One Huge Step to New York

   I guess this is one of those milestones you remember for the rest of your life. Something you look back on and say "that's what led to it all."
  Back in late December 2011, I submitted fifteen or so of my works to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the longest running youth art and writing awards in America. At the time, I obviously had a thought in my mind that I could win, but generally thought, considering that the awards are of such magnitude, there was no way I could win anything.
  Shut up, Feo's intuition.
  Late January of this year, Scholastic's Facebook page posted up that the Regional Awards had been announced. I decided to check out the page to see if I was a regional winner. Much to my surprise (I hyperventilated), I'd won a Regional Gold Key, Silver Key, and Honourable Mention. I had cake for dinner that night. The Gold Key meant that my writing was going to be judged on a National level, in New York. But obviously my writing wouldn't go that far?
  Shut the hell up, Feo's intuition.
  The Gold Key winning work that had been sent to be judged at a National Level won, in mid-March, won a National Silver Medal. Out of 200,000 submissions, I was one of the 1,500 to win a national award. And this Silver Medal is my ticket to Carnegie Hall, New York.
  So yes, my writing has just earned me a seat at an awards ceremony in Carnegie Hall this June. And, believe it or not, the National Silver Award is one of my earlier blog posts!
  Thanks to all the people who have supported me, support, and hopefully will continue to support me in my writing. It means a lot, and look where it's led me. Love you!
  I heard you wanted to read the award-winning works. No problem! That can be arranged.

Some People Can't See The Future

Humour

National Silver Medal

Regional Gold Key

  My English teacher seems to have a view on innovative artwork quite different from my own. What other explanation is there to explain his reaction to the all-encompassing beauty of my latest work?

  So the other day we were preparing for our PATs in class, which are, in essence, tests to see how low the IQ of my province is that year. One of the things we're tested on is business letter writing. The old exam papers we were using to prepare for that aspect gave this topic: your name is Kim Rogers, and you must write a letter to this and that person at your local newspaper about how you lost your pet, and subsequently found it. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! Apparently, your pet was found by the local animal shelter! So now you have some sort of unhealthy obsession with preaching the word of 'animal shelter' to the masses. Oh, and the shelter also offered (and there was strange emphasis on this) spaying and neutering services.

  I wrote the letter, and after class, read it to some people. It was met with support. A musical adaptation was discussed. The next day, it turned out we had to hand in the letter. Uh-oh. With a beaming smile on my face, I handed in the paper as my classmates laughed knowingly.

  Fifteen minutes before the end of class, my teacher stands up, walks to my desk, and throws the paper on it.

  "Next time, write something."

  A silence hung in the room.

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "You could never actually send that. What was that?"

  "Weren't we supposed to concentrate on business letter form and not on content?'

  "But you didn't learn anything! It's some sort of bad joke!"

  I seriously don't know what I was supposed to learn. I learned how to address a letter - what else do I have to prove?

  I paused for a moment, "should I rewrite it?"

  "If you want any participation marks, then yes."

  And with a sigh, I rewrote the whole thing. In seven minutes. I walked to his desk and gave it to him.

After a minute or so, he comes back to my desk and hands me the paper.

  "Why couldn't you just do exactly that...the first time?

  "I chose not to."

  This is what he didn't like:

PO Box 701

Mikmat AB T75 4D6

Happy Day, 1960

Lesley Thompson, Editor

The Wentworth News

8974 Elm Avenue

Larkville AB T8M 4Q4

Dear Professor Thompson:

Several days ago, my donkey escaped my care. I discovered that it had been spayed, neutered, and almost adopted at my local animal shelter. Luckily, the person adopting Grigorovski, my donkey, realized just in time that it wasn't, in fact, a South African wiener dog. Thus, I have been happily reunited with with a now spayed, neutered, and slightly effeminate Grigorovski.

Once Grigorovski had been returned to his attic at home, I went to learn more about the animal shelter. It turns out that the Holy Mother of Keanu Reeves Animal Shelter is a completely volunteer-run organisation that provides emergency animal care, lost pet services, and an adoption program. I would be a volunteer too, but my extreme killer bee-keeping schedule keeps me from doing so. That is why I write to you, Professor Lesley Thompson: the Holy Mother of Keanu Reeves Animal Shelter is in desperate need of volunteers. I believe that if you publish even a small article on the subject, a team of willing spayers and medical amateurs will show up standing on the doorstep of the shelter. That would seriously help the likes of Grigorovski and me.

Peace,

Kimshafandinsterisko (Kim) Rogers.

  The moral of the story is that if you're going to spend 15 minutes doing what you like to do, be able to do what everyone else wants you to do in 7 minutes. I got full marks.

  I still think the one above is far superior.

The Chair and The Fire

Short Story

Regional Silver Medal

(Final Version)

An amber sunset splashed across the fields of dying grass. Shades of light prairie blue broke through the clouds that rested on another day’s tired horizon. Gavyn Aubade’s dark grey car passed the streaking divider lines of the highway. On the side of the road, powerlines rolled in an up-and-down motion as the vehicle accelerated, not a shadow stopping the gold from enveloping it.

Gavyn Aubade had worked as Benjamin Verdigris’ social worker for 3 months. Verdigris generally had a clear enough head, but it would cloud at moments, rendering him somewhat helpless. And so Gavyn would drive for some hour and a half every weekend to make sure everything was fine: gas was off, car not running in the garage, stuff like that.

The car slowed as it passed a small house several dozen meters off the road. Gavyn’s hands crossed as he pulled the car into a 90 degree turn. The suspension compensated for the gravel road.

Pebbles scattered and made a noise that sounded like a cross between autumn leaves cracking and fire being blown back to life as the car stopped near the house. The door opened and a pale white sneaker swung out, followed by another, followed by a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans, followed finally by a plain olive t-shirt. Then Mr. Aubade’s fairly young face emerged, a thin beard wrapped around his chin. His pale blue eyes squinted in the orange glow. He pushed the door shut and cracked on the gravel to the wooden porch. Gavyn knocked on the door, a fading white slowly turning to grey - a silence. He rapped with the sharps of his knuckles - another silence.

Stepping off the porch, Gavyn walked over to the side of the house dedicated to the garage and peered through a muted window. Benjamin’s pick-up was still inside. Then Benjamin definitely had to be in the house. There wasn’t another place to go for miles. He returned to the porch and tried the handle. The door gave with a squeak.

The sunset illuminated the floating dust and cast shadows haphazardly around the main room of the one-story house. A draft sweeped in from the back. As he stepped through the room, Gavyn heard a glassy snap at his feet. He looked down to find, in the evening shadow of a couch, a broken wine bottle. A roan liquid was soaked into the surrounding carpet. This surprised him, as Benjamin had always insisted that he hadn’t drunk a drop in 10 years. Gavyn crouched and brought his head closer to get a better view of the peeling wine-stained label: Bordeaux-1974. He did some arithmetic in his head-Benjamin must’ve been in his mid-twenties at the time. He had been saving the bottle for something.

He looked up from the ruins of the bottle to see the source of the draft at the end of a hallway: the sliding glass door in the back room was completely open. Past the door was nothing but fields as far as the eye could see.

Gavyn stepped through the steel door-frame and looked out at the burning horizon. Something at the bottom of his field of view caught his attention. There, coming straight from the door-frame, were footsteps and two strange, thin, evenly spaced out marks trailing behind the steps. Gavyn followed their progress into the field with his eyes. He decided to follow the trail.

So he walked, and the sun spilled orange light onto the quietly swaying grass.

So he walked some more, and the bottom tip of the sun began to fall through the horizon.

So he walked more still, and the brightest stars of the night sky slowly began to appear.

So his feet began to ache, and a dark blue glow crawled down from the top of the sky to the edge of the earth, leaving behind blackness and evermore stars.

Gavyn checked his watch; he’d been walking for more than an hour. He started to turn to leave and call the police when he saw a hazy yellow glow in the distance. A plume of black smoke withered from the tiny dot. The steps and trail led to the haze. He halted in his turn and instead walked towards the yellow light.

So he walked, and the glow began to increase in size.

So he walked some more, and the light took on a flickering form. It was a small fire.

So he walked more still and could see a human shape wrapped in the fire’s light.

As he finally approached the fire, and the now clearly visible silhouette of a man sitting on a steel chair, he could hear the snapping of flames.

“I thought,” said Benjamin’s voice, “that you wouldn’t come this far to find me.”

The silhouette gazed down into the fire.

“You never seemed to really care about me as long as the gas was off. Of course, that is your job, so who am I to complain? At least you made sure I didn’t set myself on fire. So I assumed you’d decide I’d disappeared, and would call the police. And then they would find me in the morning with a bullet through my head.”

Still looking at the flames, he raised a hand in which shone a revolver, the fire’s light reflecting in its cold metal. Gavyn, who had, until this point, been standing startled by Benjamin’s voice, took one large step and plucked the revolver from the man’s hand. Benjamin didn’t protest.

“Jesus, Ben! What the hell were you going to do with this?”

“What, with the gun?”

“Yes, with the gun!”

“I was going to take that gun,” the fire flickered in his ageing eyes, “and I was going to put it to the side of my head. And I was going to shoot myself.”

“Why the hell would you do that? Why would you drag a chair out into the middle of nowhere, start a campfire, and shoot yourself?” Gavyn shouted as he pocketed the revolver.

Benjamin stood up and motioned towards the chair.

“Here, sit down.”

“Ben-”

“Sit down,” said Benjamin with a subtle force that Gavyn had not heard before. He thought it wise to abide, and so he sat.

Benjamin stood with his back to Gavyn and the fire, his hands in his pockets.

“You’ve seen all those pins and medals on the bookcase beside the T.V. in the house, right?”

Gavyn vaguely remembered having passed his glance over them once.

“Yes. Of course.”

“I got those for killing people. I got those when I served in Vietnam. I was part of one of the few Canadian deployments sent there to enforce the Paris Peace Accords.

“I’ve counted the number of lives I’ve taken. Four when our camp was ambushed by North Vietnamese troops. That’s when I got most of those medals. And then, in the last days that I was in Vietnam, we were performing a search-and-destroy on a small stronghold in a village held by the North. When we got to the centre of the village, there was a small gun nest armed by one man. My squad and I were pinned. I took a risk and peeked out from behind the building separating us from the nest. I got a good look as to where the gun was before the man started pinning us down again. After half a minute the racket stopped, so I stuck head out, took one clean shot, and that was the end of it.”

Benjamin made a noise; he was crying. He cupped his face in his hands.

“Except that wasn’t the end of it. When we looked into the gun nest, there was a dead boy on the ground, no older than ten years old, a bullet through his left eye. I don’t know, or really care, why they left a little boy to man the nest, but they did. And I shot that kid clear through the head… I still see his bloody little face every night. And now, after all these years, I can see that his life was definitely worth ten of mine. I took away a future, and no man should have the power to do that. So I decided to give at least part of the life he deserved back.

“I tried to drink a good-bye glass of wine, but I couldn’t even see straight. The goddamn thing slipped and fell. Then I dragged the chair here and lit a fire. I didn’t want to die pathetically. I wanted them to find me staring into the embers of a fire. It would be majestic, like something out of a movie, something special. So I sat down in that chair And I put the gun to my head and tried to pull the trigger.”

Benjamin was sobbing.

“But I couldn’t, because I’m a coward. I’m a fucking coward who shoots babies through their eyes.”

He stood, the tears streaming silently down his face. They shone in the flames’ gold. Benjamin fell to his knees and let out a single, tearful roar. He looked up, breathing heavily, at the star-filled black sky from in-between his fingers.

“I see him every night. Whenever I close my eyes, I see his beautiful, bloody, ruined face.”

Gavyn said nothing. He stared into the fire. His eyes said nothing.

They sat in silence for hours. They sat until the sun started to rise through the blades of grass. Still looking into the ashes of the fire, Gavyn took a deep breath.

“Let’s go?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” said Benjamin, standing up.

And so the two men walked through the field of dying grass, Gavyn Aubade dragging a chair, and Benjamin Verdigris looking down, wondering how much the Bordeaux had been worth.

Agave Attenuata

Poetry Compilation

Regional Honourable Mention

Dark Bare Feet

(Requiem for Japan)

From the ruins of some city

Cries of pain and words of pity

Rise from the fallen blocks of stone.

Rubble’s stained with shades of roan.

God, let them out of there!

This sort of suffering is more than rare.

People’ve been swept away,

Their flesh is floating in the spray.

Something’s crying with a pain,

A man, a woman, someone insane?

A cry so tender, so softly sweet,

The child cries on dark bare feet

Not men and women of courage steel,

Not slow-motion movie reels.

No, they will not save this land-

That is in the child’s hands.

It’s seen so much

It’s known so little

It cries on dark bare feet.

Hard Rain

Icarus’ burden hung in the sky,

The wind shifted blades of evergreen grass.

It made in between them sort of a sigh,

And up in the air not a cloud shifted by.

A bird turned its small, beady glass eye,

And looked through the blades of evergreen grass,

And saw what’d interest some passerby.

But not our small bird-she flew with a cry.

What was this quaint, uninteresting sight

That’d interest someone passing by?

The wind shifted quietly sous the sun’s light,

And sighed through the cracks of this large grey sight.

Silver steel girders tore through the frame,

Quite like a web suspended in air.

Through it was visible a faded blue crane,

The paint peeling off from years of hard rain.

Once there were people of all sort and size

Who toiled away in the cavernous cube,

Fed slowly and surely full paper-thin lies.

Everyone knew, but no one would rise.

And then apart it all fell in a flash,

Iodine tablets lay in the grass.

Drifts of black smoke rose from the ash,

Achievements reduced to mere, useless trash.

But a burning hot sphere of hydrogen gas,

Hung in the bright, unmoving blue sky.

And the building sat now with all of its mass

As the wind shifted slightly through the evergreen grass.

Feo P-S.