![]() I notice that customers’ eyes stray to my chilly lower body, causing further heating of my face. I long to curl into a (fully-dressed) ball and roll on the floor. She’d call this undignified and vulgar behaviour, and she wouldn’t be wrong. Battling nausea, sweaty hands and a sense of impending doom, I join the queue, feigning confidence I don’t possess.Įxcept flip-flops, to which Emmy grudgingly agrees. This same bank regularly extends my student overdraft. No-one is surprised when she persuades me into a deficit of good sense.Īt my third approach towards the bank, I dare to enter. Plus, I want to impress Emmy, Rag President. So, I volunteer for a University Rag Week fundraising stunt. ‘Volunteering,’ says Granny, ‘is good for you. And the grandmother only laments that he did not shave for his publicity photo. The unexpected continues to happen-so important to humor. Judge’s Comments: “Humor finds a home in this story as the narrator is talked into wearing nothing but flip flops for a Rag Week fundraising stunt that doesn’t go according to plan. She lives in Denver near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her husband, son, dog, and cat. Michelle Souleret is a content marketing writer by day, and a fiction writer and poet by night. One day, I’ll let them all out like fireflies. They pulse and gleam in my kitchen: some scaly, some pearled, some as delicate as birdskulls. At home, I light my lanterns and push the Truth into a jar on a shelf with all the other Truths I’ve held back over the years. As I glide through reeds that rise above my head, the night sounds of the marsh close in around me. I climb into my canoe and paddle home through the tidal creeks, cradling the Truth in my lap, shimmering like an emerald. The flock departs at sunset, rising in a rush of pale wings that glow in the thickening twilight. Something comforting lost, something feared storming in. The Truth they leave behind huddles hot-green and alive in my pocket, writhing with meaning-Anger. I simply peeled off the fibrous outer shell of the Truth-the metaphor that protects it-and balled it up into a salty knot they could chew and swallow like communion crackers. What I told them is true, if not the Truth. I continue to watch the birds after the locals leave. They drive away to shore up the town’s flood defenses and hold spaghetti dinners in the church gymnasium to raise funds, shouldering the load of their fear side-by-side. But as a flock-salvation.” They cry and hug each other, thank me and pay me. So I wade back and tell them “Thirty-three days, a row of storms like beads on a string, winds on the wing, rising water. ![]() They pay me for comfort, and sometimes for the thrilling kick of fear. I fall to my knees, choking, and cough out a glossy tangle of Truth.īut the town locals won’t want to hear the Truth. Meaning jangles into my brain with the snapping jaw-strength of a gator and the rightness of a hard-shelled turtle in the sun. ![]() I wait and I watch and I wait until, at last, a pattern emerges in the sinuous curves of the egrets’ necks and their awkward shifts from foot to foot. The sun passes overhead and swamp flies patter against my arms. The white birds flap and preen and shuffle, but stay in formation. I wade out, ankle-deep then to shinbone in the sun-warmed water, and stand all afternoon, watching. The locals chattered nervously at this omen and called me in. Thirty-three egrets flew into the salt marsh last night and lined up in a perfect row along an old, slanted pier. The startling ending arrives but the writer has prepared us for it well.” They are happy with a half-truth they celebrate with spaghetti dinners and swallow as easily as communion wafers. The natural world of the narrator is filled with the sun, swamp flies, silky mud, reeds and tidal creeks, a keeled water snake, a gator and a hard-shelled turtle-and the egrets that s/he reads for The Truth, which the locals really do not want to hear. Judge’s Comments: “The unstable situation is introduced right off in a superb first sentence when thirty-three egrets appear as an omen and the locals call in the narrator to interpret it.
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