Wordsmoker

(SPP’s note: First, everyone who participated this week, pat yourself on the back.  Again.  Keep it up.  There you go.  Well done.  Thanks for making this feature what it is.  What follows is DahlE’s email to me detailing the winners this week, and what a week it was.  For reference, here’s a link to the initial post.  You can peruse the winning entries there.)

I have only really known five people personally who have died, and I have not been particularly close to any of them. As such, the biggest “Don’t Go” moment in my life thus far has been the day I found out Veronica Mars was officially canceled. That said, the skill and creativity employed in the variety of touching, humorous, and even poetic “Don’t Go” moments both put mine to shame and leave me with a very difficult choice.

I feel I should start off by saying that for what it’s worth, I’m a fundamentally lawed judge for this competition–clever references from before approximately 1990 go completely over my head, and without Google, I wouldn’t have understood half of these entries. (Methinks that if this opportunity ever rises for me again, I may need to appoint a “guest judge,” or at least obtain a knowledgable assistant.) But, alas, it’s too late for that, and so, onwards towards the winners’ circle!

As I said, I had an incredibly difficult time deciding (and my husband refused to help because he said it was unethical), but ultimately, I felt that BellTolls’ “Passively Devoted To You” encapsulated such vivid images and tangible emotion that I had to choose it as leader of the pack. Passive-aggression, forced apathy, paranoia, quiet acts of dedication contrasting with louder acts of defiance, a complicated past, and an open-ended future…all the elements of a perfectly effed up relationship that for some reason, we never seem able or willing to end.

Naturally, I loved several others, most notably SamuraiPandaPoetry‘s “The Night Destiny Left Me for Another Friend of Andrew Jackson,” which I found had the remarkable power of inserting me into the narrator’s superficial and desperate shoes, despite my having zero attraction to “creamy white thighs,” and BeRightBack‘s “X, Then Y,” with the haunting and beautiful lines “Y: a cold morning, a windy platform, an approaching train. The door slides shut and the open wound of your crumpling face becomes a bleeding rose behind glass, glossy and frost-clouded.” That image has stuck with me from the moment I read it.

Bravo, for real–you guys are great, and I’m so glad to see that more people are entering this time around. Thanks for giving me such excellent material to read, and of course, thanks to Panda, for organizing and “themeing” so wonderfully. Congratulations to the winners, and I can’t wait to join in for the next one!

(Bravo, for real indeed!  Thank you DahlE for scaling this impossible mountain.  You did a damn fine job.  Everyone stay tuned for Micro-Fiction Roundup VII, coming to a video store near you.  Probably tomorrow morning.  We’ll see.  Time is very limited these days. Sling some theme suggestions in the comments below.)

Image via the internet.