This year the Lorian Hemingway Short Story competition, now in its 33rd year, received 1,197 entries from the United States and around the world. Stories were received from Singapore, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, India, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, and Nigeria, to name a few. We are honored, as always, to have had these remarkable stories entrusted to us. I just placed an honorable mention for this story: To Lie Down in Green Pastures It was early April, one of the first warm days of spring. The hours of light had just begun to stretch out a little longer each evening, and as it lay on the tips of the leaves they shimmered in the brisk, cool wind like sequins. Sitting cross-legged , Emma picked up her guitar, and strummed a few chords to see if it was in tune. She brushed her hair from her face, and began to sing. Though I was dating someone else, over the last few months we had spent a lot of time together. She comforted me through the final throes of a terrible relationship, and I always felt better when I was around her. I could be honest, and when we were together, it was as if the whole world had vanished, and none of the petty, adolescent problems that had so complicated our young lives, mattered anymore. I could be myself around her, and in high school, that kind of relationship was almost nonexistent. She called me that afternoon. I answered the phone just as I was about to walk out the door. “Are you OK? You don’t sound good,” I said. “It’s just the same old stuff,” Emma replied, in a voice that seemed even softer than her unusually soft voice. I was worried, so I changed my plans and drove out to her house. When I got there, she was standing on the porch, holding her acoustic guitar by the neck, with a blanket rolled up and tucked under her arm. “Hey,” she said, and handed me the blanket. We walked out toward the farthest pasture on the edge of her father’s property. She had two horses, one solid black, and the other a Paint, that she kept in an old stable that was stained such a bright red, that against the backdrop of the green pastures and blue sky that surrounded it, it looked like one of those Lincoln-Log toys I used to play with as a kid. We fed each horse some hay, and then she poured some feed into their manger that smelled sweet, like breakfast cereal. After we finished feeding and watering the horses, we found a place near the river, and she spread out the old quilt and we sat down. You could hear the water, and see the space in the trees where the river separated the fields, but the riverbank was hidden by the undergrowth, and the river itself was invisible. “My dad’s out of town again.” “On business?” “I don’t know,” she answered. “Where is your mother?” I asked. I’d always assumed that her parents had divorced. Having only met her a few months before, I really knew very little about her. “She died around this time two years ago,” Emma said. “I’m sorry.” “It’s OK. It was a little more than three years ago when she got sick. I tried to ignore it and pretend that she would be alright. I was keeping busy with school and stuff, just so I didn’t have to think about it. And I never really spoke to her after she got really bad, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that those last few months was all the time we had left. I hid. I was selfish. Death is easy to ignore if you are caught up in living. I thought about her more when she was gone than I did for those last few months of her life,” she said, looking into the darkness of the eastern sky, at something I could never see; one of those things that exist only in the shadows of one’s own, lonely world. Just as I too am troubled by a past that no one else will ever be able to see, when facing that fear, we are always alone. Everyone’s darkness is different. “Now, I have made my peace with my mother, though it’s not so easy when it comes to my dad," she said. “You seem like a strong person,” I said. “I try to keep my mind off of it by spending a lot of time at the studio downtown, or out here with the horses.” The first time I saw Emma dance, I was waiting on her to finish rehearsing. She was the only one left in the studio, so I stood quietly in the doorway. I watched her as she moved in wide, sweeping circles, and as she slowed down, she rose up, en pointe, and executed a perfect pirouette. As she twirled, it was as if she became part of the room, a part of everything, whirling round and round until she was almost invisible. Her fluid movements were accurate and precise as a music box ballerina, but never mechanical, never memorized. Instead, every time she moved, it was like she was coming into being for the first time, a statue coming alive, a flower opening to the sun. The room was so silent that I could hear the faint sound of her feet moving across the floor. The studio was empty by now, and I realized there was no music, but she did not need music; she did not need anything. We stayed out there till it was almost dark. I sat there, listening, in that last few minutes of golden light. It was a light that is beyond brilliant, as if in desperation the sun had quickly showered all of its beauty on our faces, scattering its last fiery rays across the fields and trees, so that night could not steal any of its majesty; so that none of its brilliance would be wasted. She picked up her guitar up from the grass where she had laid it. “So”, I asked, “are you going to play me a song?” She looked away and began to sing. As she sang, her quiet, yet passionate voice rose above the glowing fields, and then ascending further and further into the sky, as if it was some buoyant thing like a balloon, it was blown by the wind until it disappeared into the distance, settling in a place that seemed very far away. A place that seems to be moving even further away, with every new spring that passes. One of my biggest regrets was that I was never able to get close to Emma. I don’t think anyone could. I should have tried harder. I thought I was in love with her, and maybe I was, but I was also in love with someone else. And when you are young, it’s way too easy just to walk away and forget about the people, and the things that you once thought you could never live without—as long as there was someone else. Perhaps it’s the cruel nature of our animal inheritance. Hardwired deep within us, is the latent capacity to run away when things get too dangerous. In other words, it is in a our nature to break each others hearts, if our survival depends on it. A few weeks later, Leigh, the girl I was dating, invited me, and few of our friends from school to spend spring break at her grandparents condo in Gulf Shores. I tried to get in touch with Emma before we left, but I couldn’t reach her. When we got there I even tried calling her a few times, but still there was no answer. It was not until the day after we got home, that I got a call from her sister, Kimmy, and I drove out to their house. When I got there, she met me on the porch. She never told me any details, so I never really knew what happened to Emma. I know that something killed her. The official record lists suicide, the bitter and irascible truth, written, or rather spilled haphazardly across the pristine pages of her short life, and now stained forever by the permanent ink of reality: yes, she did kill herself. Though it seems to be an irrefutable fact, when you do something so out-of-character as take your own life, something so vulgar, fantasy has usually taken over. That hidden part of yourself emerges, and important truths such as love and death, life and pain, take on new meaning. And in this almost subconscious state, it becomes impossible to tell the difference anymore. The dream world takes on a new weight, and there are so many things that can happen to someone in a dream, or a in nightmare. Unfortunately, real dreams do not end when you open your eyes; and it’s the same with nightmares. The inescapable confines of our own hearts and minds, are the most dangerous places on this earth, or any place beyond. Once you are trapped in that darkness, there seems to be only two ways out: love, or death. Emma simply got them mixed up. Most beautiful things are only temporary. Emma was no different. But if we do not forget them, and hold on to them even after they are gone, they will always be there. Often the greatest joys we derive from this life, are through the memory of those things that are so fragile and unreal, that if we dare to touch them, even briefly, they would fall apart and we would lose them forever. So when I think of Emma, I can only remember pieces of her, as if she was a photograph that had been torn apart and scattered into the wind. A graceful gesture of an ivory hand as she waved goodbye across the pasture; the tip of her freckled nose that wrinkled a little when she really smiled; the perfect curve of a bare hip that glowed in the dark like a crescent moon; the iris of her eye, that was dark as the fresh, upturned earth, and flecked with tiny fragments of gold that sparkled in the sunlight like the bottom of a clear, swift moving stream. Though I know she was beautiful in a way that was nothing like I have ever known again, when I try, I can’t see her. It’s as if she was only a reflection in a mirror that had been shattered long ago, and there are too many missing pieces to ever put her back together. I didn’t find out until after she died, that the song she sang that day, was about me. Her sister found the lyrics in one of Emma’s old diaries. She handed it to me and I held the yellowing notebook in my hands like a relic, and without looking at the rest of what she had written, I read the words out loud. Though they were legible, printed neatly in that almost calligraphic script that I remember well, without her voice they made no sense, as if the words had been encrypted by time, the meaning irreversibly blurred by the years in between, and when she killed herself, she took the meaning with her, and I would never understand them. Even though it was a long time ago, I stop whatever I’m doing sometimes, when the sky is just the right color, and the light lands on the trees in just the right way, and I sit still for a minute, trying to remember the melody of that song that she sang to me on that early spring evening. And how, as she sang (a song that I had not even known was about me), the last seconds of light slowly fell behind the curvature of the earth, along with the words, the melody and everything else that was beautiful in the world. And because the earth is round, and because I cannot stop time from moving, or the seasons from violently devouring each other over and over again, and powerless to prevent the sun from rising, or setting, I will never be able to see that place where Emma now resides. I will never be able to see as far as I want to see.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 08:13:38 +0000
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