2024 Writing Contest: Fiction

In her books column from March, The Bookshelf scribe Annabella Farmer wrote that Mother Island author Jamie Figueroa “arrived at a blended storytelling method that weaves memory with poetry, myth with traditional stories,” for her most recent book. We knew we had to ask Figueroa to judge the fiction portion of our 2024 Writing Contest. Figueroa kindly obliged, and you’ll find those winners herein. “One to Another is a story that excels in language, detail, and the ability to capture the complexity of characters, a lifetime lived, and a particular place so thoroughly, seemingly so effortlessly, in such a short span—a mere three pages,” Figueroa says of the winning tale. “I was taken immediately and reread it with greater enjoyment each time.” May you find similar excitement, dear readers.

Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award, Figueroa’s debut novel “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times and The Boston Review among others. A VONA alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

First Place

One to Another

By Natalie Michaels

It always seemed to happen this way, that they would find themselves back in Boise in December. And they always seemed to allow themselves a reunion, a sort of permissible relapse before the annual beginning. It was colder than it had ever been before on the occasion of their meeting. Daniel looked older, swaddled in the coat he always wore.

Saul met him at the bus stop. The two had a similar bulk, the inherited gravity of their father. Their embrace was more like a leaden collision. Saul offered the customary greeting as he oriented them in the direction of the café: “My god, another year.” Daniel reached to grasp and shake Saul’s shoulders in response before burying his hands again in his pockets. Walking close, they strode forward in step with one another with brisk, straight-legged swinging of duty-bound prison guards or soldiers.

“It feels in a way like we always end up in the same place,” Daniel said as he pulled open the café’s glass door, “or at least the same kind of place.” They both knew this café saw each other here often in passing.

They sat at one of the small two-seaters in the center of the service floor, an island for a couple. Aside from ordering coffee, silence restrained them at the start, solemn dues paid to the time passed. It never felt right, even if they could have, to resume the conversation where it left off. So they began with repetition.

“Did Mom drink it the way you do,” Daniel asked, “with cream and sugar?” “No,” Saul shook his head lightly, “Black, and very little.”

“That’s right,” Daniel said, “that’s right, I always forget.” “You always ask.”

“Well, I never saw her do it,” Daniel reminded him, “I never saw her do it, not that I can remember.” “And you told me that Dad drank it the same way as she did, straight, but like water.”

“Instead of water.”

“And we’re not like them, I guess,” Saul said, “us like one another and them like each other.”

“It’s true,” Daniel said, smiling at his brother, “because in so many ways we’re younger versions of them, me of Dad and you of Mom.”

“You know, I have an image in my mind of Dad with his coffee,” Saul said thoughtfully, “a kind of imaginary memory.” A pause. Saul began again, “he always looks sort of defeated when I picture him, always glum, always sort of swirling and staring down into his cup.”

“That’s because of what Mom told you,” Daniel spat back, “but he became a very different person. zHe was like me, like me now.”

“But I was older when they split, and I knew him better than you knew Mom,” Saul shook his head, “I know him better than you knew her.”

“But you didn’t know him. The closest you can come to knowing him is knowing me.”

And then they sort of sat, staring down and around and occasionally at one another, wondering if it would really begin. To resume the conversation they’d been having for 23 years would be another kind of repetition. They would be working as they always did towards an apparently impossible resolution.

Saul initiated their meetings after he heard from his physician that their father had died, that Daniel was languishing, drunken and angry and lost. Their mother died when Saul was 17, and Saul recognized a familiar kind of sadness and fury reflected all those years later in the story he heard of his estranged brother. He arrived, some December evening, at the bar where Daniel was reportedly moored, and laid in wait. He approached Daniel as a stranger, as he was in a sense, after a childhood apart. They were middle-aged now, living separate but similar lives in the same town, and they were similarly softened with the polished uniformity that arises after so many years of living. When Daniel walked in, he looked familiar, so much like Saul and so much like everyone else.

Daniel recognized Saul, but didn’t say anything in his near-sobriety. They talked stiltedly, milling around in a larger group, each carefully watching the other. Later, less sober, Daniel took Saul aside. “Cut the crap,” he’d said, “I know you. I know what you’re doing.”

Saul ceded immediately, grateful for the recognition. He asked his brother to sit down with him. They began, cautiously, the first of countless conversations required to reconstruct the parallel narratives of their childhoods. Each one learned what the other had been told. They struggled to believe what the other told them.

Saul and Daniel’s parents divorced when Daniel was two years old, and they decided, in lieu of the seesawing traditional in shared custody arrangements, that each would take one of their boys. Saul went with his mother and Daniel with his father. The brothers grew up separately, each fed stories about the other’s life by their respective parent. Saul held so fast to his mother and Daniel to his father because they felt so close, abnormally and dangerously close, to orphanhood. There was a relief to finding one another, but also an accompanying pain.

There was a reason they met each December. The reason they met so consistently was the same reason they met so infrequently, a kind of fractured and confused need. In conversation, they couldn’t help but go back to the way their conversations began, constant reexamination of their differences.

This December, this extraordinarily cold December, they were each waiting for their meeting to end and thinking about when they would meet next. “Why do we always say the same things,” Daniel asked after the silence, “why do we always have the same talks?”

“I guess that’s true,” Saul mumbled while fiddling with the sugar packets in the center of the table, “we’re damned.”

“That’s no answer,” Daniel said, looking intently at Saul, “It’s not a real answer.”

“We just repeat the same things they said to us,” Saul offered, fiddling with the ketchup packets now, “But now we say them to one another.”

“Well that’s funny,” Daniel glanced away from his brother, “saying what they said to keep us apart. Maybe they were afraid we’d leave them if they didn’t keep us apart.”

They thought it strange that they remained separate despite their reunion, limited in a way to the distance at which their parents kept them from each other.

“I guess we say the things different than they did,” Daniel sat back.

Saul clasped his hands together and thought. “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels the same.”

And they sat again in silence, looking down but at one another. “Sauls’ hands,” Daniel thought, “they look so much like Dad’s.”

Natalie Michaels is a college student in Santa Fe. She is currently completing a wall of plaster nose casts and would like your nose if you’re willing to volunteer it. In addition to replicating body parts and writing, she enjoys chocolate, dogs, dancing, and spectacularly long road trips.

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Second Place

Gibbous Moon

By Shannon Chamberlain

It had been a long night.

Now that it’s over, now that he can fully catch his breath in the door to the basement, he feels rather than smells the stink on him. It’s a visceral thing, a garment you can take on and off. Sweat, of course, but other things, too, the less obvious parts of the job and the joy. The tang of broken glass. The popcorn she’d been making in a big copper pot on the stove and the charred brown smell when she left it alone to burn. Fallen, rotting leaves, from when they’d ended up in the garden beds, slipping and crawling on the wet earth and the things that were slowly returning to it, melting back into the ground that bred them. Something slightly tangy that he can’t identify, something that reminds him of backyard cookouts.

And the blood. Always the blood.

Most of it is hers. But she’d gotten him once or twice, wielding a large, serrated knife with a vicious tip. She had put up a better fight than most. Well, not better, exactly, but smarter. Not for her that moment of frozen incredulity when she first saw him reflected in the glass of the doorwall, no long seesaw ride back to comprehension and action: I am going to die if I don’t move but I can’t I can’t oh god.

No, she’d gone for the phone, in its usual place on her kitchen counter. Of course, it wasn’t in its usual place (he’d seen to that) but this futile gesture alone would have bought him a full minute with some of the others as they clawed frantically for what they could plainly see wasn’t there, digging under bills and receipts from the dentist, student loan paperwork and reminders that the cat was due at the vet’s office, pawing through the detritus of their nearly-finished lives: a minute he might have used to inflict that first sweet breach, the fast-slow glide of the knife as it burst through skin, and muscle, and sinew, and bone.

For some of them, the night might have ended there and then, splayed across the granite kitchen island, bleeding out on the unopened mail. Not for this one, though. There were stairs in the house, but she’d blasted by them—not even tempted! Remarkable! The same for the closet. He’d always enjoyed a good closet knife fight. The confined space.

The jangling hangers making crazy slashing shadow patterns. The way that they folded in the end, like clothes put away for the season.

Stupid, predictable cows.

This one was, too, in the end—even if she had fought more skillfully than most, and delayed him by hours. No, she’d signed her own death warrant over the course of the weeks, months that he’d followed her. Always vary your routine, they told you. Well, to be fair, he told them, when he taught the department’s self-defense class at the library. He told them before he demonstrated the heel-palm strike and the groin kick, scanning the crowd for the combination of black hair and gray eyes that he enjoys. It always seemed fair, to give them this small, sporting chance.

But their kicks are always feeble and they always keep to the same tedious routine: wake, check phone, shower, dress, Starbucks run, work, gym, home, Netflix. It barely changes at all. Maybe a house party, emerging so sloppy drunk that they barely noticed the man across the street, leaning against his car.

As he stands there on the killing floor, his tools before him, neat and aligned with the relevant constellations, there’s something that suddenly seems endless and exhausting about the whole affair, from the enchantment of the first sighting to the long, slow stalk to the inevitable conclusion. In a way, he’s extraordinarily grateful to this one sitting before him now, for even the slight variations in the pattern—the challenge.

She’s stirring in her bonds, fluttering her wrists against them, a butterfly beating glass. This next part—the talking part—is the part that he loves. The part that he craves. They always think that they can save themselves if they keep him talking. He’s learned to play along for awhile, leading them, pretending to hear them, pretending to pay attention to their stupid “arguments.”

Until they can’t speak anymore.

Her gray eyes flicker open and meet his, her black hair matted but still lovely, lovely.

“Hello,” she says, a slow smile spreading. He frowns. This is his line, and his smile. She’s actually stepping on his line. He decides to pretend that it hasn’t happened. “Hello,” he says, with a slow, parallel smile.

This does not deter her. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here,” she continues.

This time, he can’t stop himself, can’t maintain that cool aloofness that has saved him during traffic stops and other near misses, the times he cannot afford to have his trunk searched. He settles on flatness. “You brought me here.”

Something was wrong. She wasn’t struggling against the zip ties. They always struggled against the zip ties, no matter how pointless it was to struggle against the zip ties. It made them feel better, he supposed, to know that they’d fought for their pathetic lives. Maybe the movies taught them to do it.

Something metallic begins to eddy at the sides of his tongue—panic, he supposes. Panic, and astonishment.

But there’s no reason to panic. He is free, a small, wicked arsenal spread in front of him on plastic. Her hands are tied behind her back, and her ankles are bound to the legs of a chair.

She says nothing—only keeps smiling that infuriating, Cheshire smile.

“I brought you here!” he splutters. “Look at you! You’re…going to die! I’m going to kill you! I am your death!”

She meets his gaze, and keeps smiling, as if he’d just asked her about the weather, or complimented her tote.

He can’t stand it.

“I brought you here. I followed you. I’ve chosen you. I’ve chosen you to die. I’ve chosen you for the sacrifice. I’ve...” He trails off, his voice growing feebler. “I’ve brought you here.”

Now it sounds like a plea, a child asking a mother to buy gum in the grocery store checkout line. She glances around—the plastic sheets, the black trash bags—but not in the way of someone who has found anything she didn’t expect.

“Consider it this way,” she says, reasonably. “This is my basement. My house. My chair. My horror movie marathon that you interrupted.

“Of course,” she says, appearing to consider, “I was expecting you tonight. It is the gibbous moon. Very original. It’s not the full moon. It’s not a new moon. Those would be the traditional choices.”

He stares at her, blinks, tastes metal.

“You see,” she says, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper. “I’ve been following you. You wake at 6:30. You get on your phone. You check the tracker you put in my car. You get dressed for work. You go to your pathetic job, always the same tuna fish sandwich, the same bag of chips. Not even the good chips, Tyler! Then home. Back on your phone. A microwave dinner, feed the cat. A conversation with your imaginary friend. Don’t worry about the cat, by the way—I’ll make sure she finds a good home.”

His hand trembles as it reaches for the first of the knives. He’ll have to make her shut up, even if it means cutting this part of the ritual short. He drops it, reaches for it again, drops it again. Something is wrong. His hands are clammy; he can’t make his fingers close. The taste in his mouth cloys.

And still, she talks and talks.

“My hair isn’t even black, you know. And I’m wearing contacts.”

“I saw you!” he gasps. His mouth gapes open and close, like a drying fish. “You were mine! You were always mine!”

Now he knows. He holds his sharpest boning knife like a mallet, slashing it wildly through the air, hoping but not expecting to make contact with flesh.

“Blood,” he gargles, pointing at her shirt. Or at least in the general direction of where he remembers her shirt.

“Ketchup,” she corrects. “Washes out easier than corn syrup.”

He collapses on the floor, his view of the basement tilt-a-whirling, careening away.

“How?” The final question of his life.

“Poison. On my phone’s touchscreen. The phone that you so cleverly stole. Why do you think I was wearing gloves all night, dickhead?”

He’s gone. She hopes that he went only after she uttered the word “dickhead,” but you can never tell. She inches the chair across the basement floor to the saw that she’s mounted on a post, just at the level of her wrists. It’s two minutes’ work, and then her ankles, which she does with one of his knives. She stands up, stretches luxuriously.

It isn’t understanding she longs for, though. Not conversation. The next part—the cutting part—is the part that she loves.

Shannon Chamberlain used to teach at St. John’s College, until she was informed that her writing was too polished. Now she writes books for children and apparently short stories about serial killers. She’s not sure what her favorite part is: the talking or the cutting.

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Third Place

Let’s Just Say We’re Two Friends

By Tom Andes

“Will you please pass the ketchup?” Billy said.

Luann was making a face, “You put ketchup on your eggs?”

They were sitting in the Village Inn outside Ardmore, Billy worried someone from one of their meetings was going to come in and find them.

“No,” he said, “I just want to hold the bottle. So, what if I put ketchup on my eggs?”

“Maybe you missed your calling,” Luann said. “Maybe you should’ve been a comedian.”

Under the table, she was touching his leg with hers, and Billy had it again, that same feeling he’d had looking at her across the basement at 935 Grand, at the Ardmore Group Twelve Step meeting he’d been attending more regularly than he’d done anything good for him in his life for the last 87 days. Not like she was the most beautiful girl—or woman—he’d ever seen, no, nothing like that. More like she had Billy’s number, and he liked that, the feeling she could see right through him.

“I went to a comedy open mic,” he said, “once.”

When she handed him the bottle, he whacked the neck like his sponsor had shown him, holding the bottle of Heinz at an angle, so a big glop of the stuff came out, pooling next to the scrambled eggs on his plate.

“Yeah?” Luann was cutting her blueberry waffle with the side of her fork. “How’d that go?”

Billy took a bite of his eggs. “Went all right, I guess.” He chewed, swallowed.

“Well,” Luann said, “that’s nice.”

She was raising an eyebrow.

“Okay,” Billy said, “to tell the truth, I bombed. It was painful, awful, and I hope I never do it again.”

He drank his coffee. It was nine o’clock at night, and he knew it would keep him up, but it didn’t matter. His sponsor, the other, older guys from meetings, the guys who had time, they all told him the same thing—no major changes for the first year you were clean and sober. So, Billy could keep smoking, and he could drink as much coffee as he wanted. It didn’t matter if he was a loser living at his ma’s place, crashing on her couch and sleeping till noon. Sobriety was the most important thing, and the rest of life could wait.

“What is it?” Luann touched his hand. It was like she could see his emotions going back and forth, like a see-saw.

“Nothing.” Billy stirred ketchup into his eggs, taking a bite of his sausage patty. But the truth was, all those older guys had also told him not to get involved with anybody, no dating, never mind dating somebody else from the program, especially someone from the program like Luann, who had time—she’d been sober 14 years—and who was nearly twice Billy’s age, 39 to his 22.

“Is it because we’re here together,” she said, “and you’re afraid the guys from the meeting are going to show up?”

Chewing his sausage, Billy stared at the napkin holder, at the puddle of ketchup on his plate, at the syrup dripping from Luann’s waffle, anywhere but at her green eyes.

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess so.”

Of course, that’s what it was. They called it the Thirteenth Step, hooking up with a newcomer, and wasn’t that what Luann was doing, hanging out with him?

Billy felt an excited buzz in the pit of his stomach. He liked the feeling she could see through him, liked the feeling he couldn’t lie to her. A girl he’d dated once had called him a “little sub,” and maybe this was what she’d meant.

Except Luann wasn’t a girl, she was a woman with two young kids and a job teaching third grade at Lone Grove Elementary.

He wanted more coffee, but it was the last thing he needed.

“Listen.” Luann was touching his hand again. “I know what guys say at those meetings. I know what they say about me. They say you’re not supposed to date, right?”

“Yeah.” Billy nodded. At first, to be honest, the whole no dating thing had seemed like a relief, since he’d never had much game, never been the kind of cool, confident guy who was good at asking girls—or women—out. But what was he supposed to do, keep seeing his best gal, Rosie Palm and her five sisters, for the next nine months?

He still couldn’t look at Luann.

“Well,” she said, “if it makes you feel better, let’s just say this isn’t a date, all right? Let’s just say we’re two friends sitting here having coffee and a bite to eat, okay?”

“Okay.” But Billy liked it being a real date. Besides which, his sponsor and the other guys wouldn’t approve of that, either.

“You still don’t look happy.” Luann put down her fork. And now she seemed like she was getting testy, and Billy felt his world collapsing. Luann was the first woman who’d expressed interest in him, the first woman who’d made a move in months, maybe years, and he was blowing it.

“No,” Billy said, “I’m happy to be here with you.”

“I feel like I have to handle you with kid gloves,” Luann said. “It’s like pulling teeth, trying to get you to talk.”

Billy laughed. What were kid gloves, gloves you wore when you were dealing with kids? Maybe it was something for her job.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t need to be sorry.” She was sitting back in the booth, sipping her decaf, Billy freaking out, worrying he’d blown it.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, then he swore. What was he doing, apologizing for his apology, saying he was sorry for being sorry?

“Let me guess,” Luann said, “your sponsor and all those other guys also told you that you can’t be friends with a woman, since men and women can’t be friends, so you know if they walked in the restaurant right now, they’d still disapprove of us sitting here?”

“Yeah.” Billy was cringing. He felt like he might’ve melted into the booth. He didn’t know how to explain it, the way he felt like she was prying him open and pulling him apart, and the way he also liked that.

“You know that’s just a bunch of sexist claptrap, right?” She was wiping her fingers on her napkin.

“Yeah,” Billy said, but did he? When his sponsor, Rick, and the other guys he usually hung out with after meetings told him stuff like that, it made sense. A man and a woman couldn’t have a relationship without one of them feeling attracted to the other, they said. Was Billy so spiritually advanced that he could have a chaste friendship with a girl without trying to get in her pants? Gird your loins for the first year of sobriety, they said, or at least until you’ve started your Ninth Step.

“I think they’d tell me I was Thirteenth Stepping you,” Billy said. “Or maybe they’d say you were Thirteenth Stepping me.”

Luann burst out laughing. She had tears in her eyes, and she really was pretty, in a floral top and a denim skirt, with lipstick. But Billy didn’t think what he’d said was funny.

“One of the kids in my class,” Luann said, “the other day, he fell off the seesaw and knocked his two front teeth out. That’s what I deal with all day.”

Billy nodded, but he didn’t get it.

“The kid, was he okay?”

“You know what they say in meetings about fear,” Luann said, “about False Evidence Appearing Real?”

“Keep working it,” Billy said, “till it works.”

That was another one of the slogans, the sayings.

Keep it simple, stupid—KISS—that was another one.

And Billy did want to kiss Luann.

“It’s all imaginary,” Luann said. “It’s all in your head.”

“What’s all in my head?” Billy said.

He liked Luann, but he was trying to do his 90 meetings in 90 days, and he felt like he might die without the program, if he didn’t listen to what Rick and those other guys said. Without the program, Billy didn’t know how to live life, didn’t even know how to pour ketchup.

Luann opened her purse. She lit a cigarette, a Basic Light, and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “I know how it goes. If you hook up with me, and you end up drinking again, they’ll say it was my fault, like I’m the hussy. They always blame the woman.”

Billy was stammering. “I don’t think it’s like that.”

“Thanks for having coffee with me,” Luann said. “I’m paying for yours. If you’re interested, if you want to see me again, I’m going. You’re welcome to come home with me.”

She got up and walked out of the restaurant.

Billy took another bite of his sausage, trying to decide.

Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me, forthcoming from Crescent City Books in 2025. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Best American Mystery Stories 2012, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Santa Monica Review. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician, performing solo and with several bands. He is also a freelance editor, writing coach, teaches, picks up catering shifts, and pet sits. His two acclaimed EPs of original songs will be rereleased on vinyl by Southern Crescent Recording Co. in 2025. He can be found at tomandes.com.