Tuesday, November 12, 2013


Reflections of a Summer in Bingen

The retired schoolteacher struggled with his journal entry about his missing Ella.
Old age, loneliness, despair, anger gnawed at him. He crumpled the page he had
been writing on and tossed his pen down the stairway in frustration. July 2009 – the
midst of a blackout in Shreveport. The flickering light of emergency candles on the
large wooden table did not soften the octogenarian’s grief over the sudden loss of his
dearly departed wife of 50 years. Dwight shouted, “I need you Ella. I need you.
Come and join me honey. I cannot live without you.” The flashlight that he
retrieved from the mahogany cupboard illuminated memories of the summer of
1975: Bingen on the river Rhine, the blonde-haired Fraulein Helga. He smiled as he
recalled that first meeting with the beautiful blue-eyed Rhineland maiden. His
reminiscences about the secret affair with Helga soothed his misery and loneliness,
while guilt deluged him at the thoughts of leaving Ella behind in Baton Rogue. He
wept in a stuttering voice, “El-, El-, Ella, how, how, how could I’ve, I’ve done, done
this to you. For-, for-, forgive me, me, for cheating on you.” Afterwards, Dwight
wondered, what became of Helga?

Jamal Ali





Monday, October 28, 2013

Turkey Stories


The Backbone
by Travis Oltmann

Her robe is cinched tight and she is bleary eyed in the morning. Coffee, dark, hot, intermittent sips. Turkey out of the sink. Cellophane wrapping cut with a knife. She takes the bird and puts it in the roasting pan. It is slippery and awkward and the task is not made easier by her arthritic hands.

                The turkey gets moved out of the way and she fetches cookware from the cupboard and heats it on the stove. Bacon in the pan. While it’s sizzling she takes day old bread and chops it into workable cubes. Olive oil, sprinkle with parsley, bake, four hundred degrees. The bacon wakes her husband and he comes down to inspect in blue jeans and a striped maroon shirt he’s had since there was color in his hair.

                They kiss and smile. Another day of year forty-one.

                Her husband goes outside to see if there’s anything to fix or anything he can improve. There’s not, but he’ll find something. He’s the type of man renovators will curse centuries later.

                Bread is done. She pulls it from the oven. Chopped celery and onions in with the bacon. Her coffee is cold and she heats it in the microwave because she doesn’t have time to make a fresh pot. The turkey needs to go in. Guests are coming. 

                Her son comes down and eats a piece of bacon. Her other son comes down and eats a piece of bacon. Over the years she’s learned to fry a bit more than she needs.

                Bread in with the bacon as well as thyme, sage, and chicken stock. When it’s mixed properly she puts it in a bowl to cool and massages the turkey with butter. Upstairs to change.

                Upon returning her son asks if she needs a hand and she says she would love it if he could help stuff the turkey. She shows him how to clump the breading together and force it inside. He doesn’t like the feeling of the breading or the turkey’s nether regions so he sits on the couch and watches football with his brother.

                The turkey is in, she checks her watch and she’s right on schedule. Her coffee sits on the rotating table in the microwave and it has gotten cold again. She re-heats the cup and puts a pot on the stove to parboil a sack of potatoes. It simmers while she peels the skins with a paring knife. There’s a gadget in the drawer that would speed up the process but it hurts in her grip. Foreign, too. Not how she learned from her mother.

                Her husband comes in and asks the boys for hand lifting a sixty pound light fixture. The brothers complain and grumble as they’re taken away from football for twenty minutes.

                Dishes clutter the countertop now and she washes and dries them in the sink so she has space to work. The afternoon games are on and the announcers call plays from the living room where her sons drift in and out of consciousness.

                Extended family shows up, friends too. Her husband adds another section to the table and she’s working furiously in the kitchen to have everything ready. Butter and cream in the potatoes, mash. Salt and pepper. Turkey out, one last baste. Cranberry sauce on the stove, remove from the heat so it doesn’t melt the skin from anyone’s mouth.

                Although thanksgiving is relatively new in her lineage the basic recipes and preparations have traveled through many hands and many years to sit on an Albertan table. She was taught on the frigid, windswept plains of small town Saskatchewan. Her mother the same. Tracing it back further will lead to a long boat ride and optimistic peasants.

                Finally, after nine hours, bowls and platters and carafes cover more visible space than the red table cloth. Laughter and cutlery scraping plates fills the room.

                Everyone remarks how wonderful the food is. Afterwards with glasses of wine in beer in hand they retreat to the living room and catch up on each other’s lives.

                She listens to the stories of the people she’s known for her entire life or their entire life. Familiar and family bear such a close resemblance. She smiles to herself.

                Late at night her tipsy husband silently arranges the ingredients to a sandwich. It is dark and he decides to leave the lights off. What a racket her coffee cup makes when he pushes a plate of turkey into the microwave.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

Call For Submissions: Turkeys and More

It's Autumn. The leaves are falling, the air is crisp, the pumpkins are getting ready to take Cinderella to the ball, and many of us are looking forward to that Thanksgiving gutsplosion known as the turkey dinner.

Send us your turkey stories, or Thanksgiving stories, or any kind of writing that can be loosely attenuated to the turkey/Thanksgiving theme.

Email your submission to awcswriterscorner@gmail.com and the AWCS blog turkey will happily share it with our readers.




Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Retreat, by Jamal Ali




This wilderness of tranquility
at Goldeye Lake,
is so soothing,
my mind is at ease.

Evergreens tickle the sky.
The placid lake reflects my mood of complete calm.
Life takes a slow pace here.
This aura of prevailing silence,
is so scintillating
that it revels my psyche.

Healing surroundings,
the fresh air rejuvenates.
I rejoice in the freedom of space and nature.
The innocent chatter of the squirrels,
so full of life,
scampers from place to place
in my midst.

In the early dawn,
an owl summons its mate,
a cry of longing echoing against the foothills.
The log cabins,
are full of splendid coziness
in the dark nights.





Friday, July 5, 2013

Short-Short Story Contest Finalist


WHAT WAS NOW

By Phyllis Heltay

Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock…then the damnable rodent continued to try to skitter a way into my works, chased up my tower by Desdemona’s cat. The turn of the last century makers were not metal fools and so built me impervious to the elements and any creatures that might consider this a safe perching nest. My iron face has retained its original subtle patina, despite what it routinely has to witness that is less than dignified, I must say.
Horrors! The aforementioned Desdemona is ignoring her marauding tabby just as she ignores the sign at the entrance to this public rose garden – NO PETS PLEASE. There you have it. The “please” at the end makes it seem like a kindly suggestion rather than a rule. While she sits on that bench, for exactly forty five minutes each and every Tuesday through Thursday, her freedom crazed animal will pounce on mice, beetles, and wind-blown leaves. Then, when its metabolism is charged to the maximum, it will use the base of the Queen Elizabeth Pink as a litter box. Shameful. Desdemona will ignore the desecration, only looking up once at my face to check that she hasn’t become so lost in her fiction that she’s out-stayed her welcome. If only my minute and hour hands could form a scowl to show my annoyance. However, I was built for the inevitable, not judgement. One minute follows the next, regardless of the endless prayers to the contrary etched on the hopeful upturned faces I see on a regular basis. They come to the garden to slow down time, and even stop it.
A few days ago a young man entered the park on a wave of anxiety, his telephone contraption glued to his ear. I’m surprised that anyone can look at me and remember how to read the hour since the style is to have the numbers flashed without a hint of irony or grace. I’ve seen expectant lovers hold their breath between the ticks of my filigree minute hand, parsing out the seconds until their flushed partners arrive, not a moment too soon.
The young man circled me twice, muttering obscenities and then, I am almost sure, I heard the sound of a gut retching pain that emanated from his core as he threw his device to the ground. He pressed his forehead to my cool metal and stood silent and still. When he felt the vibration of the hour being struck he raised his head, and I saw it in his eyes, that prayer – a sad expression of overwhelming regret and loss, and an intense need for my hands to move counter clock wise, giving him the moment back when irreparably choices changed the course of his life. I can only look down and offer another second, minute, and hour to set things right. Can he feel the vast forgiving ocean of time in those infinitesimal spaces between then, and now?