Grand Prize Winning Fiction

A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built. The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water. Sultry it was and humid, but no whisper of air caused the plump, laden spears of golden grain to nod their burdened heads, eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, her creamy bosom rising and falling like a temperamental soufflé. Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so long -- as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

"Ace, watch your head!" hissed Wanda urgently, when the strong, clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo. So I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, her red jumpsuit molding her body, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically peddling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance. It was, after all, right there under his nose, and Selena fretted sulkily with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet. The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, but in all his years of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, driven by Nature's maxim, "Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work,"

Dolores breezed along the surface of her life, he had never noticed that the freckles on his upper lip, just below and to the left of the nostril, her and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career. The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to a single accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova.

She wasn't really my type, the first female ape to go up in space, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, partially hidden until now by the heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, and, buffing her already impeccable nails--not for the first time since the journey began— on reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky.

They had but one last remaining night together, so they hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, while overhead the burning orb of luminescence ascended its ever-upward path toward a sweltering celestial apex, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six Bic slugs into the bloodless tyrant. She was a woman driven--fueled by a hairy mole he had just removed a week before, the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when the bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where my sixth sense said seventh heaven was, for although it is not in Kansas that our story takes place, it looks godawful like it.

She finally lost momentum, sank, due to an overdose of fluoride as a child and pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil. Desiree winked at me slyly and pouted, her thick, rubbery lips exactly matched the pattern of the stars in the Pleides, as the newest Lady Turnpot descended into the kitchen wrapped only in her celery-green dressing gown as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

As he stared at her ample bosom, she resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight, her tart mouth pursed in distaste, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.

As blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape --the first of many such advances -- I swept her into my longing arms, causing her to reflect once again as they unheedingly awaited the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein.

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, comprised of angry yapping lips, but he couldn't you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little period of time during the month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair. Though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all that gleaming treasure, and like the city, their passion was open 24/7, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, and that tarry substance along the greasy, cracked paving-stones certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently. Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blown’ off Nantucket Sound from nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito that was a stupid idea like Martha Stewart begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

For those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N. J.”.

Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio intestine and caramelized onions, and yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, the Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth.

Discounting the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know, which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center, slick from the sputum of the sky, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, that was soon to devastate his life. Not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee, when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy's girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Your last meal," thus ending her life.

For the first they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean, grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, and forced open the door of his decaying house that mocked him day after day, and then, As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned.

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job. Summarily, he daydreamed of that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.

You can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler. "Hold the spumoni--I'm going to follow the chick an' catch a Tory.", for it was captained by John McTavish the sous-chef, allowing her to remove the cap through red, full, sensuous little cheek or lips that nipped at Desdemona's ripping ankles, as big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

“You’ll feel my steel bullets through sand crisp shrimp’s”, the entire contents of the bottle, summarily embraced each other unmistakably, inside as tightly by the cyclic tail, yet somehow provocatively, if he really tries, but not of their.

“Flick to your naïve and swallow. The ape ran out of a vein chick flick. You’ll feel my…” -- He appreciated her warning.

"I don't know what to make of her." whispered the scullery boy.

And at last I knew Pittsburgh.




"What the hell was all that?" you might ask. Not the first chapter of my award-winning space detective mystery, but more a curious synthesis of some of the very worst fiction in the world. Since 1982, San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a literary competition challenging entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Sentences are well and good, but they're not very long. So, armed with only the last 17 year's winners, I sort of cut-and-pasted bits of the sentences together to get the above clear and cohesive narrative. (Individual words and even letters by the end, when as you may have noticed things got slightly desperate.) So no, none of this is mine, but the compilation is, and that sort of counts, doesn't it?