Meet the Winner

The second annual Stranger/Rendezvous Reading Series Minor Writing Contest revealed the hairless underbelly of Seattle's pubescent writing scene. There were stories about friendship, and runaways, and girlfriends who turn into solid gold. There was a treatise to the art of the end-zone dance. There was a feminist Adam and Eve. Judging from the entries, Seattle minors are often skewed, sometimes brilliant, and uniformly incapable of manipulating a spell checker. They are watching you, and they are busily writing down their thoughts. Keep an eye on the future.

Here we present the winning entry--remarkable for its blend of heart-wrenching irony and poetic insight. Congratulations to Rachel Eggers (age 20), whose winning entry, "Memoirs of a Sweet Tooth, Pt. 1" enchanted our panel of judges: Traci Vogel, Rachel Kessler, Paula Gilovich, and Novella Carpenter. When we informed Rachel that she'd won the contest, she asked, "Is this some cruel joke?" Like many 20-year-old fiction writers, Rachel is extremely shy, and refused to have her picture taken.

Congratulations are also in order for our runners-up: Allison Mitchell Wright (age 16), for her story "I Was So Completely Bummed!"; Anna Lawson (age 17) for her story "That Girl Got Me Thinking"; Erica Nelson (age 19) for her story "Do the Right Thing"; and Bart Mallon (age 21) for his story "Brown Eyes and Love and Noise." Well done all.'--Traci Vogel

I remember everything, or, what I forgot did not happen. I tried to forget, but something always came back, stronger than the very moment I was living, something that struck me as something that had happened, until I came to the point where I realized that I remembered everything, because everything eventually forced its way into my memory, and if I had forgotten it, which of course I would not know because I had forgotten and therefore could not have a memory of it, well, then that thing had not happened, because if I could not remember it, then it may as well not have. Happened, I mean.

For example, barfing happened. And I remember it. City pools happened, and once there was a rosary for a woman I did not know, the chanting repeated things about Mary. I remember thinking Mary was a great-aunt, on my father's side. This later turned out not to be true. Once, waking in a car in the middle of the stiff night after a long trip, I ate a dead bee from the back of the car, the place where the speakers are, thinking it was a piece of candy from earlier. It wasn't. I ran into the house the back way, up the deck stairs, spluttering flakes of bee carcass from my mouth as I went, wrenched the slide door open, and drank orange juice till it ran down my chin, wearing a pained expression throughout, not making a sound. This happened. I remember it. I remember painting on my father's turntable with whiteout. Beef stroganoff happened. Banana bread happened. I remember falling out of my dad's MG, a block from my house, and wordlessly limping back home with skinned legs, whimpering slightly, my dad yelling at me confusedly, what was I doing; I remember needing only my stoop, needing only to go home and sit on the front steps. He caught up with me there; it happened that way, I remember. There is much more I remember. As I said, barfing happened. I remember that, though I tried to forget. Mom was gone by this time. She didn't die or anything; I just mean she didn't live there anymore. But she was supposed to come over sometimes. The night of barfing was one of those nights. My dad worked 24-hour shifts. He had to leave in the morning, which was fine because we had school. In the afternoon it was okay, too, because it was light and all we did was run around and play anyway. But the night, of course that's different; I mean, she should have been there by the time it was dark. So there we were, my brother Nathan and I. We sat on the couch, which was against the window that faced the front of the house. We watched shows taped from television; Pee-wee Herman, the roadrunner and the coyote. Our knobby legs went sprawled out, legs and feet brown and dusty from the dirt lawn where my brother and his friends made streets for their cars and Tonka trucks, never speaking, just making grunting noises. Nathan and I were rough; we laughed loudly, with mouths wide open. Only the living room was lit. Behind our heads was the large, rectangular window. To anyone passing by, walking along the pavement because there was no sidewalk, there was the same tableau playing out across the front window of every home on the block: a light in the living room, the backs of heads, the intermittent flashes of blue light.

Nathan got an idea. Dad bought us a box of Twix. It's in the freezer. I padded into the darkened kitchen, my feet sticking slightly to the linoleum floor. I peered into the freezer. The icy mist moaned at me from the gloom, and Nathan procured from the foggy depths the sacred treat: a box of individually wrapped peanut-butter Twix. We gave each other questioning looks, which melted into devilish looks. We returned to the couch, teeth-scouring loot in hand.

Nathan and I had a habit, on the nights that Dad was away all night at work, of keeping late hours, certainly much later than any other child on the block. Perhaps it was to keep each other company. Of course, we could have gone to sleep, but there was something even worse in that. Better to stay up. The act of going to sleep entailed thought, brushing teeth, changing clothes. Then one of us had to turn off the light. The designated person stood at the switch for a beat, then, suddenly, hit the switch and dashed into bed. The jolt of fear about this moment, this standing in darkness before being safely in bed, was illogical. If pressed, neither of us, being past the years of truly and wholeheartedly believing in the monster under the bed, would be able to articulate what, exactly, we were afraid of. Yet my brother and I, when unable to be tucked into bed under the safe, revealing harshness of a 60-watt bulb, and then placed into darkness by the very hand that had just caressed our foreheads, felt somehow, or rather, simply acted on the principle without really thinking about it, that it was better to stay awake, with the comic struggle of the roadrunner and the coyote for company, and allow sleep to grab us unknowingly, so that when we awoke in the morning we would find ourselves awash in mismatched blankets on the couch, blinking confusedly, without the experience of a frightened bedtime behind us. So we sat, laughing like hyenas, devouring like jackals. We were good kids, really; we had just spent too much time riding our bikes along dirt trails where railroad tracks used to be, yelling to make our voices sound funny, and fishing crawdads out of creeks, plucking them from the flowing water and collecting them in red plastic buckets. We didn't know any better. And when it came to the Twix, we didn't know when to stop. We tore off the wrappers without looking, keeping our eyes fixed to the screen. Our eyes had a sheen, a fixedness. Only our mouths moved, breaking down all the elements, the underrated cookie, the sweet chocolate, and the decadent peanut butter. The combination of flavors and textures, which we adored and smacked our mouths in approval of, was bliss. But it didn't last for too long. We should have breathed more; we should have gotten up for a glass of water; we should have paused. But we wanted to be full, to feel full. Eating those treats was a process; it was a continuous action. We didn't think about anything else; the show didn't ask us to think. We fell into a mode, into a trance; consuming felt like action. It was all a rush, and then, in the middle of a laugh, it hit.

I really don't feel so good. Me either. Oh my god, I'm gonna die. Suddenly we were deaf to the show. The noise made it worse; the mute button was pushed. We sat in silent, mutual agony, too ill to moan or complain. We were scared, the way only children could be scared by a stomachache, alone together in our barely lit, creaking house. Our bodies went cold, our faces white, our lips pale. It wasn't a decision, since no words were spoken; it was more of a reaction. We were running, with shuffled legs and clenched teeth, out the door, into the street, toward the brick-red house kitty-corner from ours, the light promising hope for the distressed.

It was the house of a family of zealots. The father was thin and hunched over, with black, greasy hair. The mother was shaped like a soft triangle, with strange, light-brown curls on her forehead, and a pale, glowing face. The child they had was a blond, cherubic boy, whom we sometimes played with, except one time when we were all in the sandbox, I had said, "oh my god," and the mother leaned over the deck, furious, and yelled at me and sent me home. All that forgotten now, the house deathly silent as we took turns leaning over the toilet, the husband sitting on the edge of the tub, rubbing our backs, the mother distressed and stilled.

Our dad came to get us. A phone call had most likely been placed--even in neighborhoods like that, it seemed, numbers were exchanged. In the deep purple glow, the night still resisting the pale blue of morning, we trudged across the street, not saying a word. It seemed like a bad situation. The neighbors would be, more than angry or shocked, saddened. It seemed sad, that the father wouldn't be there, that the kids had been alone all night, that they had eaten candy until they were sick. It seemed strange, that they hadn't been able to throw up together in their own house, their impulse to go for help. Lessons derived from that night weren't like the ones in school; they weren't made clear to us, said aloud like a fable. They weren't even whispered, or thought in our heads. Children take life in by osmosis. The days in dirt, collecting weeds for flowers, the nights spent watching television, making messes of cheap toy collections, the raucous laughter, dirt-covered legs, ratty, bed-shapen hair, big eyes, crawdad collections, the drawings on any surface other than paper, the fights, the bike rides. All these would persist in one unbroken chain of memories, and Nathan and I would eventually be left, grown-up, trying to sort it out, like unraveling a ball of string; remembering that we had spent a night, in pajamas and a coat, barfing in a neighbor's toilet, sensing some future loneliness that, at the moment, we could only guess at.