Spring 2010 Writing Regimen Contest Winners
At the end of every month-long writing regimen for adults, participants are invited to submit up to three of their best regimen-inspired pieces for a chance at publication on southeastreview.org. This time, we were presented with an embarrassment of riches and selected one prose piece and one poem. We are proud to announce that Ethel Rohan and Marilyn Cavicchia are our most recent winners.
PROSE WINNER:
Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Ethel Rohan now lives in San Francisco. She received her MFA in fiction from Mills College, CA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Storyglossia, Keyhole 9, The Emerson Review, Los Angeles Review, and Potomac Review, among many others. She blogs at ethelrohan.com.
Ethel chose to submit a piece in response to Day 27 of our April regimen. The prompt was to write about an action that someone regretted, or else about an "almost-action" that someone regretted not taking.
by Ethel Rohan
As kids, we spent most of our free time on the streets, flanked by parked cars and watched over by chimney smoke. We chased, played ball, skipped rope, and vied for the boys’ attention. We loved summer best, no school and sunlight as late as eleven.
Friday nights, my parents disappeared to the local pub religiously. Done-up, my mother looked like Elizabeth Taylor and my father like Errol Flynn. They linked each other down the street, two parched movie stars on their merry way. I watched them go, my mother’s perfume heavy in the air. My friends said how great they looked, their own parents so dull. The concrete beneath me turned to water.
The Friday nights my parents arrived home angry drunk, they woke us with their shouts. My older brother and I sneaked onto the green-carpeted stairs and spied. He tried to shoo me back to bed, but I stayed. The tiny pink flowers in the carpet had dirtied to gray. We couldn’t make out much of the words, the balls of fire they slung at each other, but we understood enough.
The moment the living room door flew open, we scampered back to our beds. Mother liked the last word, her tongue as sharp as the leather belt she used on us. After she banged the door closed, she struggled up the stairs, leaving my father behind in his armchair. I imagined he sulked there, and raged, plotted, and dozed. I couldn’t sleep with him downstairs and her next door, seething.
My father loved to read The Evening Press and solve its crossword puzzle. In the margins of the pages, he drew in pen girl stick figures with long curly hair. They always had dots for eyes and large smiles. I would stare at those girls in pen, looking for differences among them, but they all looked the same. I wondered who she was, this stick girl with the long curly hair and bright smile. Maybe she was nobody. Or she was Father’s first love. Or she was the way he wished my mother could be.
Some nights Mother rushed from her room to the bathroom. While she vomited, I listened at the bathroom door—afraid she’d choke or drown in the toilet bowl. When there was silence for too long, I pictured her on the bathroom floor, cut and bleeding to death. My insides called to her not to do it.
Eventually, when it seemed Mother was asleep, Father climbed the stairs, creak by creak. Sometimes, he hesitated down in the hall and I waited, not breathing. I knew he was eyeing our front door. I prayed hard.
One of their worst fights, Mother smashed the large gold mirror that hung over our fireplace, a wedding gift from Father’s parents and the best ornament in the house. Father shouted in a voice we’d never heard, the roar of something about to charge. My brother barged into the room and pushed his way between them.
Long after the house finally quieted, Father climbed the stairs and appeared in my bedroom. He brought in the smell of beer and cigarettes. While I pretended to sleep, he settled himself across the end of my bed, his knees pulled up to his stomach and his elbow under his head, small as a little boy. The mouse in the wall sprinted and scrabbled, back and forth, back and forth. Father banged at him. Still I pretended to be asleep. My insides kicked and flopped, and I tried again and again to muster my voice and summon the courage to speak. While I trembled and rehearsed, my skeleton sat up in the dark, reached out her arms, and whispered “Here, Daddy. Best Daddy.”
POETRY WINNER:
Marilyn Cavicchia lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, and a three-toed box turtle. She is an editor at the American Bar Association. After receiving a bachelor's in English with a creative writing concentration at Ohio University, she stayed there but switched departments, earning a master's in journalism. She only recently resumed writing poetry; this is the first poem she's had published since graduating from college in 1995.
Marilyn chose to submit a poem she wrote in response to Day 25 of our April regimen. The exercise presented an excerpt from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and prompted participants to write about a religious icon, creative endeavor, or other experience requiring faith in some form.
by Marilyn Cavicchia
I couldn't bring it home,
the feeling of pent-up
golden air, holiness
in the form of oranges,
Chinese food in styrofoam
clamshells, offered to
the goddess of travelers.
I couldn't make it mine,
though I looked for
connection in the
photocopied sheet I took.
I tried to think about
how I was a traveler on
life's journey, and so forth.
To no avail. I knew
I'd only been a tourist,
like all the others,
respectful, yet interrupting
the old people who
truly love the goddess
and show it by buying
her food, tending her altars.
There is no love except
in tending, no love except
in the old woman rising early,
dressing as if for a date,
stopping on her way to buy
the sticky ribs she knows
are her beloved's favorite;
there is no faith
except knowing, being known.
