Bitten
Shannon Fandler is 17 years old and has been writing most of her life. She is the editor of her school literary-arts magazine. She also loves to read, drive, spend time with her horse, and listen to music that no one else likes.
It happened in the heat of the moment…the silver of the iron, swiping hurriedly over a skirt, nipped the silken membrane of my resting left wrist. I shrieked and snatched my arm away, the curved metal nose sticking momentarily and leaving a searing grill-mark in its oh-so-slow retreat. The skirt was for my mother’s impending burial, but the burn was for nil. I stared at it dumbly, watching a blister billow up like a snapping ivory sail. Too stunned to think of running the cool tap over my arm, I instead pressed my tongue anxiously to the spot. In its sensitivity, the burned area felt the grate of my every raised taste bud. I sucked. The blister tasted papery, salty, singed.
When I was a child, my mother always warned adamantly, “Hot bites the tot!” She never lit candles, always jabbed an elbow in my bath water before lowering me in. She’d press clothes after I was tucked into bed, my eyelids growing weighty to the creak of the ironing board and the hiss of steam soaking my father’s dress shirts like a series of sputtering breaths.
My mother’s mantra superseded her mental integrity and my toddlerhood. For years, I ironed my clothes, burned incense, cooked food safely. I never bought Band-Aids or jars of salve. Funny, how with the final fading of her existence, that ironclad defensive shield fizzled so instantaneously. Examining the moon-shaped scarlet bubble growing up from between my ridged veins, I felt the deficit of maternal protective charms. I was vulnerable. Bitten. Cursed.
Second Place Entry:
The Quotable Taft
Gary Malone studied English and Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He works in Sydney, Australia as a computer programmer.
It happened in the heat of the moment.
This explanation, reproduced between quotation marks whose font size had been deliberately inflated to lampoon, formed the Clarion’s front-page headline the morning after the Mayor of Winchester was arraigned. The remark – hackneyed, hopelessly unimaginative, almost schoolboyish in its enfeebled attempt at self-exculpation – was the stick with which Mayor Taft was to be beaten for the rest of his days.
This bone, flung hurriedly at a pack of baying reporters whom the Mayor was fleeing as he ascended the courthouse steps the previous day, succinctly comprised his entire side of the story. For he was to say nothing else to the press or public until the case was concluded. Thus the citizens of Winchester were left to ponder the intense ‘heat’ in which the Mayor had awarded a battery of construction and engineering contracts to firms who had all exhibited a proclivity for paying a peculiarly consistent percentage of the gross into a single offshore account. As for the ‘moment’, it emerged that it had been spread over three years. And eighteen contracts.
For months, the city frothed with indignation and satire. Locals DJs duly discussed the Mayor’s susceptibility to ‘impulse-corruption’; and the columnist who had broken the story wrote admiringly of Taft’s ‘speed venality’.
In a previous century, when the Winchester Clarion first hit the news-stands, someone remarked that its name ‘sounded like a device that made beautiful music while inflicting a gunshot wound’. As it would on the day the verdict was read out.
Third Place Entry:
CLIMAX
After being engulfed in words spewed by everyone from Rushdie to King for a lifetime (read twenty five years), Fouad Khan discovered one day that he could put together a few sentences himself… the skill started coming naturally, motivation however was somewhat harder to find. For a while he wrote sociopolitical commentary disguised as humor for Pakistan’s most widely read English weekly… until he ran out of common ground to stand on with the editors. These days, he’s living the role of a Fulbright Scholar pursuing graduate studies in environmental sciences. If you’ve got a space, any space to fill with words, you can reach Fouad at fouadmkhan@yahoo.com.
It happened in the heat of the moment.
He pulled me onstage —my dainty white fingers in his full, brown, manicured grip— and the next snippet of real consciousness was the feel of cold hardwood under my bare skin as I struggled to hang on to my panties. Then, I remember telling him off with a clear “NO” and a shake of the head. The customer had had enough fun for the night.
Backing away, he winced in disappointment… pulled on the silk panties so hard that my hips lifted inches off the stage before the tiny garment was reduced to a shred of black net in his hands. I fell to the floor buck naked, through a black-hole of instincts in the continuum of civilization, nothing more than a member of the weaker sex completely at the disposal of an aggressive male; shocked and reflexively trying to cover my nudity with both hands.
Five years on, I was having dinner with John’s parents and our two boys when Spike TV aired this “Shocking Moment Caught on Tape” from a male strip club in Hawaii. The footage was grainy, but you could easily tell the faces of people on stage. That was the winter of my divorce, four summers ago.
To this day, I can rewind and feel his strong arm grabbing my wrist, moving my resistant hand aside… see his head going down between my spread legs… sense his lips touching me… barely… as the tease climaxes.
I’ve never had to fake an orgasm since, ever.
