ISSUE NO. 2 SHORTLIST WINNERS

THE NEW WIDOW

She awoke, her husband's empty space on the bed a bitter reminder of their dispute in the night. In the kitchen, the liquor cabinet hung ajar, the bottles inside knocked carelessly over. She looked out a window, and the air rang with anguish as the new widow saw the overturned tractor outside.

--Mark Walsh, Santa Cruz, CA

DELIVERY

One quarter mile each way, six days a week, she walks to the mailbox. Following her, along the gravel road, a dog, large, brindled, and old. The postal service wants to deliver mail one less day each week. She wonders what she will do on the day of no delivery. The dog just follows behind her.

--Dana Hoeschen, Pepin, WI

SMILEY FACED OBSESSION

Coffee. Login. Status Available. Six smiley faces. No KPM. Laundry, dog poo, errands, pick up kids. Move laptop to counter. View contacts. No KPM. Prep dinner. Hide screen. Hot bath. Chenille robe. Unhide screen. Refresh. KPM…There you are! Touch his initials. Status Invisible. Shut down. Goodnight.

--Kathleen Parvizi, Scotts Valley, CA

SHOPPING

Mortuary called. Mom's ready for pick-up. He hands me a shopping bag and I write a check. Outside the sun is bright, the sidewalk slick from a recent rain. I slip, fall, reach out to take hold of the cardboard box before it gets damp. Shopping was my mother's favorite pastime. We used to argue a lot.

--Manjula Stokes, Santa Cruz, CA

NIGHTMARE

Last night I dreamed I ate a giant marshmallow. When I woke up, the pillow was gone.

--Keith Fisher, Marina del Rey, CA

Pick of the Week Archive - May 2010

May 7

FUTBOL

She watched the men hassle the American whose painted toenails were dirty from the street. "Leave her alone." Bhai let her burka fly open. Beneath it, flowered pajamas and slippers. She kicked a coconut, a cap. All she wanted to do was play futbol. "Either wear a burka, or don't," one man yelled.

--Manjula Stokes, Santa Cruz, CA

May 14

IN TRUST

He fingered the parcel in his waist pocket, waiting her out. Something about the neighbor cat, and the tea kettle, drew her away like a siren. He eased open the bureau and nestled the paper package in folds of linen, grunting bemusement at her shouted story. He heard cups clinking faintly and smiled.

--Jeff Eberly, Los Angeles, CA

May 21

A MATCHBOOK MEMOIR

The casino lighting was unkind. I tore a single match to light the cigarette that dangled from her mouth. Tiny words inside the matchbook cover caught my eye, and stayed with me as we stumbled inside her musty trailer. The story of a lonely man revealed in a matchbook. I hate people who smoke.

--Kathleen Parvizi, Scotts Valley CA

May 28

YOUNG ST.

He found her address on the internet, bought a road atlas and drove. In Utah, he got a haircut--likely his worst ever--and asked where Young St. was. Back then, they agreed to have it. When she came out slow, he up and ran. Now, a mile more, the sign says ROAD CLOSED. How much snow buries that road?

--Decker Marshall, Charlottesville, VA

ISSUE NO. 1 AUTHOR BRUCE WILLEY RESPONDS

Like all good and not-so-good works of literary fiction, I wrote “To Light a Cigarette” on a whim and a prayer. Though I’ve long given up praying (or smoking for that matter), I still hold tightly to whim. It’s how I make sense of mine (and yours—mostly yours, come to think of it) existence on this fine but short term on earth. So when the call went out for submissions to Matchbook Story, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t take my contribution very seriously. I merely wanted the editor, Mr. Kyle Petersen, to know that I’d clicked on his website. A hello of sorts and a simple validation of his project rolled into one friendly little story. I’d heard nothing of this project before. In fact, brilliant and obvious as the idea of printing a lit journal on a matchbook is, I thought he was just passing on a link despite the fact that I’d known the editor to possess routine brilliance over fireside chats and his own work.

As I may have mentioned nervously at the Poet & Patriot reading, I’m a bona fide gas bag. I like to write long, stretch-and-pull thick paragraphs onto the page at my own peril. My favorite, albeit rare, words out of an editor’s mouth are, “take as many words as needed to get the story told.” Short form fiction, flash fiction, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t really appeal to me. Too many years spent writing music and events page blurbs for the Good Times and Metro Santa Cruz make short shorts seem a bit sexy. Since a lot of people seem to think writing is a craft, I might as well go out on a limb and use a metaphor: I have far more patience for making rough-hewn tables than cute little jewelry boxes, but not enough patience for a whole house. Journalism and long-form non-fiction seems to fit my wandering head and feet.

So I banged out a 300-word story about two fellows on a backpacking trip who lose a lighter while suffering in the throes of a nicotine fit. Sort of an updated version of London’s “To Light a Fire” without the wolves, dogsleds, or the Yukon. I set the story somewhere in the backcountry of the High Sierra near my hometown of Bishop.

But to my dismay, I realized I’d not read the instructions carefully enough. I felt like I was putting together a cheap piece of Ikea furniture where you get to the end missing some Swedish screws and Nordic do-dads. Oh, 300 characters. Bastards. Even 200 words into it I’d begun to wonder what kind of matches Mr. Petersen intended on using. Those long fireplace matches for the pyrophobic? I also knew the editor as a cheap but generous man; wooden matches and a big box wouldn’t fit his budget-minded literary project.

So, with a chopping axe worthy of my amateur woodsmen characters, I cut the story down to size, liberating adjectives, nouns, and verbs from captivity in one fell swooping thud and… submitted it.

When Mr. Petersen informed me a few weeks later that my submission was being considered for publication, my first thought was pity. I figured he’d gotten two or three submissions total, one of which must have been about vampires, the other a sci-fi tale concerning mutating viruses—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mine wasn’t better, it just fit the theme of a matchbook with its underhanded critique of modern technology—the lost and wet lighter. Petersen, after all, is a manual typewriter man; plop him down somewhere between 1949 and 1962, and he wouldn’t know he’d gone back in time. Admittedly, I was playing to the editor’s aesthetics (and mine, too, since we probably share a commonality in that department minus the typers). But, again, I was only to sending off a simple missive to demonstrate that I care.

That’s the back story on the story, all of which is a bit absurd given this amount of words to write about a story that has so few. But the editor wanted me to respond, in part, to his thoughtful, dare I say, elongated, analysis. He was thoroughly schooled in the mid-nineties lit crit craze of signs & signifiers, and he knows his way around a deconstruction site. And unlike any lit journal I’ve ever heard of, he’s actually paying me $25 to write a response to his careful, erudite theory, so I’d better earn my keep.

Mr. Petersen is mostly right on, though I didn’t give the story nearly the same thought as he did. It makes me blush to think he spent so many brain cells on it while pumping his fingers around words like “metafiction” and the like. Let’s just say having your story torn limb from limb then put back together again is a rare reward. It makes the writing life seem worth it for a few days more.

A story containing only 300 characters forces the reader to fill in a lot of narrative gaps. Big, canyon-like holes make the reader a participant in the process, and what isn’t said explicitly in the story (absence vs. presence) becomes more important than what is said. I guess the trick to writing this damn short is to anticipate the reader’s imagination and just nudge them in the right direction with a few precious details and a tad bit of mumbling narrative so they don’t get completely lost. This means, without sounding trite (but still managing to do so anyway), that the miniscule short story is and has to be wholly open to interpretation. For that, Mr. Petersen is well within his lofty bounds.

But I do have one beef to air with his otherwise astute interpretation, and that concerns not whether mine is a story or not, but the narrative itself. Mr. Petersen says he thinks the characters quit smoking. That’s wishful thinking. This would be, in essence, a happy ending given that cigarettes slowly strangle you to death. The very reason the characters try to quit their habit in the wilderness is because they don’t possess enough willpower to do it in the lowlands with handy access to their addiction. And there’s the matter of the last cigarette that is left defiantly and temptingly un-smoked. As any smoker knows, the lack of atonement in the ritualistic last smoke means he can postpone quitting until the conditions are more perfect—or failing that, it provides another excuse to go on smoking another day. You can’t say goodbye to a bad habit until you’re allowed to wave.

Instead, I imagine they hightail it out of the woods. Not only do they buy another pack, but a lighter, too. And as one of them pays the cashier, the other has the foresight and wisdom to say, “Do you think I could get some matches?”

Yes, this is likely what happens. But that’s not much of a story, is it?

Pick of the Week Archive - April 2010

March 26

DELIVERY

One quarter mile each way, six days a week, she walks to the mailbox. Following her, along the gravel road, a dog, large, brindled, and old. The postal service wants to deliver mail one less day each week. She wonders what she will do on the day of no delivery. The dog just follows behind her.

--Dana Hoeschen, Pepin, WI

April 2

FOR MY BROTHER

You started clenched at the far end of the hall and landed with your head through the plate-glass window on the bedroom door. A fussy silence followed. The babies choked on their hush. You said: "I'm gonna be dead meat." What was it that set you down that sticky runway, a wanted and furious arrow?

--Melina Rutter, Spokane WA

April 9

SMILEY FACED OBSESSION

Coffee. Login. Status Available. Six smiley faces. No KPM. Laundry, dog poo, errands, pick up kids. Move laptop to counter. View contacts. No KPM. Prep dinner. Hide screen. Hot bath. Chenille robe. Unhide screen. Refresh. KPM…There you are! Touch his initials. Status Invisible. Shut down. Goodnight.

--Kathleen Parvizi, Scotts Valley, CA

April 16

SHOPPING

Mortuary called. Mom's ready for pick-up. He hands me a shopping bag and I write a check. Outside the sun is bright, the sidewalk slick from a recent rain. I slip, fall, reach out to take hold of the cardboard box before it gets damp. Shopping was my mother's favorite pastime. We used to argue a lot.

--Manjula Stokes, Santa Cruz, CA

April 23

NIGHTMARE

Last night I dreamed I ate a giant marshmallow. When I woke up, the pillow was gone.

--Keith Fisher, Marina del Rey, CA

April 30

THE NEW WIDOW

She awoke, her husband's empty space on the bed a bitter reminder of their dispute in the night. In the kitchen, the liquor cabinet hung ajar, the bottles inside knocked carelessly over. She looked out a window, and the air rang with anguish as the new widow saw the overturned tractor outside.

--Mark Walsh, Santa Cruz, CA

COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS

The following matchbook stories were written collectively (three words per person) at the Issue No. 1 release party. What more can be said? They speak for themselves.

__________

So then Jake pointed to the dart board and threw up on his supposed date, only to realize she had fallen upon someone elses. Dizzy and confused, she slid over: thud. The smell oozed across the felt. I only wished she could play along with my stoic act and pull some party ass with cue stick and 8 ball.

__________

In your britches wheat scratches your nuts like a fiery STD. What have we got here? A pocket full of bread crumbs? Feed the birds into long life and on-again-off-again pleasantries filter through urinalysis. Dirtier than suspected, the birds crawl beneath wet urinals, kneading my doughnuts into crumbs.

__________

One rainy day started early when Billy Jean pulled on her dog's leash. Lucy's tail wagged hard, knocking loose a filling in the skull's mouth. How dare you! College was just lost without a trace! Wet against my cheek were the gums and tongues of lands lost. Lucy knew how much her father loved the sand tears.

__________

Darth Vader's shoes are genuine tonton. You wouldn't know they're from Payless. His dashing mind is lost in his choice of armor and words: a man-machine. What matters is his sword. And his pantaloons, his mother said. "Fuck pantaloons! Give me a light saber." He quickly grabbed his glow stick and screamed.

__________

The box opened with a red fox monologue about your silky scarf covered in money. I couldn't afford anything else. Emotionally, I'm broke. Intellectually, I'm rich. Physically, I rock, drinking only beer. Under the scarf: Who me now? Scram fox, scram! Eat a clam. My spirit animal? Needs to be a sea cucumber.

__________

God My Feet

Please allow me another house plant. My jade died. What's the point? Sometimes you just can't do it!!! I want a puppy instead. Plants require music and sweet nothings. God my feet. Plant my orchid, it needs nourishment. God my feet. Fungus grows incessantly. Fills my house. Who needs a bunion licker anyway?

__________

"What the fuck," was what came in through the palindromic sigh-sound echoing down the elevator shaft. Ellen? Should I jump? "Only if you have the balls." Live, love, laugh, and take a big shit. Ah sweet relief. He decided that love is the answer to suicidal crap. Uber balls! He climbed up and pushed her off! Ah...

__________

A bird once stood amongst bears, twittered in the treetops, unfettered, lost in revelry. The peacock presents -wasted on reds, shitty weed- and then it realized time was passing too slowly. Time for hyperdrive over the freeway and got stopped. Superbowl halftime show distracts me from myself during it all.

__________

They stopped by, wishing they hadn't. Blood dripped down her unwilling thigh. Where are my eyeshades, she mumbled, squinting. They're all the way down the street. What should we clean up first? She started looking for the first mess they started. But of course she's feeling fresh.

__________

Sunday Morn

Eventually, glass drinks drinker omnivorously with hands, feet, and long straws, drawn from deep pools, and end up floating weightlessly down the shadow boxin'. What the fuck? Making less progress, I fell over. Into the depths, darkness enveloped me, cold, vacant, pearlescent, streaming: a song. Do this in memory of me.

Matchbook Story ISSUE NO. 1

TO LIGHT A CIGARETTE

They watch the BIC swirl down the icy creek, a stab of yellow bobbing with luminous truth. "Matches?" Sam asks, last farewell cigarette dangling, ready. Holt digs his pockets. "No." Plan was to wrestle nic demons in the wilderness like Jesus. "How many miles back that liquor store?"

--Bruce Willey, Big Pine, CA

________________________________________________

The first thing that struck me about Bruce's story was that it was complete. It contained all the elements of conventional narrative. We have, in the very first sentence, the essentials of exposition: the characters, setting, and foreshadowing of conflict: the icy creek tells you that the characters are outside in the wilderness; and the BIC lighter swirling down the icy creek warns you that the characters have just lost something essential to being in the wilderness, namely fire, warmth. Next, we have rising action, or the moment at which the protagonist's internal conflict is introduced and complicated by secondary, external conflicts. The internal conflict here is the paradox of addiction, smoking a last farewell cigarette in order to stop smoking, and Bruce deftly captures this state of limbo with the juxtaposed words, "dangling, ready." Soon after, in traditional narrative sequence, we have the climax--"No."--which marks the turning point for the protagonist. Sam's dilemma has gone from bad to worse: he (or she) is stuck in the suspended animation of quitting, of not yet having had his last cigarette. The falling action, or the moment where the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist unravels, is likewise suspended in the very first word of the next sentence, "Plan." The plan "was to wrestle nic demons in the wilderness like Jesus," and this plan is still possible if Sam foregoes his pre- plan to smoke a last farewell cigarette. But the denouement, or conclusion, renders tragedy. When Sam asks, "How many miles back that liquor store?" he falls to his antagonist, pulled by his addiction in the opposite direction of where he planned to quit smoking, indeed, desiring to return to the supply store of his very dilemma. This last line--the way it echoes hauntingly back into the story and then reverberates outwardly into Sam's near future--makes this story a story in its ability to continue off the page as well as to describe the universal condition of all aspiring quitters.

Of course, for those of you here already familiar with the conventions of narrative, this is only so much Creative Writing 101. But Bruce has written more than a complete story, which is why his was chosen for the inaugural issue. At the risk of paying myself a backdoor compliment, I can think of no better story to print for the first issue of Matchbook Story than a story which calls the whole enterprise into question. Whether he knows it or not, or whether he'll cop to it, Bruce has written a metafiction--a story about writing stories--which is signaled here by the self-referential title, To Light a Cigarette, headlining, mind you, a story intended for the inside a matchbook. What are matches for? To light a cigarette, answered most literally. But here, matches are also literally for telling a story. So, answering the question again, What are matches for? and answering, To tell a story, Willey's title makes cigarette smoking synonymous with short story writing. The protagonist, who can now be thought of as a writer (maybe not Willey himself, but his bio did mention something about being a mountaineer), enters the wilderness to kick his cigarette habit. What is the wilderness? The wilderness is this new, unexplored form--a story in 300 characters--and like the backpacker-protagonist required by the wilderness to reduce his everyday needs into the confines of a pack, the writer, too, is required by this new form to write a short story in less space. The protagonist's addiction to cigarettes is the writer's addiction to average short story length. The loss of the BIC lighter is the loss of technology--call it the laptop, perhaps; or built-in spell check--with which to write, or light, this story. The absence of matches is the absolute inability to light the cigarette, or to enjoy the civilized leisure of short story writing. As the cigarette is the delivery mechanism of pleasure-producing nicotine, the story is the delivery mechanism of pleasure-producing truth, of that yes! moment driven by our desire to find out, unveil, affirm, or to know. The plan, then, to wrestle nic demons in the wilderness like Jesus, is the writer's plan to wrestle a moment of truth out of this new, very short form, to see if he can go without the thing that produced pleasure before and still come away happy. But then the protagonist-writer asks, "How far back that liquor store?," doubting his ability to write a successful story in the 300-character wilderness, and, in turn, asking to retreat to the modern convenience stores of conventional short story writing. The story ends there--we don't actually see Sam and Holt head back to town or further up the trail--and this is as it should be. If, in the end, Sam marched confidently into the wilderness without his crutch, the writer would be claiming his success at this new form, cigarette/short story be damned! If, on the other hand, Sam tucked tail for the shelter of civilization, the writer would be indicating his failure to enter the wilderness. But we see neither and, so, we get to decide. I, for one, think Sam hiked on and kicked the habit. Indeed, I believe Willey has blazed a trail.

Matchbook Story - Issue No. 1 Shortlist

Foundations

How could he have known that as a drugged up satanic metalhead, killing & burying a cat in a building site one night so long ago with friends he’s since lost track of, that now, after 13 years as a financial advisor, to give his kids more room, he would be buying the house that stood on its grave.

--Julian Baker, London, UK

__________

Hiking Out of South Feather

At Post Creek we 3 shouldered our boats and climbed out. The others eased downstream 1 mile and got a night in the starlight suite with inflated pillows, maybe a space blanket. Lessons of the day: don't be the leader of the clown show, and know when to thumb a ride with bear hunters from Willows.

--Daren Commons, Santa Cruz, CA

__________

Dr. Strangelust and Mr. Love

My neighbor's cat is passed out on the ugly, orange couch my ex-girlfriend suggested I buy for $25. (Reduced to $20, after I bargained with the guy at the thrift store.) My neighbor's cat got into a patch of burrs the other day. I picked each burr out, one by one, while he purred and loved me.

--Sam Edmonds, Spokane, WA

__________

Central Locale

They left me at the place of impact. With the electrons swirling around the center, she yelled back "Must you always be so still when we crash."

--Fish Fishtofferson, Alameda, CA

__________

For Your Grandmother

Your grandmother does not like Calvino. She is letting you know this right now. “You’ve read Calvino?” you ask, frankly amazed. She has. In fact, unbeknownst to you, she started reading your copy while you were sitting right there at the kitchen table, line editing a story.

--Megan Fitzgerald, Santa Cruz, CA
__________

Soon You Lose Touch With Both

His beautiful wife killed the year before in SUV rollover, your friend says he's doing all right, but he can't relax. Talking to your wife, a dark fresh young Colombiana, your friend gives her his full attention. Your wife's friend is put off, she has enough problems with her boyfriend. She turns.

--Sesshu Foster, Alhambra, CA

__________

The Last Cigarette

As he finally caught a first dim glimpse of the cave's fabled wonders, Roger thought he'd earned a smoke for his travails. As he greedily put a cigarette to his lips, he tried to recall Evans' warning about the place. Too late, he realized it might have had something to do with matches.

--Seana Graham, Santa Cruz, CA

__________

Here's t' You

That bottle told the cops. I said she’d be back, but they’d found the body and then me, drinking her bubbly. What I’d shot was shot already, though, before the gun, back when she said, “Y’re dead’n’gone f’ me” and raised a fluted glass with that sharp-ass smile beneath the eyes I’d fallen into once.

--T.C. Marshall, Felton, CA

__________

Train Tracks

I could kill that bloody bird. I imagined tying it up and leaving it by the cat flap just like a villain trussing up a heroine and leaving her on the train tracks. When I returned I found it in three neat pieces. I stared at the cat flap. I was standing by the tracks. There was blood on my hands.

--Richard Ross, San Francisco, CA

__________

Hold On

Everyone has to hold on to something during the apocalypse. We need it, to keep us human. We have lost so much, scattered across the land. And why not? There are so many parts to choose from.

--Katie Sparrow, Santa Cruz, CA