2019 Writing Contest

When Pasatiempo calls for submissions to its annual writing contest, we never know what we’re going to get. We don’t issue a theme; we ask only for your best writing on any topic — entered as fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Usually, the writers are from Santa Fe, but sometimes they enter from around the state or even, as in the case of this year’s winning poem, from outside of New Mexico. This year, about 150 people allowed a team of volunteer judges (reporters, editors, and graphic designers from The New Mexican )to read their submissions. As usual, the process wasn’t easy. How does one evaluate a story about a man who turns into a moth against one in which a woman longs for the comfort of religious tradition and ritual? Can an anecdote about meeting a beloved old movie actor at a Santa Fe bar be compared to a road trip story in which a woman revisits her birthplace in Southern New Mexico? Every entry was worthy of consideration as we waited to be transported by your imaginations. We might be sucked in by a quirky yet darkly poetic voice, an evocative description of another world, or the clever rhymes and earnest patriotism in a poem about horses.

Themes that emerged in 2019 included personal transformation, memory, environmental concerns, and family issues. Of the first-place winner in the adult fiction category, a judge observed the author’s “lovely way with language” and said the writing is reminiscent of an Anne Tyler novel. A judge for the adult poetry category lauded the author of the winning poem for the strength of her imagery of natural phenomenon, the way it draws parallels to the human voice, “and the sense of transience and longing she evokes.” Judges for the adult nonfiction category were impressed by the overall quality of the entries. As usual, nonfiction essays reveled in local color and history, offering insider and outsider perspectives on the City Different and the Land of Enchantment.

Children and teens wrote about animals, creativity, family, history, nature, and more, impressing us with their energy and vision. There was even a murder mystery among the winners. There were some truly surprising turns of phrase and a few key lines that will likely resonate with readers long after they close these pages.

Said an enthralled judge for the teen prose category: “The overall aftertaste was existential.”

Mathew Mudbridge turns into a moth. His episodes — he’s not sure if there is a better word for it — last about an hour, but, then, when he’s changed, he’s not strictly focused on keeping time. What he does know is that he will start to feel — dizzy? Dizzy might be the best word, although it doesn’t quite match the feeling. Dizzy will do, if it has to. Either way, almost as soon as he begins to notice the change, it happens, and it’s past him and he is a moth, flying. The world becomes vast, and slow. Colors change, everything shifts ultraviolet. He suddenly has antennae, fanned, expansive, grand — he senses with them — something akin to taste and smell, but different, more full than both. Hairs on his many legs feel the world, vibrations, changes in the air, the heat, the humidity — his whole self experiences.

He has no memory, no capacity for it, no ability to store anything — only programming, biological ‘if-thens’ — move to the light, fly away from motion, move toward anything that smells like food. It always surprises him, when he comes back to himself — naked, unsure where he is (although never too far away) that there is some kind of sensation, something close to joy, or fear — root, pure elements in an emotional periodic table.

Mathew’s life had changed, naturally, in the face of his attacks. Obviously, he could no longer drive — like an epileptic, he was just too unsure of himself. And that he would reappear, suddenly somewhere

I else — naked, always naked. This had already been the cause of more than a little confusion.

He had tried a number of different specialists, and each time it was always the same:

Yes, I’ve read The Metamorphosis. It’s not like that. No, I don’t have any control over it. It’s not about selfloathing. No, I don’t think my penis has anything to do with it. After his fifth attempt, he just stopped trying. Relationships suffered. But then, in a certain way, his connections to other people seemed less important after a time — what is a partnership in the face of his “problem”? Sure, she wasn’t happy, but, then, she didn’t turn into a moth randomly. He felt his issues outweighed hers. He found himself afraid of lightbulbs. After some months gripped by his new condition, he learned (third-hand, mind you — people just don’t talk to each other anymore) that a neighbor, two doors down — soccer mom, works at a bank — had suddenly turned into a garden snake, and for 45 minutes had been hiding from her terrified family under the couch before snapping back into humanity again, naked (it wasn’t just him!) and knocking over the credenza.

Soon, he heard of others: The tall, unfriendly guy who rented the casita behind the Williams’ place was turning into an Araucana — a type of heirloom chicken, who knew? Mr. Williams himself would suddenly become a dik-dik, which seemed about right, given his personality. Lucy Spivak would, several times a week, become an obviously confused mountain vole. She ate most of the ground cover out of Mrs. Vida’s flower garden.

Increasingly, it had become obvious that it was the whole neighborhood, and moreover, that the frequency had increased, and continued to increase. All of them — as it could no longer be argued, it was all of them — a spontaneous, random ecosystem that popped in and out of existence — the nice girl who said hi when she rode by on her bike now spent hours as a Goliath Beetle; the bratty kid across the street was a Slow loris.

It was Lucy first who changed but did not change back. Others followed. Mrs. Vida flashed into her new life as a desert tortoise. The kid across the street disappeared into the trees and presumably stayed there. Mathew, for his part, was — and oddly so — ready. His dreams had become the moth’s dreams; washes of temperature and sounds that rippled through the whole body, light; fractured and sparkling through the hundred lenses of his new eyes; wings so thin that he was as much a part of the atmosphere as an object within in it.

On that last day, his first day, he felt the change. He walked through the house, shedding his clothes in the garage. He stood in the front lawn (gently being pruned by Mr. Williams), he inhaled once, and the sun became an indistinct firework, the wind lifted him into a sky he could taste, and the sounds of the new jungle beneath him drove his wings upward.

“Anyone know about us becoming animal spirits,” he said.

“When you die, schmuck, you’re an animal, then you’re a spirit,” laughed Ray. “I ain’t no animal,” grunted Ben. Ben was part Navajo and liked to play Native on nights like this, sitting around a fire getting hammered and stoned. Ben said his grandfather told him spirit tales that we passed down from his great grandfather, a shaman and tribal medicine man who conjured up ghosts and witches and helped Natives become animal spirits.

The spirit talk blew over, until a year later when there was a story out of Mexico about a werewolf that locals said killed a couple of sheep and tore at a 5-year-old girl who got away. The locals claimed a peasant rose out of the grass with wolf hair and teeth and lunged at the sheep on hind legs. Everyone said it was likely a wolf or coyote, and the locals were very hopped up.

Not Ben. “Eddy,” he said, gripping my arm, “Grandpa told me about werewolves. They happen. Men can be wolves, bobcats, coyotes and turn back to men. You have to believe in the spirits and do certain things. We try this weekend.”

Ray and I thought Ben was nuts, but if he was bringing “things,” there might be some good drugs involved. Sure enough Ben brought magic mushrooms and peyote, special fire sticks and hemp pullovers to wear. Naked under the ruff sacks, we huddled to the fire’s heat and repeated Ben’s incantations. We howled like coyotes, necks stretched up to the crescent moon, scratched the earth around the fire, rooted out a pit to lay in, and beseeched a coyote spirit to take us body and mind. Ben’s last words were “believebelieve,” chanted in a strange ritualistic monotone. Suddenly, I smelled singed fur and jacked back from the fire, scratching up cool earth with my forelegs. My eyes had turned to night vision goggles, my nose was locked on to dozens of new scents, I could hear the pitch of creatures scurrying from the fire line like windblown leaves. I could hunt!

No one knows how long we stayed fallow. In the dawn light, we saw dog-like prints around us. Our dirt-streaked hemp covers were torn front and back. A few glowing coals remained of the fire. We put on jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts and left without saying anything, except that we’d come back next Friday. We had throbbing hangover headaches.

On the second time, our coyote shift was easier. Ben later said it was because we now believed. We were high on the ’shrooms and peyote but now walked effortlessly down from the bigger pines toward the scrub brush and piñóns on the edge of a neighborhood, close enough to set off a dog barking. Then, a second. What to do? Stay silent. A powerful urge to hunt surged through us. Ray lunged at a chipmunk, and it slithered under a boulder. Then he spotted a tawny cat frozen under a scrub juniper by the side of the road. He dove and broke its neck. I wanted my own kill, but the dogs were making such a racket we decided to move upslope to safer ground. We prowled the rest of the night, scratching into rabbit and squirrel holes. The impulse to hunt wasn’t about hunger. It was to kill.

Nothing much happened until a month later when the paper did a small story about neighbors in the northwest part of town warning about losing pets. Since there were no wolves around, the blame went to coyote packs like us. On our next shifting foray, we nailed three more cats and a backyard goose and then I raided a chicken coop and killed six. The story said the coyotes were brazen, walking along the road in the early morning light, hunkering in the arroyos by day. One woman said three paraded across her portal in midmorning. She said she kept five rescue cats inside but was sure the coyotes knew they were there.

Ben said it was dumb to terrorize a neighborhood. They’ll bring in sharpshooters. Plus, a bear coming down to raid the bird feeders and outside garbage had everyone on alert. Nobody wants to tangle with a bear. We agreed to move up the mountain and keep our act away from the suburbs. But the hunt was addictive. We nailed a few feral cats and some squirrels up the mountain but the pickings weren’t the same as in a neighborhood. We were kids by day, predators on weekends. It was too much. So, in early November, we came back and went on a rampage. Ben killed a pet schnauzer that had wandered off a backyard, and Ray and I each got two cats. We’d nailed them in daylight, hiding in an arroyo culvert and knowing when the owners left them out. There were no night-dogs barking. The owners thought daytime was safe, thinking of the howling coyotes prowling only at night.

That’s when Carol of Animal Control showed up. She came in an unmarked green pickup and parked at a construction site next to our ditch. At dusk, as we started to stir, there was a crack and Ray fell under a chamisa shrub. It was a clean headshot. We hunkered in the culvert, knowing to run meant a second shot. Carol was the sharpshooter Ben warned about. Then, as she started across the road, we saw dead Ray turning into his human form. By the time Carol got there, he was a naked kid with a hole in his head. Carol stood motionless, then stooped to feel his pulse, then sat back stunned. Did she kill a kid? We took the chance to edge up the mountain, changed back into street clothes and waited for days. Ray’s mother reported him missing. There was no search and rescue. Nothing was ever said.

I missed the water and took up swimming. The mikvah for so many years cleansed and immersed me. The bath surrounded and caressed my body with a soft, compliant buoyancy. There is nothing quite like allowing time every month to ritually, intentionally rebirth yourself, and, of course, be closer to God. There’s also the sex afterward. Abstinence always makes the heart grow fonder. That was during the years when our bed was more active and trying to be observant, meant seven days after the flow with no hanky-panky.

Not all Jewish women use the mikvah, but I began just before my marriage and continued until I stopped bleeding. But when that was over, after my invitation to be cleansed so beautifully, so thoroughly, so privately on the moon cycles, a loss beyond my wildest dreams came over me. Like a tsunami.

Without my monthly water fix, there was an addictive element to my pious regularity, I felt grounded. A realization dawned on me that my life had focused, not on my family or husband — as it should have — and by all appearances did, but actually, I secretly longed for the day of my appointment every month. It was a constant comfort in my life. Then the possibility of fertility ends, albeit slowly, a faucet whose pipes begin to clog through years of slow disuse and then finally, the flow stops. When that day comes, the mikvah ends. No more floating in the quiet womblike gentleness of a private pool.

I wasn’t prepared for my unexplainable grief of losing those brief moments of unconditional love. The first few months I was listless and sad inside, but no one really noticed because I fulfilled all my familial duties with reliability. It had been the water that kept me flowing

I through the boredom of this life that now seemed even more so because the children were fledged. They had looked at my observancy as a weakness, just as my husband had regarded it with relief. They had no idea how far I traveled without them while I floated, supposedly reciting the texts but, in actuality, reveling in dreams I held without expectation, places I knew I’d never visit and lovers I’d never know.

It had never occurred to me to frequent the local pool. Ours was not a swimming family. The time off that vacations represented could only be spent visiting other relatives. My sisters didn’t share the ritual with me, but I sought out local mikvahs. One I remember particularly was a windowless concrete block building behind a small post office. It looked like a storage room, instead of its secret purpose. Once let in by the attendant, I assured her how clean I was, from top to bottom. Fingernails, hair, teeth, tongue, and all small crevices. To get clean, you had to be clean. Then I walked down those seven steps into the bath. I remember emerging into the dusk in a nondescript parking lot with a dumpster adjacent to my car. How ironic, I thought, that such a sacred place for women would be tucked away next to the trash. Now, many years later, I hear that these new mikvahs are spa-like, tiled and with amenities. Still, while I walked to my car that day, I smiled contentedly.

The first time at the public pool was disorienting. So many naked women in the dressing room. At the mikvah, it’s only you and the very discreet attendant. So much jolly laughter and talking! Such skin-tight suits. Mine was balloon-like, with a skirt. My cap, a leftover in the attic from summer camp, was a tight helmet with decorative ridges in the rubber. It ripped and fell apart after the first swim. But I was determined to have water in my life.

I learned that one doesn’t float in the community pool but actually swim. My stroke was quite awful, head bobbing like a gourd while my arms tried to find a rhythm in order to move forward. But in the strange chlorinated humidity, the masses of people swimming in a library-quiet atmosphere, I felt not only a buoyant joy but also a camaraderie of souls who must feel that same solace in the nonresistance of water, in a world where there is so much resistance.

Here’s the crazy part. You can go every day. Talk about enabling. My husband questioned this new “thing,” not relating mikvah, water, swimming. Of course, mikvah has nothing to do with swimming, so why should he? It didn’t have any correlation for me either. It is all about the water.

I’ve purchased a better suit now with goggles, a silicon cap, and earplugs. My body has taken a new shape. There are no recitations before I jump into the water. No one checks to see if I’ve actually showered. The water is deep and clear, sunbeams cast light shows refracted in the water. There is the reverential silence accompanied by muted splashing from dedicated lap swimmers. We don’t talk. I don’t know if others are swimming because of the weightlessness; the grace the body attains when it is utterly supported; the simple joy it brings. It seems inconceivable that they are not, perhaps they are without knowing it.

I have been cleansed enough. The water still holds me, but I no longer have to wait for ritual permission to immerse myself. I don’t expect the water to change my life, and I don’t escape from life in the water. It simply is, as am I.