2nd Place Winner – Flash 405, June 2024: “Persona”
Nonfiction
A small boy chases my daughter at the park, screams I want a friend, flings himself into his mother’s belly. She stumbles and he screams friend into her folds. Her leopard-print top bunches onto his tongue and teeth. I think of how teeth sound zigzagged across velour, the low screech of spots on spots. My doctor calls again to discuss test results. Surgery, my doctor said this morning in his office. I send the call to voicemail just to watch the notification number tick. At school, a teacher gives my daughter a princess sticker each day in the hallway outside her gym—he coos, beautiful—and I can’t help myself, can’t help how my brain sees a train bell clanged by hand, like a triangle calling your family in for dinner, like a porch light flicked three times—one long, one short, one long—or your own hand clasped quick around your own tight-whistling throat. I’ve never written about that day—at twenty-five—my doctor called to say abnormal. I can’t explain why. In his office the next day, he told me hysterectomy, told me gold-standard treatment. No, I replied, and he told me to have children as soon as possible. He told me.
Judge’s Comments:
I was struck by how this piece conveyed competing, confusing emotions from the writer’s past and present. The tactile imagery and snippets of dialogue are haunting and beautiful.
Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down (Persea Books), winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and three other full-length collections. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Allison is the founder and director of Small Harbor Publishing. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com
Photo by Jennifer Uppendahl