The judges have sent a message. Their minion, the ineffable Kaplovsky, tapped obsequiously on my door last night (he is always cowering, shying from the blow he knows must fall) and delivered a list of finalists culled from the official entry list. For three days they have laboured without food or water (with the exception of a freezer full of lime vodka, a bag or two of whole wheat crackers and a wheel of Vermont cheddar). The task has been difficult, fraught with violence and recrimination. The first aid kit was needed more than once. Here is their short list of finalists in no particular order. Honours and laurels to these well known and sometimes anonymous contributors.
And over and above these illustrious authors of insane and melodramatic versions of a false truth who can forget Claire Wilkshire’s heart-rending cry “Behold, what a toe!!!” and her “master of whoop-whoop” or this sentence from Vivian Dorsel “What behooved me to! That linen and silk charm, the shoes and silken veils, the ring on her finger, that was for Frank” and her gorgeous “wordy as an eggplant” simile? Or this riff from Steve Axelrod, master of the startling and outré comparison “…laugh through their misery like farting crippled geese, trampled by toddlers … it degrades these nihilists of the Veldt, rope-throated troglodytes…”? Or Natasha Sarkissian’s cool psycho-sexual spaghetti-eating scene: “Frank squeezes my hand while we wait. ‘You can have a bite of mine,’ he says…”? And the anonymous X’s triple XXX, sultry version: “What behooved him to! He kneeling and sin licking, my shining sins devoted, my ring turned to vinegar by sin, but he was my Frank.” Or Sheila Stuewe’s talking wombat and Gwen Mullins’ (winner of the 2010 Numéro Cinq Villanelle Contest) horrific chase/birth scene “…even as I finally find moisture; running down my thighs in streams, salty, dripping wet against dry heat, signaling a taste of pain and torture that is birth. I feel my legs buckle, weak, failing: the mission was doomed from the start, but, even as the sun consumes both of us, I know the mission that was doomed was my own birth, calm in our adobe hut while my mother screamed and my father paced the floor”?
And others…
But here, as I say, are the five finalists, two with the original text (has anyone figured out where it’s from?). (And remember to vote for the People’s Choice Award here.)