Santa Fe Community College 2009 AWARDS
STUDENT WRITING COMPETITION
Table of Contents
SFCC Student Writing Competition 2008-2009 Awards

Fiction ….3 Prizewinners

Family Conference by Meg Tuite

Paris Could be Home by Anna Carvlin

Confusion by Iza Bruen

Elizabeth in Iambic Pentameter by Rita Feinstein

Honorable Mentions
Voices by Margaret Wood

Not Quite Human Not Quite Alien by Lysander Cramer

How Tadpole Became Frog by Jill Beyer

Romee the Chocolate Cake Girl by William T. Zawadski

Poetry

Prizewinners Pecos Pueblo by Barbara Robidoux

3144 Jemez Road by Barbara Robidoux

Blood on the Sangres by Barbara Robidoux

39 Memories, Memories by Martin Levy

Kaddish in the Rain by Martin Levy

Sworn Statement by Hector Santana

Team America, Fuck Yeah! by Hector Santana

Autobiography by Lauren Camp …………………………………………………..

Counting by Lauren Camp

One Thread Loops by Lauren Camp

In The Arroyo by Denise Lynch

Honorable Mentions
White Pelicans by Rita Feinstein

Different by Meg Tuite

Nonfiction Essay

Prizewinners A is for (    ) by Rita Feinstein

Family Treasures by Lucas Buck

La Sicología de la NenabyEdelweisAnankePailos

Last Callby Teresa Phelan

Half Empty to Half Fullby Teresa Phelan

Decision by Casey Frank

Honorable Mentions
Heroes by Kevin C. Griego

In a Flash by Ekaterina Gerasimova

Chance of the Opening by Ekaterina Gerasimova

Academic Essay

Prizewinners Different Uses of Religion by Casey Frank

The How-To of a HowTown by David Jack Gleghorn

Safeguards Shake Upby Charles Streeper

Honorable Mention

Vertigo of the Lambs by  Rita Feinstein
Organizers and judges wish to thank all the students who submitted their writing and all the members of the SFCC community who support the program throughout the academic year.

Fiction
Family Conference
by Meg Tuite, Prizewinner

I stare out the picture window at a sky. It spreads up there ordinary as buttered bread on a table; underneath, one block in the neighborhood stares back.The Connollys get into their blue station wagon. No pushing, no fighting, the doors slam shut, then they move off down the street. Mr. Hampton mows his lawn and next door Mrs. Sullivan pulls weeds.
One black fly (Diptera; Muscidae) buzzes up and down the window frame looking for escape, or maybe not. I have a microscope in my room, a pile of dead insects in a cigar box. Moths, spiders, flies, beetles, bees, a few luminous butterflies and one glorious preying mantis that I study with pleasure.

Fact: One fly strip a week every summer guarantees over a hundred slaughtered. I pull a few live ones off with forceps, place them under the scope, and watch them die.
Sweat rolls down the back of Mrs. Sullivan’s legs like packaged sausage thawing. Every day for the last week she’s been out roaming her pasture like a cow, doubled over that same scrawny patch of grass, wrenching up mounds of weed clumps and dumping them into a bag. Now, of course, to the passing observer this might be considered an honorable pas- time for an elderly woman to overstrain herself in the buckling height of the summer, battling to destroy any foreign substance that rears its parasitic head inside the boundaries of her scoured landscape with a thoroughness comparable only to a mother delousing her own child’s scalp.

But I maintain that one must look closer. Carefully scrutinize this domestic scene so bleakly submerged in the commonplace, that it demands much more than the average eye can withstand. If one truly has the ability to persevere, one will discover that the true essence of the person will reveal itself within the sinister monotony of the habitual.

Truth demands, at the very least, a sublimely static eye. Karl von Frisch was one of the masters of this muted singularity, discovering that honeybee workers were transmitting detailed information by dance: both the distance to the source of the food and its direction in relation to the sun were reported to other bees by turning in circles or figure eights. Here was a man, capable of an intensity taken to the point of delirium, that dared to barrel his high-powered vision into the droning regularity of the buzzing swarms and do the only thing that separates the truly mystical from the masses. Absolutely nothing, but wait.

I examine Mrs. Sullivan more closely. I reason, first of all, that a front lawn of humble proportions (I measured her lawn one night by the beacon of a flashlight), twenty feet by twelve feet, must by anyone’s calculations come to the end of its weeds fairly soon. It stands to reason that over a sufficient amount of time spent consistently pulling up clumps, day in and day out, Mrs. Sullivan will one day step out of her house to find nothing but dirt.

Densest patch of weeds: twenty dandelions/square foot x 240 square feet = 4,800 dandelions to be picked.Throw in another 1,000 or so misc. weeds that come up every month-ragweed, goat’s head, etc. Approximate rate of time allowed for scalping each weed-10 seconds for Mrs. Sullivan’s weakest pull. 58,000 seconds can be rounded up to 60,000 seconds to allow for back stretching, wiping of brow and cursing, which calculates to 1,000 minutes or 16 hours, 40 minutes. Round that up to 20 hours to allow for disposing of weeds in a garbage bag, answering of phone, talking to neighbors, thwarting mosquitoes and swearing. Mrs. Sullivan has seven days left to finish the task efficiently if she sweats it out less than three hours a day.This has not been, and I theorize, will never be the case.

The drone honeybees sole function is to mate with the queen, yet as soon as they mate they die.The male genitalia everts out of the abdomen on encountering the queen and the resulting shock kills the male. Drones that do not mate are stung to death by the workers.They are banished from the hive at the onset of winter.

I have been watching for Mrs. Sullivan from my window the last three nights without fail. I contend that long after all the neighbors have sunk deeply into that dead man’s community, snoring and drooling as one, Mrs. Sullivan creeps out in her bathrobe with a flashlight and slides weed clumps back into holes like golf balls. I speculate that Mrs. Sullivan keeps herself occupied at night with this dubious diversion to spare herself from the slovenly clutches of fat man Sullivan, who would have squashed her by now, like he did his first wife, if she really slept with him.

Married people need not have a reasonable reason for unreasonable reasoning. Take Aunt Emily for example. My mom says Aunt Emily never wanted to marry Uncle Bob.When she turned the ancient age of thirty, her mother snarled at her to tie the bloody knot once and for all, and instead of running away like any normal girl would have, she married the bald-headed Bob instead.

Most bees will select flowers that are radially symmetrical.

Bumblebees prefer flowers that are vertically symmetrical.

Aunt Emily became a bumblebee in her thirty-first year.

From that wedded day forward Aunt Emily chose to fight her nocturnal battle with creases, wrinkles, and undefined shapes, instead of with Uncle Bob.

I watched her transform entire sleepless nights into vertical land-
scapes of starched perfection. Piles and piles of anything she could get her hands on were ironed.Tablecloths, napkins, sheets, pillowcases, towels, drapes, rugs, dishtowels, handkerchiefs, shirts, pants, skirts, socks and even shoelaces, rose up out of the steamed darkness. My mother said that Aunt Emily saw anything that sagged as a testament to failure.

I scan the street for more action and notice Megan O’Brien up on her porch hiding behind one of her raunchy romance novels again.The book is nothing more than an unimaginative prop for the more enthusiastic occupation that obviously consumes her. Now why wouldn’t she choose an encyclopedia or an art book to provide a wider expanse to sink behind. Books that might lead any passersby to mistake her for an actual intelligent girl? Unfortunately, the girl is an imbecile who doesn’t read anything, and so she chooses to crowd herself behind a tawdry paperback while she rips away at her fingernails. I wonder how long before there are no nails left on her fingers?

And when are the Connollys getting back? I look over at the empty space where their station wagon had been and wonder if maybe they went off for a pleasant afternoon of miniature golf and lunch at McDonald’s like any decent family ought to on a Saturday afternoon.
Or, maybe the Connollys hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Maybe they were still out circling the neighborhood, driving and driving around to the rumbling monotony of their dad torturing them on how to better organize their time and their life. Got to have goals to live up to, or you may end up like Rednose Scunner, another of a long line of neighborhood halfwits who couldn’t navigate his way out of his own bed.

I turn from the window back to the Family Conference.We are in session. Dad usually starts the sessions off by laying out our various shortcomings. That’s when Beatrice steps in. She is the only one who ever speaks, besides my Dad.We are now somewhere in the middle, I surmise. My Dad and my older sister, Beatrice, are slowly circling, gripping hair from the other’s scalp, hunched.

“Let go, you bastard!!!” Beatrice wrenches her fistful of hair. “You ranting bitch!!” Dad grabs her shoulder with his free hand. “You son of a whore!!” She swings at him and he dodges. “Don’t you dare”, he hisses as they continue to circle.

I survey the room. Mom sits braced on the corner of the couch, pinned between a bookcase and her own hell, rocking forward and back, covering her mouth and then clutching her hands in her lap, whispering “no” or “stop” every few moments. An open window across from her confiscates whatever soft, sad sounds she emits to the motoring tirade of Mr. Hampton’s lawn mower, as it plows through its riotous busi- ness with throttling disregard. I am forced to look directly at Mom’s lips in order to decipher what she says.

James, my older brother, is on Mom’s left on the floor in lotus position with his back against the couch, eyes closed, palms up. He has taken to transcendental meditation. He claims he has transcended the block more than a few times.

Opposite the couch, a smaller version of the same lumpy beige specimen mocks the room, with the majority of its springs exposed.This is the cat’s preferred scratching post.The youngest two are sitting on the loveseat in silence. Ronald, now eight, is exploring the boundaries of his hand, sucking one finger after the other, apparently an advanced stage of sucking the thumb, while Andrea, age six, with her arm entwined in his is watching the spectacle with her mouth and eyeballs in the same curiously frozen state, a deeper variation of her Saturday morning cartoon glaze.

And that would leave me. A sixteen year old girl stuck to the window seat like a dead fly on a strip.

“Go ahead, hit me,” Beatrice taunts, “Child abuse.. I’ll call the cops…scream it out for the whole goddamn neighborhood to hear! You’d love that, wouldn’t you!”
Dad coughs out a laugh and jerks her head toward him. Beatrice howls and tries to wrench his hand away.They lose their balance and push away from each other, strands of torn hair tight in their fists. Beatrice punches the air while we watch her face turn the remarkable shade of Mom’s Thursday meatloaf.
“Damn ungrateful brats…This is a goddamn asylum!” Dad lurches around the room waving his arms.
“It’s a damn nuthouse… Look at you!!!” He stares at each one of us. “No kid talks that way in my house!”

“You’re the crazy man! Fucker,” Beatrice yells, bolting for the
staircase. Dad pulls the back of her t-shirt and swings her down to the rug.
He kicks her a few times in the side till she’s screaming. Now Mom is up running at him and jumps on his back. Her face is chalk-white like all the blood’s sucked out of her.
“Monster,” she chants over and over till Dad forgets about Beatrice and turns his attention to Mom. He swats back at her while they spin around. Her legs clamp tightly to him, and her arms attach to his neck.
“Crazed bitch.” He struggles to free himself. “Don’t..you ever,” Mom stutters. Beatrice’s bedroom door slams upstairs. Dad stops circling and
stares at the ceiling while Mom slowly releases her grip. She slides down his back and falls to her knees. She covers her face with her hands.

The room is silent. One knotted lump on Dad’s temple pumps between veins like a prisoner behind bars. His frantic eyes stare at us. One after another we sink into our shoulders and study our shoes. The haunting idiocy of the lawn mower barrels away outside.

Dad spreads his arms out in a slow, sweeping arc. “Why?” “Why do you do this to me?” His arms drop to his sides and he searches the vacant faces again.

Passive migration occurs when insects are swept up and carried away, high into the atmosphere, sometimes thousands of feet into the air, and are transported by air currents to new areas.

I watch our house slowly rise up over the ragged stucco of this decrepit little street, rise up over the tan house, the yellow house, the white house.There go the chalk-marked sidewalks and the long, endless ridicule of coiffed green lawns.There go the lawn mower and the shocked upturned faces of Mr. Hampton, Mrs. Sullivan and Megan O’Brien. I watch all the shrinking parched faces fade away never to be seen again. But then, what if they’re only the same faces in every neighborhood, dying and repetitive as their plump square lawns. I let the house sink back into its crumbling frame.

An ambush bug found in Central America kills termites and arranges their dead bodies around the remaining nest of termites, then waits for the others to come out and inspect this camouflage of curiously silent neighbors before it descends on the parade of dupes with a deplorable ease.

A species of bird feeds on Monarch butterflies (Lepidoptera), and although these butterflies are poisonous to this specific type of bird, the birds have somehow learned over a two hundred year span to scoop out the inner non-poisonous tissue.

First, we must penetrate the outer shell of an adult.The human exoskeleton is much thicker than any insect’s could ever be.Any number of shifting personas can be detected in an adult in a single day. Downtrodden depression at breakfast can turn into an uncontrollable rage by lunch, and then after a few cocktails, they’re laughing and delirious by dinner.

The hidden inner tissue of the life of an adult is most often revealed after the sun is down and bottles of scotch, whisky, or beer are opened.They light up cigarettes and pipes. Cocktail parties are an ideal setting for tracking an entire group of adults getting drunk in the same room simultaneously. They no longer are those know-it-all blurs of earlier and with a few more drinks in them.They laugh and tell jokes, while the respectable babblings of the parents disappear. Each adult has a sunken continent of memories they scrounge up at parties-memories that come with their own pathetic music that adults never seem to grow tired of. After an hour or so, the group usually begins to sing, and some of them start to dance, while faces redden and we watch as they become strangers to the present–to us. The volume rises over hovering cigarette smoke. Laughing takes on a maniacal pitch and their reddened eyes and lips belt out old, sentimental tunes. Some dance hysterically in each other’s arms. Gross lip- stick-stained glasses pile up in sour, sticky little cloisters discarded on end tables around piled ashtrays.

After midnight the smoky room becomes gloomy. Adults suddenly become quieter, sit closer to each other, and everything slows down. The music becomes softer and drips into the back- ground. Some adults stagger out at this point, using children and babysitters to get away. There are slurred goodbyes and kisses, and we wait for the screen door to slam a few more times before the room is able to settle back again. Now the stories begin, and if we have hidden ourselves well from our parents on the staircase or the landing above, we are given the chance to follow these internal histories that breathe through the ghostly faces, walking through the darkened rooms, exhibit by exhibit, like a wax museum. An ocean of memories are dragged over and over again for sunken bodies of yesterday. There exists a whole underworld of discarded pasts that now resurface, and each adult takes on a mournful, faraway glaze as they tell the tales of lost loves and exotic places they were going to visit that never came to pass. Some would have been rich with huge mansions if they had just taken that other job, or if they had just bought that cheap plot of land thirty years ago that is now a famous ski resort worth millions. One of the wives bypassed a marriage proposal from some poor, bearded slob in California, who now owns a vineyard with his famous name slapped over bottles lining the shelves of the world. Someone never took a job in Paris, or those painting classes, or that law degree, or the dream of biking through Europe, or finishing school, getting rich, running away, or becoming famous. Eyes settle back into rumpled bags as trembling lips brace tightly against each other, and the troubled faces grope silently around in the miserable backwaters of unexplored seas with the low, mocking music of yesterday behind them.

And just when it seems that the room cannot possibly hold its breath a moment longer, something in the room suddenly shifts again. Each adult grasps for some fragment of rock they can cling to, in this ongoing battle for the self-preservation of the species.A fresh round of drinks are passed around, cigarettes are lit, and one of the adults announces proudly that her daughter has won first prize in some science fair. Another adult is nodding her head as pale cheeks fill in with the vision of offspring, and soon the room is filled with endless stories of the accomplishments of their kids-a child’s basketball championship, a piano recital, a track meet- and slowly the conversation builds again, layered with swim meets, soccer games, ballet classes, spelling bees, graduations. One or two of them snatch up their purses and search for photos, and the driftwood of that other life never lived floats off for a time beyond the murky waters of the present until the next party.

And then slowly, the dull, thick exteriors reattach themselves to respective adults as they yawn and get up to leave the party, mumbling their good-byes.Their heads are already rattling with tomorrow’s agenda, and as absolute as the rise of another morning’s sun they are promptly up the next day and impenetrably dressed in the efficient armor of authority. And though Mom rubs her temples and searches for the aspirin, and Dad wears bleary, stained and sunken eyes, complaining of his lower back, these seem to be the only visible proof of the previous night’s regressive pool of friends.The day has just begun and they are already railing after us as though all of civilization depended on a pair of matching socks and a combed head, and if this direction were heeded like the bee communicating the location of food, then all of life would settle into its rightful place at the table.

Or fall prey to diapause, a spontaneous period of depression which may occur at anytime during the developmental cycle caused by oppressive environmental conditions.
The drone of the lawn mower has become a dulled lullaby that motors over the inner stirrings of this captive room, while the sharp stench of freshly mowed grass parades in and discharges its flagrant green in tumultuous blasts.The fly is still working its way up and down the frame with what looks to be vertical futility.

I read in some magazine that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, not because this group of arrogant men felt assured of its verbal perfection, but because the horsefly population in Philadelphia was so thick at that specific time of year that the delegates gave up on any further discussion of the document and signed it, fleeing frantically for their respective homes.

Dad sits down in his brown leather recliner with the ottoman pushed off to the side, because, of course, this is a conference. He adjusts himself, leans forward, elbows on the rests, hands clasped.The clock on the mantel is burrowed inside its glass house, moving its hands from time to time to keep from appearing suspect.The room is a gallery of dry, muted tongues that sit strangely inside compressed mouths, and eyes prefer the inert reliability of rug, shoes, walls.
“Children,” Dad clears his throat and shakes his head.
He laughs and stares down at his hands. He rubs his eye and takes a slow, deep breath. “How did we let this get completely..out..of..control?”

The lawn mower suddenly sputters off into mechanical death. Everyone but James looks out the window.We wait.The fly is moving down now, buzzing maniacally in a futile battle of will.
“We need to talk to each other! Try and comm..un..i..” Dad’s voice trembles and labors the chain of this word while each syllable unlinks from its neighbor. His arms raise up slowly, then drop. A cough fumbles from his throat in another failed attempt to clear it.
“Co..mmun..i..,” waivers; one syllable becomes two and he begins to cry loudly, head shaking in his hands, a strong indicator that this conference is about to come to a close.

I look back out the window. Mr. Hampton has just pulled his lawn mower away and is now dragging a hose toward his car. Mrs. Sullivan and Megan O’Brien are back inside.
I watch Mr. Sullivan drag the lumpy bag of decapitated weeds to the back of the house where the trash can is. Maybe Mrs. Sullivan really sleeps with the fat man. I might have forgot to calculate the rate of weed growth.Weeds will always grow back.
Mrs. McCarthy is doing dishes across the street.Yellow, plastic gloves are visible from the window across from where I sit. I watch them move back and forth-two yellow agents in a serious battle against filth. I am sure various sponges line the sink at attention-soft sponge, scrubbing sponge, scouring pad for pots and pans, and one plaid dishtowel, ironed and awaiting the final slaughter of any surviving water drops that cling for their bacterial lives.

I hear our front door slam shut and watch Dad hurry down the steps and walk toward our car. Mr. Hampton yells something and laughs. Dad smiles and waves at him, gets into the car and drives off. Mom stands up, smoothes out her skirt, smiles blankly at a point above the loveseat, and then heads slowly toward the kitchen. Ronald and Andrea are still pressed together on the loveseat, and James is just starting to flutter his eyelids.

I scan the street slowly again. Mr. O’Brien is now in his front yard fumbling with the sprinkler, though he’s about due for his first beer of the day. Must be three o’clock. Ellen Rogers clicks quickly past him, late for her afternoon shift at Wal-Mart. She lives in the corner house with her Mom and three sisters, never talks about her Dad. I found out from Parker, whose brother used to date one of Ellen’s sisters, that their Dad paid them a surprise visit a couple of years ago and axed in the back door.When the cops found him he was sipping tea, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, spread out on the couch. Mr. O’s screen just slammed. First trip to the fridge.

No one else out at the moment. Just the same ugly houses decaying in the same ugly row. Flat, green lawns under a flat, blue sky. An oil splatter shines up black from the asphalt where the Connolly station wagon used to sit. It looks to be about the size of a tarantula, round and furry and fat like that, and I stare at it long enough to watch it move and change shape.The station wagon isn’t back yet. I guess they really went somewhere.

END

DIFFERENT
by Meg Tuite, Honorable Mention

How come he can’t play our game, that boy hiding under the chalkboard that swings when you pull it?
The one that tells me I smell like oranges, lives in my building and stands taller than me, even though I can say my ABC’s and read sits open-sourball-eyed and watches me going round and round on the merry-go-round, turning it faster than any other kid dares to, till you can’t see the concrete underneath, just colors, mixed up stampede if you don’t close your eyes, get a headache, one time so fast I opened my eyes, just long enough to see bumpy grains of concrete gray come up at me, screaming, I saw red howling out of punctured purple hanging loose in folds from my hand, his circle of eyes and a mouth so small and straight, like lines on paper and white, so white, he seems about to fall from all his whiteness, but he doesn’t, he watches me.
I told my Mom how he listens doesn’t watch other kids like he watches me, I tell him everything he needs to know-there’s a witch, lives in our building, called me a boy when I helped her with her groceries, I threw her poison nickel down the sewer, the witch from Oz melted into a puddle, small and green, but I’d seen butter melt then settle itself back into a long, yellow bump, no reason to believe any witch was dead.
He always touches blue first. I set five race cars all in a row, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, he picks blue no matter which I line up first, and pixie straws,
the kind with long stripes that you throw back let sit in mounds on the back of your tongue, I give him the blue ones, he stares at his tongue in the metal of the slide and smiles at the blueness of it all,
then pours some into his palm, a pile blue crystals he licks till they fizz explode into darker blues, he doesn’t like crowds, only one or two kids at a time, so school is hard, cause there’s always more than two kids at a time, and that’s when he hides behind things
like now, behind the chalkboard, cause he doesn’t like crowds, I told my Mother how he hides at school and stares at me from behind chalkboards and under tables, like he watches me at home. I want to tell him things. She says he is different, he will always be different, that’s why he hides like that. So now, when I see him, I stare back.
END
Santa Fe Community College
6401 Richards Ave. Santa Fe, NM 87508 (505) 428-1000 www.sfccnm.edu