New Short Fiction Award
We value creative writing and wish to encourage writers of short fiction
to pursue their goal of being published. Jerry Jazz Musician would like
to provide another step in the career of an aspiring writer. Three times
a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original,
previously unpublished work.
Joanne Seiff of Bowling Green, Kentucky is the fifteenth recipient of the Jerry Jazz Musician
New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on July 15, 2007.
Joanne Seiff (with Harry)
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Joanne Seiff is a writer and knitwear designer. Her forthcoming non-fiction book, Fiber Gathering, is about fiber festivals and the rich fiber arts community in the United States. Her writing appears in a variety of newsstand publications. She's proud to be the recipient of a Kentucky Foundation for Women grant and the Kentucky Art Council's 2007 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship for her non-fiction.
The Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest gave Joanne an excuse to visit the world of her imagination and write about it every few months. She's very grateful to the contest for this opportunity.
When Joanne's not working, she's often walking Harry and Sally (her bird dogs). Her hobbies are fuel for her writing: spinning, knitting, gardening, cooking, and spending time outdoors with her absent-minded biology professor husband, who studies butterfly genetics.
Read more about her work at her website, and follow her daily adventures on her blog, Yarn Spinner.
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The Prayer For Swift and University
by
Joanne Seiff
_______________________________
Stories burst out of her as a magician's trick pulls
out scarves; multi-colored patterns, solids and conservative checks spilled
out of her mouth and hands when she least expected it. In the end, of course,
she recognized it as it was. These were the stories of all our lives, every
human soul's experience could produce that knotted, impossibly long scarf
string that sprung out of the local magician.
Yet, most people did not have a new story to tell very
often at all. At first, this was a wonder to her -- why did all the interesting
things happen only to her? But of course, this was self-centered, she
realized. These things do happen to all of us on this earth. It was just
that few people noticed the stories as they blossomed. It's in the observation
of it, she discovered, that one finds a good story.
Watching, waiting, even expecting intrigue and anxiety in one's daily life was the best way to capture a story. Like mice, they hide
when you're trying to catch them, and run rampant havoc through our dreams.
When night falls, the moldings of old houses become their race tracks, and
our day's stories are their Grand Prix. Our unconscious risks and bucks,
bets like the mice bookies, making millions of seed bets on the lack of
observation skills in our waking souls.
It was a heavy, humid day when the puppy died. She said
goodbye to her husband as he headed out the door on his drive to work. She
settled down to her studies, alone as usual. Only moments passed before the
phone rang and her husband called from a passerby's cell phone.
"At the corner of Swift Avenue and University Drive,"
he said. "A small, reddish brown chow puppy ran by." He started to pull over
to the side of the road to reach the puppy, but it was too late. The puppy
darted across the intersection (and it was a bad intersection anyway). A
bus turned the corner and ran over the puppy.
He rushed the puppy to the vet, cradling it in an army blanket and towel in an old wooden box he'd kept in his car trunk.
She called the vet's office to warn them of the emergency. She rushed to
meet him. The weather was drizzly and humid.
The puppy was in to the vet's surgery, but it was too
late. It died, its pelvis crushed. The doctor charged nothing. The couple
carried bloodstained blanket and towel home. The bus driver called, weeping.
He offered to pay all the (nonexistent) expenses and thanked them. His own
dog had been run over once.
No way to proceed on such a day, even though everyone
had been compassionate. She arrived completely unprepared at her afternoon
seminar on Western Religious Tradition, but newly versed in mortality. That
corner of Swift and University became a personal memorial, a perpetual moment,
as she turned the car into silence.
That kind vet? He died the same year, hit by a drunk
driver at a difficult intersection, on a curvy road. Remembering his compassion,
they longed to tell the family something -- but could not. How to tell a
family with young children who'd just lost their father about a lost puppy,
run over, and the vet's professional compassion? The parallels ached, and
were too jarring to repeat.
Turning through the intersection, they'd turn to one
another. "This is in memory of a fifteen pound chow puppy that almost became
our own," they'd say to each other. It was a wordless message, a look into
each other's eyes as the driver glanced both ways, and each saw that the
glance, brief as it was, slid towards the other, and landed on the spot in
the road. This, left unsaid, was in memory of a kind and gentle vet.
The story was just another day, another moment frozen
into memory. It could pass easily into oblivion without recording, without
observation. Yet the scarves unfurled. She saw the mice rushing the moldings,
lining up for a derby in her mind each night. The unconscious couldn't forget.
The drizzle, the damp humid clinging of her dress. A bloody army blanket
scratchy against her skin.
Is a sad story a good story? Can a poignant loss become
strong narrative? She turned the ideas over and over, making the edges smooth
and rounded with time. Did it still cause a key-like turning in her gut?
It still caused her to cry unexpectedly at times, when she touched a dog's
fur. In a society wrapped up in happy endings, is it possible to draw attention
with one tale that ended, even on frequent reflection, without a tail? She
took long walks with her own dog, wondering about what had happened. Was
a secret moral lurking, just beyond grasp, in the gravel of a nearby unpaved
road?
The rabbi of their congregation, just a mile or two beyond
the dreaded intersection, offered adult education classes on blessings.
"For everything," he taught, "there's a prayer. The Talmud
teaches us myriad formulae to pray, at every occasion. Here's one prayer
for seeing a rainbow. Here's another for meeting a head of state, a president
or a queen." The room buzzed with interest as everyone strove to find their
own particular blessings and prayers. The class closed with a modern poem,
a sweet prayer for eating a peach.
The couple was quiet as they left the synagogue, slow
to talk about the prayers they'd missed out on saying, the opportunities
long gone. In the car, they wondered, was each prayer a way to observe any
moment when things should be remembered? In what way could they remember
everything, the sad experience as well as the happy one, the event and the
ritualized prayer to describe and bless it? The car jittered onto the gravel,
and turned into that bad intersection, the one they couldn't forget.
Each added a new silent prayer to their vocabulary, a
terrible story to remind them to utter the prayer for the corner of University
and Swift. May the one above, (brake, look both ways, turn the wheel) treat
that vet with mercy, the way he treated one very small puppy.
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