Short Story Contest
Our
Short Story Contest remains open until December 31. The prize is a bottle of wine. There are two rules: Limit your entry to 1000 words, and the story’s
first sentence must be “I
could hear the floorboards on the porch, weathered by years of exposure,
creaking in the night.” You take it from there. As of now (October 13), we already have two
entries, and we await yours! Just send
it as an Email attachment to me at riart1@aol.com.
As
an example of how easy it is, here is one I have written. It will not be in the contest. Aside
from the title, it contains precisely 1000 words, which proves it can be
done. You can get a lot into a 1000 word story by writing economically. The hardest part of writing this one was
editing it down to that size. Its
original version had almost 200 more words than that. At the conclusion of the story is a brief commentary on how it was written which might help you in writing your entry. Go to it!
Jack
Lippman
It took about an hour for the police to get there and do their work. Detective Yablonski sat across the kitchen table from me, the meager contents of the woman’s pocketbook spread out before him. The boys had already been taken into town to be cared for in the County shelter.
Sons
I could
hear the floorboards on the porch, weathered by years of exposure, creaking in
the night. They creaked whenever the temperature or the humidity was
changing. I no longer bothered to get up to peer out of the window to see
who was there. No one ever was.
After
retiring from my job as Headmaster of the stuffy New England prep school where
I had made the mistake of staying too long, I came down to Florida. I
fish, play golf and read a lot. Once in a while I speak to one of my
daughters, but see little of them since the divorce. But as for the noise
on the porch, this time it was different. There was a knock at the
door. Someone was actually there.
I went
to the door and opened it. Standing there in the light rain were two
little boys, about eight or nine years old. One of them had a smear of
what looked like blood on his cheek and the other’s pants leg was torn exposing
an abrasion on his knee.
“Mister,”
the taller of the two boys addressed me, “Can you come out and help us?
We had an accident and Mom is still in the car. It’s about five
minutes down the road.” The other one chimed in, “We saw the light in
your house. Please come.”
Grabbing
a flashlight, I followed the boys along the path to the hardtop road which led
to the County road. The red Chevy was off the road wedged against a
tree. I aimed my flashlight inside and saw her in the front seat.
The airbags were inflated, but they hadn’t provided enough protection.
Rivulets of blood, already drying, dripped from her ears and mouth and her eyes
were frozen open. Quickly turning, I led the boys back along the path to
the house.
It took about an hour for the police to get there and do their work. Detective Yablonski sat across the kitchen table from me, the meager contents of the woman’s pocketbook spread out before him. The boys had already been taken into town to be cared for in the County shelter.
“Strange
story, Mr. Kay,” the detective said. “Lucy Durango was released from
prison only last week, and it took her only a couple of days to steal a car and
kidnap her two boys from her husband who had been given custody of them.
There was an alert out for the car, and the boys, of course. The husband
is pretty well off, living in a big house on the Key, and had posted a reward
for their return. I guess you might get it. Come down to the
Sheriff’s office in Sarasota and I can arrange for you to meet him.”
Two
days later, a chauffeur in a Bentley picked me up and drove me to a mansion out
on the Key. Led into a well appointed study, I found myself facing a tall,
suntanned man, about 50, smoking a big cigar, seated at a mahogany desk.
“You
don’t mind my smoking?” he asked. Shrugging, I reluctantly nodded my
assent. Behind Quentin Durango was a shapely girl in her twenties clad in
a sheer beach shift, with nothing more than a pair of panties underneath.
She was gently massaging the back of Durango’s neck. From her lips a
cigarette dangled, the kind that was a little too bulky to be filled with
tobacco. Her eyes were half-closed and she held a Heinekens in one hand.
“Can I
have Gracie get you something, Mr. Kay?” I nodded “No,” and tried to
breathe in as little of the room’s sour aroma as possible.
Durango
continued, “Let me get to the point, Mr. Kay. I have a check for $25,000
for you for finding the boys, but really, it might have been better if they
died in the crash like Lucy did. They were a pain in the ass to me.
That woman ruined them, and after she got put away for stealing my jewelry,
they got worse. Frankly, I am going to send them away to some boarding
school. I can’t stand them in the house. They get in the way of my
lifestyle.”
Gracie
smiled, spreading the opening in her shift a bit as she flexed a tanned abdomen
featuring a diamond hanging from her navel. “Quentin is right,” she
ventured. “The boys are a real drag. They don’t like me.”
“Shut
up, Gracie. No one asked you!” Durango interrupted as he turned and
slapped her on the face. Gracie turned and walked out of the room.
“Fuck you, Quentin,” she cried out.
Sometimes
thoughts which should take many years to gestate are born with the speed of
light. Things come together from remote corners of one’s mind. What
if Peggy had wanted to try for boys, as he had, and they both had remained
faithful? Why did he stay at Afton Prep
for twenty years after the divorce? These boys should not be allowed back in
the Durango house, ever.
“Mr.
Durango, I have an idea.” And then the words flowed out of my mouth in a
torrent.
Putting
down his cigar, Durango smirked at me and agreed.
And so
it is that I have two fine boys, for whom I eventually was appointed Guardian
by the State of Florida, living in my house. They go to public school and
I try my best to enrich their education. I never got the reward nor the support for the
boys Durango had promised, but he couldn’t come up with it anyway, even if he
wanted to, since he is serving twenty years in the State Prison in Stark for
whatever it was Gracie told the County Prosecutor after he threw her out of the
house a week after our meeting.
As for me, I finally feel that sense of fulfillment which having sons to love, nurture and teach can bring about. Lucy probably would be happy with that.
As for me, I finally feel that sense of fulfillment which having sons to love, nurture and teach can bring about. Lucy probably would be happy with that.
Jack
Lippman
Commentary from the wrtier:
In writing “Sons,” I let the
story first tell itself in skeletal form.
As I outlined its initial version, I didn’t know what would happen
next. It starts with a knock at the door.
Two boys appear. Their mother is dead in an auto accident. The police come.
They connect the storyteller with the Dad who is a bad guy. The story teller
ends up with the boys. How do I make
this happen?
On this skeleton, then, I
then had to put some meat. If he is to
end up with the boys, let’s give him some credentials, so I made him a retired
headmaster. I hinted at why he was alone
by mentioning a divorce and distancing him from his own children. At the time I inserted them, I did not know
how these details would contribute to the story later on. When I did, I went back and “polished” them a
bit. I described the boys’ father in
great detail, making him so bad that it was believable that a court might take
the boys from him. Although I made his
girlfriend the mechanism for this happening, I didn’t know she would be that at
the time I introduced her to the story.
But why would the
storyteller want to end up with the boys?
I had to come up with some explanation, so I decided to explain it by
his sudden realization that his divorce, the fact that he had daughters, and
his remaining at the school for years were all tied together. By this point it naturally flowed that the
divorce and his infidelities must have stemmed from his wanting more children, specifically sons
that his wife did not want, sons from which he might have derived the joy of a father's parenting, and his staying at his job provided students, particularly boys, who became his surrogate children.
I didn’t have to get
specific as to what his “deal” was with Quentin. Would he be the boys’ tutor? Where would they live? I left it to the reader to fill in the
blanks, as I did as to what kind of illegal business Quentin was in, and the
questionable circumstances which ended up putting Lucy in prison.
I hope I have explained how
“Sons” developed itself as it was being written. When I started it, I didn’t know how it would
end, and how it would get there. In
fact, along the way, the possibility occurred to me that Mr. Kay, the
storyteller, was a child molester, dating back to his days as a headmaster, and that
was the reason not only for his divorce, but also for his efforts to have the
two boys move in with him. The story,
however, did not go that route. It might
have, though. And Lucy might not have
died in the accident. And Gracie might
have reformed. Either one could have
ended up moving in with him and the boys.
Or perhaps both of them. There
are a lot of directions in which any story can go and it is the job of the
writer to guide it and fill in the details, making all of the important
decisions when choices present themselves.
I hope this helps you in writing your entry in our short story contest.
JL
Two Political Parables
Republican View - A man walking down the street felt a hand reaching into his back pocket
attempting to take his wallet. Pulling a
gun from his belt, he turned on the pickpocket who screamed out, “Please don’t
shoot me. Put the gun down and we can
talk about how much of what’s in the wallet you can keep!”
Democratic View - A man walks into a room and finds a suicide bomber with his hands on a detonator
attached to a pile of explosives. “Give me your wallet with all of the money in it,” the bomber calls out or I’ll blow us both up! The man replies, “Just take your hands off of
the detonator and we can talk about exactly how much I will let you have.”
JL
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