Winners of the 2020 Flash Fiction Prize

First Prize ($251): Meth Gators by Epiphany Ferrell

Second Prize ($151): “So Moved” by Curtis VanDonkelaar

Third Prize ($53): “Vibrations” by John Badura

Meth Gators

Everything I do jangles his nerves. It’s only the second time he’s had the boat out all season. The seats and even the oars are dusty and I have the sensation of spiders crawling on me, probably brown recluse. He says I’m too wiggly, I make the boat shimmy.

It’s nighttime. The moonpath on the water and the night violets are romantic. He’s not. It’s our fourth date. Some of my classmates would have had a marriage proposal by the third date.

“Spindrift,” I say out loud. He shushes me without turning around. “As a name for your boat,” I say, more quietly. I know no one names little jon boats like this, but I don’t know why not. I would, if I had a jon boat. I’d name it Spindrift or Cirrus, or maybe Swordtail.

We’re ’gator hunting. He’s into taxidermy; some restaurant upstate wants a specimen for a display.

“What about meth ’gators?” I ask. They’ve been on the news lately, alligators hooked on meth because of all the drugs dumped in the bayou and flushed down toilets.

“There’s no such thing as a meth ’gator,” he tells me.

I see a ripple in the water and then the moon catches yellow eyes and I can see them, like magic, now that I know what to look for. There are two on the bank besides the one in the water, her eyes like topaz in lava rock. I imagine she has molasses in her veins, thick and oozy. A meth ’gator would have mercury in its blood, it would be quick and slippery.

I slide to the bottom of the boat, and the molasses ’gator goes beneath it, the sensation of her dinosaur back and sweeping tail quivering in my legs, in my spine.

Male alligators roar to announce their availability to mate. I read that somewhere.

The man in front of the unnamed jon boat is quiet.

Some of my classmates have babies already. Their eyes gleam when they smile.

~ ~ ~

Epiphany Ferrell lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020, Pulp Literature, New Flash Fiction Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and other places. She is a Pushcart nominee, and blogs for Ghost Parachute.

So Moved

A block ahead of the stop sign where I’m idling, a man loads our couch into a moving van. The van’s parked in our drive, and the couch is the antique one with the arched back and the clawed feet and the hard ribs beneath a skin of upholstery, the couch my wife brought with her into us, and that she’s loved forever—much longer than me—and that we’ve brought along on each move for the jobs or the kids or the dog or the people we were yet to become, and today, I’m home early, unexpectedly, and she’s having the couch moved away, and I’m caught at a four-way behind a man who can’t seem to remember which pedal does what, so it’s brake and clutch and gas and break, and clutch.

Behind the van, boxes of her clothes fill the drive, and the kids’ stuff, and even the dog’s crate, and I didn’t know that we were planning to move today. I didn’t call the mover. I didn’t know he was coming at all, and it’s him I can’t look away from. He makes me think of Picasso. The odd, bald man at work in his studio, smoking, at an easel, wearing a smock. He makes the round face of a woman square and the angles of her chair broken.

The mover pauses on the van’s inclined ramp and flexes, clenches his hands like a bare-knuckle boxer. He seems an inch taller than me and a sack of potatoes heavier, or even two. He channels the Incredible Hulk for one last push, and our couch heaves into the van’s open mouth. It’s gone.

For good? I’m beginning to wonder.

He loads the last boxes and the dog crate, then tucks up the ramp, and he’s gone, too. Our stuff is gone, all of that which was hers, or ours. For good, and here I am, at last at the stop sign on my own.

But no—there’s a painter in my passenger seat. He’s not a master, just me on the day after we moved in here. This painter, he’s about to go inside and explore, run his hand down the jamb of what will become our bedroom door, and he’ll get a splinter. Easy to pull free, won’t even need a band-aid, but he’ll discover there’s more work to be done than he thought. Sanding and painting the frames as well. Saturday, maybe. That’s when he’ll catch everything up, everything that’s been left wanting.

But today, I’ve got another plan. I’m going to make dinner. I’m home early to cook by way of apology. When we were younger, before kids and leg cramps and yearly check-ups requiring us to crush our best parts flat or to let other people send their parts exploring up into ours, we had one good dinner a week. One or the other of us, sneaking home to brew the other’s favorite meal.

This afternoon, I’m home early, and I’m thinking about resurrection. I can’t get it out of my mind, the image of a man, like me—but no, he isn’t—wearing my slacks and navy suitcoat, climbing out of the ground with chunks of dirt between his teeth. He smiles at a woman whispering a prayer before a small pile of stones.

“I’m back,” he says. “Did you miss me?”

And she refuses to brush off her knees.

I bought a new roaster on the way, and it occurs to me, if I hadn’t stopped to buy the damn thing—if I had stayed instead at my desk and gone on with the giving away of my fingertips for new accounts, a bit of bicep here or there for a bump in sales, all my heart for a new office, one with a view of the parking lot, if I had stayed at work and left all of myself behind, I might have finished the greatest report on quarterly sales increases ever written, and then, fuck that driveway Picasso.

Even now, I’m turning it in. My boss cries over the neatly formatted pages. This is what splendor means. I’m tall and proud, and holding up my chin. I look, like a needy child, into the rheum of his eyes. He rolls the report in his fingers, but he can’t open it. The weight of my success overwhelms us both. Look how his hands shake, how his neck wattles. I think, this day, he will never forget.

~ ~ ~

Curtis VanDonkelaar is a recent winner of the Literal Latte Short Short Contest and The Gateway Review’s Speculative Flash Fiction Contest. His work has appeared with journals such as Third Wednesday, J Journal, Passages North, Vestal Review, Western Humanities Review, Hobart, and DIAGRAM. He teaches writing and editing at Michigan State University and edits The Offbeat literary journal. See curtisvandonkelaar.com for more.

Vibrations

Kevin mistook our proximity for friendship. I knew what his sweat smelled like—last night’s vodka and grocery store soup—but we weren’t friends. He referred to the women sitting below us in traffic as either yeahs or nahs. I’m not sure what made the cab of the moving-truck feel smaller, his JV football brand of personality or the impotent tickle of the AC. Still, he was stronger than the other guys, so jobs with Kevin were easier in some ways and harder in others.

Siri—a nah according to Kevin, no explanation offered—directed us to a single-story house with an overgrown yard. Its knee-high grass mohawked between the neighbors’ groomed lawns. Dandelions poked through the green, the front yard a kind of colorblind take on the night sky. I smoked a cigarette while Kevin knocked on the door.

“Dude’s a full-on looney tune,” he reported back, energized by his diagnosis. “He has slippers for us to wear to minimize vibrations. We should check the medicine cabinet for anything good.”

Inside, styrofoam takeout carcasses decorated every surface, old chow mein noodles spilling out like intestines. The floor was a field of dirty clothes and disco-silver Pop-Tarts wrappers. Six bed frames floated on the mess. Only one was equipped for sleeping, the skeletal wooden slats of the other five unemployed. A man took refuge on a stack of mattresses piled on the lone operational bed. I traced his thick black hair, bushy eyebrows, and non-threatening eyes back to high school. “Sean?”

His face reddened in recognition. The how-have-you-beens were asymmetrical. Sean didn’t volunteer much about his situation. I didn’t want to press, but Kevin was room-illiterate. “Is this just a Goldilocks deal, whichever bed feels right?” he asked.

“I’ve been trying to find the right one for my sensitivity,” Sean said to the wall behind us. “I need you guys to take the others away.”

I felt sick to my stomach. We’d hauled the remnants of squatters’ nests to the dump before—foul smelling couches, upholstery stained in the whole spectrum of bodily fluids. But they belonged to faceless junkies. We cursed them, then used their existence to stand a little taller. I sat next to Sean in AP biology. His driver’s ed lessons followed mine. I could still picture him, always waiting on the same bench in his charcoal gray American Apparel hoodie, pretending not to see my battles with the curb.

I didn’t know what to say. Silence seemed to broadcast my discomfort, so I leaked high school all over the room. “Do you think Steve Fletcher slept in those aviator sunglasses?” I referenced the mystery of Lauren Meyer’s hair, perpetually wet regardless of weather or time of day. Like a teenager trying to mask their funk in body spray, my reminiscing just sort of layered on top of reality, loud in its intent.

Sean seemed tuned into some frequency we couldn’t hear. With every step we took, he winced from his mattress HQ. I did my best to move gingerly, as if we were carrying the reject beds across a sheet of ice. Even though Kevin’s face was frozen in a state of what-the-fuck, I could tell he was trying too.

When we finished, I popped back in for a signature and offered to clean up some of the garbage. “That’s okay,” Sean said. I could tell he just wanted me gone. Wanted his struggle to be private again. “Hey, Dan,” he added when I was almost to the door, “I’m not crazy. I’ve just had some health issues.”

“I know,” I said.

That night I couldn’t sleep. An afternoon from high school looped in my head. An unlikely collection of juniors piled into Martin Rodriguez’s Toyota 4Runner to go hiking. The clouds burned off into a sneaky heat, and when the trail finally spit us out around a mountain lake, we stripped down to our underwear. A girl I kind of liked referred to Sean’s octopus patterned boxers as cute and I could remember feeling a little snubbed. I remembered the way my mind turned off in the almost glacial relief of the lake; one of those moments that reduces someone to their sensory inputs. But mostly, I remembered Sean—Sean floating, his head above water, the efforts of his arms and legs concealed beneath the surface.

~ ~ ~

John Badura is a writer from Seattle, Washington. He appreciates boldly painted front doors. He is color blind, but is pretty sure his is periwinkle.