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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3910 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Breaking the Skin Graeme Mullen He sits beside the lake, watching two children as they play— Wet hands, the color of river clay, splash the water furiously; their heads bob, lightly, like floating seeds. One bends to grab a stake of driftwood. His friend shadows him, they eye each other with flint stares, weapons poised, feet shifting back and forth with fighter’s sway, until smiles break in unison, and the hardness falls away. He watches them run down the beach, now stabbing at ghost vampires, who can turn invisible at will. Their shadows recede behind the big dunes, and they are gone. He walks down to the edge of the lake— The water there is lined with muck, like sleep around a groggy eye, and a clear cold beyond that, the color of pounded glass. He wants to touch it, but, something about the color, maybe just this light? He tosses a pebble, as a test. It breaks the surface with a splash and bores down until it hits the bed, clouding up the water with a plume of silt. As the brown swirls, his mind wanders back to a phone conversation, the one he had with his brother a week before, from a payphone in town. They talked politics for a half hour, cargoing words across the ocean on distance fees he couldn’t afford, trying to poke holes in things like poverty and war, and cancer. He wonders when they’ll talk again, scoops up two pebbles in his right hand. He snaps his wrist hard, and the stones land far apart on the water, throwing out smooth ripples, concentric circles that grow out like radar, and in the middle of the space, where their swells meet, the water rises up high, catches a sliver of sunlight and shines a hot white, like the glint of new coins. |
