(re) tell me a story contest
INTRODUCTION
Something new, something borrowed, something small and mighty.
Last fall, we called for submissions that retold old stories in a new way. Some of the best works in recent literature have been retellings: Grendel by John Gardner, Wide Sargrasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and March by Geraldine Brooks. These flash pieces can change the setting, point of view, time period, or transform the story entirely while preserving central elements. They put a new spin on the old, transform the legendary, and harness the mythical.
Here are the best of the best.
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first place winner:
JAMES craig HARTZ JR.
“THRENODY”
When we pulled him cold and breathless from the wine-dark sea we wondered if there was any use in singing at all. The words never changed—they never have—but the melody was laced with mourning, an elegy of another failure. Our mothers covered our eyes and wept. They did not want us to see, but we snuck glances through the gaps to learn. There is so much they never wanted us to carry, to know.
When we were born along the cliffs our mothers told us we were given voices. They never told us what they were given for. But they taught us to sing, that sacred melody that only one had ever heard and lived, that man of twists and turns who lashed himself to the mast, they say. They taught it to us slowly, the billow and swell of it, pure and powerful, deadly beauty that drifted lilted over whitecaps and breakers in warning. We never knew—then, our mothers never told us—why they fretted and fluttered over every dissonant note, why they molded our voices and sharpened the blade of our song with such restless care. It is such a simple thing. How strange, we thought, that it should warrant such shaping.
When we closed his sightless eyes and covered them with coins for the Boatman we thought of our father. When our mothers spoke of him it was only to say he was of the river. We have never met him. We do not know his name. But when we open wide our throats and wing out our song, when we sing the briefest of refrains—Keep away, keep away—those who hear the warning never seem to listen, and when they plunge into waves and are pulled down into the roaring crushing black by whatever madness made them heedless and bitter tears sting our eyes we wonder deep in the whirling pools of our minds if he is locked in Tartarus for deceiving the angry gods. We wonder if our mothers lied to give us hope, as their mothers did before them, an endless regression back to the ancient days that are nearly forgotten, when gods and heroes braved the sea. We wonder if they lied to spare us from the truth that he, too, weeps for the futility of his labor, watching helplessly as the stone he has rolled up and up the hill again tips and shudders and crashes down to the valley floor, and there is nothing else to do but to set his shoulder against it and make the climb once more. We wonder if they lied to spare us seeing the very image of our song in his stone.
But when we light the pyre and watch the hungry flames consume him we know that when we become mothers we will teach our daughters, too—murmur to them the lullaby that will be their lifelong labor, sculpt and hone and refine it on their tongues as it was on ours. We will tell ourselves that it has always been, must always be, sung. Someone must warn sailors from these deathly shores. We will pray, yes, even pray, that perhaps one among our daughters will have a clearer voice, a louder voice, a stronger voice to call across the wine-dark sea.
And we will hope that they will hear her.
James Craig Hartz Jr. is a writer and Junior Editor for Brink Literacy Project. He is currently based in Corvallis, OR, where he is pursuing an MFA in Fiction from Oregon State University. Prior to academia, he served as a Combat Medic in the U.S. Army for several years. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, F(r)iction, and Watershed Review. He is the recipient of the 2022 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Witness, and his fiction has been nominated for Best American Short Stories.
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runner-up:
JORDAN WINDHOLZ
“THE SISTERS IN THE NIGHT”
Together, but they didn’t know how they arrived, in the center, or where they could imagine the center, of a dark forest, howls with teeth in them, a grey silence that ate their questions. They didn’t even know if they were the villains, the witches cursed to conjure sprites and devilish curs, if they were an ancient magic feeding saplings into a heretic bonfire, its pillar of wet, white smoke rising like a spell. The sky was black above them, stuck with stars that seemed the pinpricks of a bloodletting, their hot light hissing and steaming in the mists snaking the pines. The moon was a sister of what they didn’t know. They were not afraid. They had knives beneath their muslin, amethyst charms, a language that bent the world back to wishing. They imagined whatever was next was a perch with a nest of mottled eggs in its maw, a birthing of naked, flying forms or a tender meal for skulking cats.
“THE SISTERS AS VAMPIRES”
You invite them in. You aren’t supposed to, you know this, and you tell yourself you’re not supposed to even as the thoughts of come in come in come in rumble in your gut, and you do, you do, you invite them in. But not much happens after that. The what if pumping of your adrenaline falls back to the this this this of your heartbeat, and what was opening in you still opens, but like a flower wilting into its bloom. It isn’t like they don’t do vampire things. They watch you sleep. They breathe on your neck as they run their noses across its nape. They levitate. They refuse to open the curtains, keep them pinched with clothespins. And they do not leave. Every night, they drink and they drink and they drink. First it’s wine. Then gin. Then whiskey. Then it’s wine again. As soon as their tongues start slipping on their sentences, they tell you a story. It’s always the same story. It’s about a peasant boy, about how, one day, he wandered into the forest in pursuit of a chicken that escaped from its yard, or no, no, they say, it was a goat bleating into the dusk, or no, the other corrects her sister, it was a girl from the village, and he didn’t wander. They never slur their words at this next part. They run their long nails against the lip of the glass as they tell of how the whole village searched for him all day and all night, all day and all night, for a week and another, how they lit bonfires that inevitably dwindled to ash-heaps, murmured prayers into their hands, how they filled the air with their wailing as if they believed the sky held a god whose tongue wasn’t clipped, one whose ears were not sewn shut. They tell of how they did not find a bit of him, not one of his shoes, not a thumb, not a strand of hair, not even a tooth.
”THE SISTERS AS RED RIDING HOOD”
The red comes after. Their cowls are first blue, or they are green, or they are a yellow shining through its dye. Every day, the hard work. For hours, they lop open wolves, searching their bellies for the mothers of their mothers. Every day, they whet the axe blade. Within some grove, the muted echoes, the thwack, drag, and thwack. For hours, they burn entrails, seek a premonition in the smoke. They pack cups full of ash, pick out pieces of bone. They line their huts with hundreds of these cups. They wash their hands in the creek, break their bread. They eat. The woodsmen the next town over tell stories about them, how they are always on a journey, heading for home. The children fashion little dolls of flax and wool, dip them in the broth of madder root. Those rustics believe that sharing little myths about those girls will insulate them in the safety of story. But we—we know to lock our doors. The things we tell you before you fall asleep, dear children, are not meant to usher you into the dark halls of slumber. We do not tell you them that you would learn the proper place to harbor your fear. The silks you feel brushing your face are not the gauzy curtains of dream. Do not close your eyes too tightly in the starlight.
Jordan Windholz lives, writes, and works in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of the poetry collection, Other Psalms.
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second runner-up (tie):
ELIZABETH QUIRK
“MAY QUEEN”
Every generation of maidens has a first crone; I know, because I am mine.
When we bow our rose-crowned heads in sweet supplication before the Maypole and, clutching the brilliant-colored sash allotted as our own (mine is verdant green), move merrily to the sacred old dance, our white dresses floating around us, identical but for variations in flourish, flounce, and frill, inside I am all along changed: If you pierced me, sliced me in half to count the seeds, you might find me already stone, the sweet stuff of girlhood already down to the dregs. My cheeks are fair and hair still satin, but what a disappointment for the one who picks me out, for I will bear him no child and instead of evenings spent in wifely concern, I will read him his future from breadcrumbs and tend to my pet Caspian tiger. I may love him, but not like my sisters might, with eager hearts that know no iron threading: beneath this form, my crone’s heart beats.
Over and under— over and under— twisting color and girlish laughter against sun-drenched sky.
Light morning wine rocks in our bellies as the village mirth grows around us. We move now with the consciousness of admiration (Cate just like a pink rose, Effie a velvet-red one, Alice the palest blush, and me, I suppose I fall from the blackthorn bush). My pretty friends will someday join me, of course, however many years hence, as every maiden must turn crone, except for those that die ruined in an unmarked grave— O Alice!— or as beloved wives, broken by the babes they bring into the world. Above all, a crone is safe, for she knows the truth about men and what often takes fifty summers to teach: that the same earth that brings forth such blooms may also spit up jawbone and coccyx, foot and femur, from May Queens that danced centuries ago.
Over and under— over and under— our weaving bands blend with the wind’s wild old song.
When a lovely maiden looks up at you with black crone eyes, you may not notice, Suitor, except for a slight gradation in thrill; but ah, the difference for her! She sees you from the wise vantage of the bent-back hag, undeceived by the beguiling trickery of May, which is only innocent for the young. And should I come to love you, it will be abiding and true, but half-maternal, too, and the most sacred parts will go into my charcoal sketches: you in profile; the paws of my striped beast; the moonlit hillside. When at last I prove barren, as I will, an orphan shepherd-child will come into our lives and I will call her Alice, after a dear girlhood friend, long-dead but never forgotten, and teach her how to draw— My reveries are interrupted; they’ve chosen me Queen of May.
Over and under— over and under— at last meeting at the middle to mark the start of the season.
Little children take me laughingly now by the hand and add still more roses (roses upon roses) atop my head and place large bouquets of them into my arms— yes, a crone crowned Queen. Cate, Effie, Alice! and others cluster around me, kissing my cheeks and embracing my waist. Life does not give many moments of pure bliss (a beldame knows nothing if not this fact) and so my crone-heart brims. Suitor, I feel your eyes on me, too, and I know you will kiss me today. Amid the rejoicing, again the tree-spirit within the Maypole guides me, and as in a waking dream I rush through three hundred May Days yet-to-be, watching familiar revelry and bonfires on the green become rebellion and revolution, toppling those real crowns that make monsters of men. Then I am back amid my dear friends, a vision in white before you, engulfed in summer roses.
Every generation of maidens has a first crone; I know, because I am mine.
Elizabeth Quirk was the recipient of the 2021 James Hurst Prize for Fiction
and teaches in the English department at Wake Tech Community College in
Raleigh, North Carolina.
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SECOND RUNNER UP (TIE):
CLAIRE VOLKMANN
“STORY OF WINTER”
The days shorten, and at dusk the sun falls and gasps for air like a guppy in shallow water, drowning in an oily orange glow beneath a vermilion sky. Small brown branches crumble like burnt breadcrumbs tracing old paths deep into lost woods. Little things sleep restlessly in the hollow crooks of oak trees—woodland creatures, wide-eyed little things—shivering as their dreams are carried up quietly by wind in the willows.
The sun does not melt as it used to. In the morning, a thick layer of frost covers shrub roses in secret gardens. Snowdrops begin to peak out of the cold grass, their little petals like open arms. The darlings glisten with dew; dew that reminds of spring sprouts and green beanstalks. Marigolds and snapdragons brace the cold—shaking bright bulbs and petals—oranges and pinks of lost summer—the last flowering.
Little children peer out from closed windows into the new fog, blowing puffs of breath onto the glass. Their gardens are blanketed with wet auburn leaves like broken pieces of sun or dried-up apple skins. The air smells sweet of nutmeg and vanilla and butter melting in the oven; hot kettles burn fingertips and blow thin clouds of steam over gas stoves; and children’s clumsy footsteps fill the walls and ceilings with little knocks—little tumbles here and there on bruised hardwood floors, sweeping up the soot sprites lingering in corners of the house.
A mother lights the fireplace in her daughter’s room. Lavender bulbs in a vase on the windowsill shudder at the sudden loss of the sun’s warmth—warmth of summer that has disappeared overnight. Fall fills the room, but the mother gazes at the fire’s glow: the way it licks up the sides of red brick and eats through thick wood blocks. Her eyes are gray and empty like the mist that fills the empty open spaces outside in their orchard, where apples ripen on overhanging branches. Her thin cold fingers trace wispy patterns into the salty dust that has collected at the hearth; an abandoned doll sits before her with a silly smile gracing her plain cotton face, fat and overstuffed with beans.
She watches the thing with contempt—its ugly white face and limp body, bearing no resemblance to her daughter, whose hair is the color of a burning sun, curling at the ends like stormy ocean waves, with wispy baby hairs floating over her like candlelight. In the fall, it has burned into a thick brown curtain, and soon it will be as pitch black as a night sky without stars.
The mother’s call drifts through the half-open window and follows the biting wind past the apple trees and shrub roses in the gardens and into the woods. Her voice dies at the start of the path, too far from her daughter. But it is loud enough for the clouds to hear. They stir from their sleep, upset by her cries, and begin to spill angry tears onto the sunburnt earth, watering plants that have grown out of season. The rain pours everywhere—everywhere but a small circle clearing deep in the woods, where all kinds of flowers smile at an eternal sun that warms the back of a little girl weaving flower stems into a crown.
Something buried deep beneath the earth stirs from his sleep. Dust gathers in dark salted corners where the light cannot see. Vermin scratch at the walls of a broken house; nymphs of mayflies grow drowsy beneath freezing ponds and their water lilies; sad little holly shrubs bear their berries to hungry bluebirds. A rumbling rises from the ground, like a stomach growling for food. A baby bear snuggles restlessly against its mother for warmth as it waits to fall asleep.
The wind rises, slow and steady, like a tide. It chatters its teeth, a thing of the wild. It moves through the forest, searching the grass for footsteps and fallen strands of gold, begging the sun to settle into its starless wintry sleep.
And, somewhere in her field of flowers, Proserpina shivers.
Claire Volkmann is a graduating senior at UC Davis studying English. She is
preparing her critical honors thesis on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Wherever she goes, she wants to be surrounded by pictures and
conversations.
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finalists
Gita Ralleigh
“CREECH”
Lauren Johnson
“RED HOOD”
Savannah Chandler
“FOR ICARUS, WHO I WOVE TO RUIN”
THANK YOU TO ALL WHO SUBMITTED!