a large group of fifteen Scandinavian travelers were squabbling at the front desk, insisting in several languages that they could fit themselves into two rooms even though the employee made it clear that it wasn't aloud. An old woman shook her fist. The employee motioned to us over the crowd. He gave us the keys to our room. My mom and I laid on either side of the bed, staring at the ceiling.

"Want to go for a walk?" she asked.

I grunted.

We glided down the carpeted stairs. The Scandinavian family was nowhere in sight. Thick air clogged my throat and nostrils when we opened the door. A shrill squawk sounded from the bushes and leaves shook to the ground. It sounded like an alien—but it was only one of those bugs. The sidewalk was quiet. It ran along a highway that serviced airport hotels for about a mile. I started saying things like, "I need to get home. All my friends are having fun without me. I hate this. I'm going crazy." My mother sighed, stopped in her tracks and thrust her arms up like volcanoes that erupt every thousand years or so.

"We're in Georgia! We're stuck in Georgia and there are weird bugs and Southern hospitality and hush puppies! We're on a goddamn adventure! Lighten up, honey! I have things to get back to also. But this is important, this may never happen again."

I opened my mouth in a series of attempts to speak. Nothing came out. I took off my shoes, and we meandered into a large empty lot, trespassing over heavy metal gates. She told me to watch out for these insects called chiggers, adding that she wasn't sure what they did or if they even existed. I spun around and watched the area around my toes with caution.

"Grandma used to always warn us about chiggers. But we never knew what to watch for," she said. "I guess it helped us keep track of our feet."

I looked up from my toes and knew what she meant. This was my mother and I thought I loved her.

We tip-toed across the empty highway, over some rubble, sharpened bottles, nameless Southern brush. We were behind a row of hotels where the lights didn't reach, and the trees grew taller. Railroad tracks rolled out from the darkness. We each claimed a silver balustrade and tip-toed upon it. We just strolled along those tracks while each honest, Southern star unveiled itself in the sky.

"Sometimes you act like you know everything," my mother said.

"That's because — that's because 1 usually already understand what people are talking about before they try explaining. I want people to know that I get it. That I'm smart."

She smiled, balancing on a rail. "Mhm."

"Doesn't that make sense though?"

"Oh sure it does. But I think you still need to listen."

"I do listen."

"Ok honey," she said.

We kept walking.

In our hotel room I looked at my chapped face in the mirror and ran my fingers across it. I thought of my brother and the way he had looked, marching with all the other soldiers, holding that American flag. I stayed up until the A.M. crouched between the bed and the nightstand with the telephone at my temple. I was talking to a couple of friends back home, curling the telephone cord in and out with my big toe. Watching my feet.

Being Naked In Front of Everyone

By Jason Sherwood

 

My mother and father and sister love to watch home videos. The camera jostles back and forth, my baby-self burps. They laugh. They love to look in the photo albums, the plastic protective sheets crinkling under our since-grown hands. They smile, through tears, in some cases, at pictures of my sister and I in the tub. Naked pictures are the best, they say. Pictures of me clad in Batman cape, naked on the beach, climbing the monkey bars, dressed in my best as a Power Ranger, dancing to Raffi's classic tunes, hiding under my Batman bed comforter.

I try not to look at these things. Frankly, I don't understand why we take pictures, why we film corny and amateurish videos. Well, that's a lie. I do understand why they do it: it helps them remember. I'd never want that. I remember things a certain way. I remember my favorite sand pale was blue. If one of their pictures proves otherwise, I don't care. It's how I remember it. It was, it is, my childhood. And my memory. And my sand pale. So what the hell do they know.

Now, when we go on what feel like interminable trips to our beach place down in South Jersey, I am flooded by my own memories. A large portion of my childhood was spent at the beach. Down the shore. Which exit number? I used to dig for hours, play two-hand-touch football, volleyball, "boogie board," kneel in a shallow portion of water and let the waves knock me over— I used to.

But now I work. As a lifeguard, in a huge complex not far away. I walk there, and I watch the people pass, blow my whistle when the little children run. I hide behind a pair of Baywatch-esque sunglasses. I remember when I used to run on the pool deck. How I never stopped, not even after the cold concrete nearly split my shin hi half. I'd never seen so much blood. Now Mom tells me it was just a scratch, that it hardly bled. Like I said. What the hell does she know?

At night, I often take walks alone, my feet burrowing into the cold sand. The beach is most pleasant at night, when the din of screaming children has ceased and finally, from even hundreds of yards away hi the dunes, you can hear the ocean slightly turning over. The waves weave themselves in and out of each other. Nature's reminder of the lanyards we made as kids. Weaving in and out. Box stitch. We sold them for seventy-five cents to our relatives.

Now, I walk along the water mostly, a nice mix between the soft sand, the "hard," or wet, sand, as we called it at age six, and the ocean itself.

When I watch the children run past me, I can't help wondering at what point those things stopped for me. When did it become unfashionable, just plain wrong, to run on the pool deck? To continue running even after an ear-splitting whistle? When did I lose my privileges to stay on the beach until after six, building a sandcastle? Who told me I couldn't cry when we returned and the sand-raking machine had crushed five hours of effort?

I can't name it, put a date on it. But there's a moment, a single tune in every person's life, when you reach "that point in your life." That point when you become, at some level, an adult. When you cross from the realm of child to young adult From teen to young man. When suddenly all sign of sheer silliness surely are shucked.

In truth, even at six or seven or eight, I wasn't into frolicking. Plain silliness never fascinated me. I was too obsessed with being like my sister, my cousin, my parents. I wanted to do important things, write great books, be famous. I wanted adulthood, to sit with my aunt and uncle and mother and father at the Thanksgiving table. To finally escape an eternity of fold-out tables and chairs. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to answer the phone and not be misinterpreted as my sister. I wanted to be first-pick in beach volleyball. I wanted to play my own hand of cards and not be on my mother's team. I wanted to be included in the poker games, to not be ushered out when the R-rated movies started. I got that eventually. It took eleven or twelve long years of fighting. But then I lost what I'd always had. I lost what I never had to miss.

I stopped playing video games. They sit, collecting dust, now. I stopped the cartoons, the Batman capes and figurines, the stupid jokes, the bathroom humor, the Disney movies, the being naked in front of everyone and not caring phase. It ended so suddenly.

Sometimes I wish I had written more at that age. That it had all been on paper. Today I write constantly. Sometimes I write just to document it all—just because I know in ten years it won't seem half as serious. Half as real.

When I take my walks at night, people pass by and watch me. I don't appear out of control, hi anyway childish or bizarre. I appear normal. Maybe mature. I can't say. I walk by them. Think about the book I just finished, the play that's sitting in the back of my mind, the memoir I want to write but don't have the guts to put on paper. Think about quitting my job, building sandcastles for free tips like the man with the beard who comes down for a week in the summer, writing all day hi my bedroom. Think about what they would do if I turned and ran into the water. I might do it one of these days. But I'm afraid to move beyond bathroom humor and Batman capes. I can't recite those jokes or wear that cape. But they’re with me. I’m hung up on them.  And I’m not ready to reach that point in my life.

Red

a short story

by Dallas Woodburn

 

Grace knocked the nail polish off her bedside table and onto the carpet and that was The End. She crouched there, as if paralyzed, watching the Maybelline "Vixen Red" soak into the white Burbur, the teardrop-shaped stain slowly growing bigger and bigger, like blood seeping into a Band-Aid.

Grace sat there, rocking on her heels, watching and waiting. Waiting and watching. For what, she didn't exactly know. When the teardrop stopped growing, she got up and went to the kitchen to get some paper towels.

* * *

The rain spattered softly against the car windows. Grace watched the windshield wipers dance, back and forth, forth and back, like her piano teacher's metronome. She sat with her knees hugged up against her chin, trying to minimize the contact of her skin with the cold vinyl. "Mom," she said. "It's raining cats and frogs."

"You mean cats and dogs," her mother corrected, never taking her eyes off the road.

It was still raining "cats and frogs" when they arrived at the park. Grace stared out the car window and imagined they were inside a giant aquarium, except filled with birds instead of fish.

Her mother turned around and smiled at Grace in the backseat. "What a perfect day," she said, "to fly a kite!" Grace could tell she wasn't joking. Her mother never joked about important matters.

Part of Grace wanted to stay in the car, but the other part of her won out. She pulled the strings on her sweatshirt hood so tight her face was scrunched and there was only a keyhole of an opening where the rain could get in. Then she tied the strings in a bow - double-knotted, the way Grampa had taught her so it wouldn't come undone.

Grace tightly held her mother's hand as they trudged together up the rain-slickened hill that overlooked the playground. Grace had never been to the park in the rain. It was deserted. Like a magic kingdom that belonged only to Grace and her mother. Just the two of them, and of course some fish disguised as birds. "We've always got each other, Hon," her mom said whenever Grace asked about her daddy. "Us girls gotta stick together. Just you and me, that's all we need."

That's all we need. Just you and me. Grace squeezed her mother's hand.

They were at the top of the hill now, and Grace peeked out her keyhole through the drizzle at the slide and the swingset, then at the picnic tables and the scattered trees, and finally at their blue Volvo parked alongside the curb. Her mother stood a few feet away, face turned skyward, eyes squinting against the driving BBs of water, hair streaming long and wet down her back. Grace's clothes had grown heavy and cumbersome. All the tiny raindrops had banded together. It reminded Grace of one of her Grampa's favorite sayings. "Take little steps, baby steps," he told Grace whenever she was on the brink of giving up. "Baby steps have a way of adding up to a lot of big steps."

"So do raindrops," Grace thought now, wriggling inside her soggy Hello Kitty sweatshirt. "Little raindrops have a way of adding up to big buckets." She wanted to take her sweatshirt off but couldn't get Grampa's double-knotted bow undone. Water ran off the tip of her nose and she stuck out her tongue and caught a drop. She was surprised at how warm it tasted.

Grace's mother held the kite with hopeful outstretched hands. She peered up into the leaden sky as if challenging it, or maybe begging. The kite was small and diamond-shaped and painted with rainbows, which Grace's mother said was "highly ironic." Grace smiled appreciatively even though she didn't know what "ironic" meant. She knew this though: she loved kites and she loved rainbows. And, above all, she loved her mother.

The kite had a hard time getting airborne. "Mom, maybe we should go," Grace said, holding the end of the kite string and shivering slightly, but her mother didn't hear. Grace's mother continued to squint into the drizzle, determined and desperate, holding the kite above her head, quietly beseeching the wind to take the tiny rainbow in its arms and raise it high. Grace knew you shouldn't fly kites in the rain. Her mother knew this too, and yet there she stood, trying anyway. Just you and me, Hon. Years later, this was what Grace most vividly remembered when she thought of her mother: eyes squinted toward the heavens, a double-knot bow that just wouldn't come undone, and a tiny rainbow struggling against the rain to fly.

* * *

The chemotherapy started the very next week.

The second time, Grace went with her mother into The Little White Room with the

hospital smell and space-age machinery. It reminded Grace of the aliens she had seen once, when her Uncle Bill let her stay up late and watch a movie with The Big Kids. Grace was scared of The Little White Room but she went in anyway. She sat beside the bed and watched the medicine drip. . . drip.. . drip out of the IV bag, down a clear tube, and into her mother's arm, slowly trickling inside her, becoming a part of her, like blood or bone.

Drip. . . drip .. . drip.... It reminded Grace of rain dripping off the leaves of the eucalyptus trees at the park, the day she and her mother flew the rainbow kite. Grace remembered the way her mother shrieked with excitement when the wind finally swept the kite up into its arms. Grace's heart leapt with the thrill of the kite tugging on the string. She forgot about her soggy sweatshirt and stubborn double-knot bow. She and her mother stood side-by-side, just you and me, Hon, watching the rainbow dance in the gray misty rain.

"Hey Mom," Grace said now, eyes still transfixed on the IV bag. "It's like the rain."

"That's nice, Honey." But Grace could tell her mother wasn't really listening. She didn't watch the drip. . . drip. .. drip. Instead, she looked at Grace and asked her questions about kindergarten and play-dates and Grandma and Grampa. She sounded tired.

As the treatments continued, Grace sometimes brought along pictures she drew in art class. This always made her mother smile, except for the picture of the rainbow kite and the rain. That one made her mother cry.

One day when Grace came to The Little White Room she brought a bottle of her mother's nail polish and they painted each other's toenails. Grace was careful as could be, but she still got polish on the skin around her mother's nails. She wasn't very good at "coloring inside the lines," but her mother said that was okay. The nail polish was red; deep red; "Vixen Red." It was her mother's favorite color. She said it made her feel alive. After all, you couldn't be dying if you had bright red toenails. It just didn't fit the picture.

Grace believed her. We've always got each other, Hon. Just you and me. She coated her mother's toenails with thick layers of red, as if somehow chip-free nails could create miracles.

And then her mother died, and Grace's eyes were Vixen Red for weeks, and she didn't

believe in miracles anymore.

* * *

Grace kept the $3.49 bottle of Vixen Red polish hi her bureau drawer buried underneath her underwear, where nobody would find it. She kept some of her mother's other things - a lock of auburn hair, a lavender silk scarf, a book of Walt Whitman poems - in the drawer of her bedside table. But the nail polish was Grace's secret treasure. Sometimes she would slip it out and painstakingly paint a single fingernail red with the same tiny brush that had traced her mother's nails nearly a decade ago. Now she stayed "inside the lines," carefully painting only one coat, using as little polish as possible, because this was a magical red, her mother's red, and she couldn't go out and buy more when she ran out. She doubted they even made Vixen Red anymore.

Grace would sit there on her bedroom floor, sneaking glances at the splash of vibrant color alive against the white of her skin, stroking the single red nail with her thumb, strangely comforted yet upset with herself at the same time.

Now. Grace watched the pool of Vixen Red soak through the layers of paper towels. The tiny bottle, nearly empty, was propped upright on the bedside table.

She looked out the window. It was raining "cats and frogs." Tears spilled from her eyes and drip. . . drip. . . dripped down her cheeks, but Grace felt a smile cracking open her face. She crawled across the floor and rummaged around in the back of her closet.

Grace sat there for a moment, looking at it, running her hand across the light plastic surface. With Vixen Red-stained fingers, she carefully wiped off a thin film of dust. Baby steps, she thought, taking a deep breath. Baby steps.

She slipped out the front door and into the rain, hugging the faded rainbow tightly to her chest. Baby steps. Baby steps. Grace opened her mouth wide and caught a water droplet on her tongue.

"What a perfect day," she thought, smiling as she squinted into the falling raindrops, "to fly a kite."

 

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