February 2022 Contest Winners

Congratulations to the winners of our February writing contest!

1st Place
“Flash Mob”
Sarah Butkovic

2nd Place
“Bigfoot Was My Mother’s Alien Lover”
Lizzie Ritteler

3rd Place
“Little Miss Hurshmiffit 2112”
E.G. Karma

These stories can be found below, along with author bios and social media links. If you want to see your own story listed here, take a look at this month’s writing contest and give it a shot. 

Enjoy!

1st Place

Everyone knew Jax Orlin was married to an alien.

He was a Saturned-eyed explorer, a weedy mess of spider limbs and overgrown hair who spent his childhood building cardboard spacecrafts and papier mache planets. At the age of
seventeen he had a full ride to Brown and a gateway to the galaxy, flying through two degrees before he was even twenty-two in an effort to escape reality.

Neighbors say Jax disappeared overnight–completely blinked out of existence like a
miasmic firecracker. One minute he was tending to his garden–pulling weeds and planting
roses–and the next he was millions of miles from everyone’s heads, a totem on an astrological
dreamcatcher.

He stayed in space for seven years and came back with a wife. Everyone pondered her origin, but Jax was quick to pass it off as a sudden reunion with a highschool sweetheart. The only problem was that her skin had a sickly aster hue and she glistened like steel in summer whenever she stepped in the sunlight. My mom said she thought she saw a third eye peek out from her bangs, but there was no real way to tell.

E.T. or not, the two of them had a son. They aptly named him Perseus, and not surprisingly, kept the poor boy locked in the home every day of the week. Sometimes he came out to socialize with the neighbor kids, but it was never for long and never past sunset. He tried to get us to play jacks and hopscotch and ghosts in the graveyard, but we preferred to howl and spit and bury ourselves in brambles. Most afternoons we left him to idle behind the stained glass of his bedroom window, a porcelain angel as we unsheathed our fangs and burned rubber on
pavement.

“You should really get him out of the house,” my mother suggested one afternoon. “See if he wants to join you for prom.”

“But mom,” I chided. “He’s a… you know. What if the people at school catch on?”

My mother waved a dismissive hand. “Prom is all glitter and smoke and play pretend anyway. No one’ll even bat an eye. Besides, don’t you think he should have one normal teenage experience? The best years of his life are almost over and he’s got nothing to show for it.”
           
“Hmmph.” I chewed on this. “I guess you’re kinda right.”

__________

To my surprise, Jax and his wife agreed to let Perseus come to prom. When the big day arrived, he showed up in a powder-pink suit and a castle rock smile to match. His navy blue hair swept into inky ocean waves and his trembling hands clutched a baby’s breath corsage. I grinned magnanimously and helped him fasten his wonky boutineer.

“Nervous?” I asked.

“A little bit. This is my first time at a proper school.”

“It’ll be alright.” I tucked a lock of hair behind his tiny elven ears. “You look great. We’re gonna have an absolute blast.”

Our limo arrived shortly after to parade us around the neighborhood. I could hear the chiming of overmixed pop before we even pulled up to the venue– Marlin Banquets was littered with baroque ballgowns and uncomfortably rented suits taking a break from the sweat lodge inside. I took Percy’s clammy palm and gently led him to the doorway.
           
“Savannah,” he whispered. “What if they ask where I’m from?”

“Just say you’re studying abroad.” I pretended not to see the ogling eyes landing on us like horseflies. “Somewhere cool like Paris or Moscow.”

“Paris!” He beamed, blue cheeks almost rosy. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Exactly. So convince them you have.”

__________

The main hall was just as raucous as I expected– molten bodies erupted against each other and droplets of contraband beer flew up in a whirl. Dinner tables lay abandoned like war posts and a congealed mass of glitter and skin surged together on the dance floor.

“This,” I proclaimed with open arms, “Is the high school experience. Come on– I’ll teach you to dance.”

I led Percy to the heart of the chaos and began to bounce around like a buoy. He cautiously mimicked my motions, his shoulders slinging back and forth and his feet sliding like snake oil, until his groove was interrupted by a girl tapping on my shoulder.
           
“Hey! Who’s your date?” she hollered over the blare of the noise. It was Sally from math class. “I don’t think I recognize him!”

“His name’s Percy!” I said proudly. I gestured for him to extend a hand. “He’s a foreign exchange student from Paris!”

“Bonjour!” He said with a flawless lilt. “Agréable de vous rencontrer.”

“What?”

“It means nice to meet you!”

“Nice to meet you too! I love your face paint!”

“Thanks!”

Sally briskly bobbed away and we continued to bop to the beat. As the music became more intense, the DJ extended the overhead lights and shot blazing lazers across the room. With the flash of a wand, the dance floor was a jungle of flashing prisms and pulsating bass, and I watched Percy mindlessly sway.

“You alright?” I tried to ask. Sweat beads coagulated on his glinting azure skin and his pupils were dilated so wide I could hardly see the glow of his irises.

“What!?” he cried horsley. “I don’t think I heard you!”

“I asked if you were okay!”

Percy’s reaction provided all the answers I needed. The overstimulation must have triggered something in him, because suddenly his oxfords were off the ground and he was slowly
ascending to the ceiling. Students shrieked and stumbled backyards as Perseus morphed into a
disco ball.

“Kill the music!”

“Get out of the way!”

“Make him get down from there!”

The DJ fumbled with the strobe light switches but they seemed to be locked on POWER mode. By this point Perseus’s eyes were two oval ink stains and his body was twitching with foreign intervention.

“DO NOT MOVE,” he bellowed robotically. “ALL OF YOU ARE COMING HOME.”

———————————————————————————————

2nd Place

“Mother was always an unashamed fan of hairy men. If you asked her who her celebrity crush was growing up, she’d say it was Chewbacca.” That’s not the way you’d usually start a eulogy, but my mother’s social circle mainly consisted of fellow cryptid enthusiasts, so her penchant for shaggy men had become a staple joke among them.

A chuckle broke through the sobs in the viewing room, and I was about to continue when I saw him out of the corner of my eye: a seven or eight foot tall man standing in the doorway, the furriest creature this side of lycanthropy, wearing a very ill-fitting suit and a bowler hat that looked clownishly small on him. As an abominably hairy individual myself, I’m sensitive to the struggles of other hirsute people, so I cut my anecdote short. When everyone else had said their piece and left, I found myself alone with the giant.

He walked up to the casket and caressed the lid. “You don’t know me, but I’m Sascha Quac,” he said. “I’m…an old friend of your mother.”

“She talked about you sometimes. You went to high school together, right?”

Sascha nodded and wiped a tear from his eyes. “I have something for you that your mother wanted me to give you.”

From inside his suit, he pulled an old scrapbook. It read “Annie & Sascha” in glittery letters across the top. “And baby” was scribbled in a charcoal afterthought at the bottom of the book.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Sascha tucked a large paw under my elbow and guided me to a chair. “How much did your mother tell you about me?”

I shrugged. “She never really talked about her childhood. Just mentioned she had a crush on you at one time.”

“Right…That’s probably for the best.” He opened the scrapbook and flipped through the pages. “This is a photo Annie took to commemorate the first day of senior year. It was love at first sight for both of us.”

He flipped through the next few pages, showing photos of my mom and him together at the fall dance, arcade dates, Halloween, Christmas, and other holidays and dates until we came to the final pages of the scrapbook.

“This was senior prom,” Sascha said, smoothing out the worn photo on the page. He laughed. “She convinced me that we should get matching perms for the night.”

Suddenly, he slammed the book shut and handed it to me.

“So, if you and my mom had such a great relationship, what happened?” I asked as a lightbulb began to flicker on in the back of my mind.

“Well, the thing is, I’m not from around here. The truth is, I’m from a different planet altogether. When I was seventeen, my family crash landed in Mercury, Nevada (which, by the way, is why you never let a student driver handle interplanetary travel). And since it’s so close to Area 51, we always had to hide from the Feds who’d want to study us, dissect us, or worst, probe us. We laid as low as we could for my senior year in high school, but by the time Annie was getting ready to graduate, my family was preparing to go into deep hiding.”

Ding! “So that’s why she took up cryptid hunting later on: she wanted to see if you’d resurface.”

Sascha fidgeted in his seat. “…Yes and no. See, if you tell two teenagers they can’t be together, they might take…um…drastic measures. Especially on prom night.”

Another lightbulb began come to life in my head. “What do you mean?”

Sascha inhaled deeply. “Have you ever heard of a dumpster baby?”

Zap! I stood up and backed away, only stopping when I ran into the casket. “No. No way. No fucking way. Don’t – “ I laughed manically. “I’ve had enough. This is some bullshit prank one of my oh-so-funny cryptid-crazy friends put you up to, isn’t it? Sascha Quac? Sasquatch! I should’ve known it was a joke!”

Sascha held up a reprimanding finger and silenced me. “If there’s one thing and one thing only that your friends don’t joke about, it’s Sasquatch!” He rose and quickly closed the distance between us, then pushed the scrapbook into my hands. “Look, ‘Annie & Sascha,’ that’s her and me, ok?  ‘And baby,’ that’s you, son. Where else would you have gotten all that fur from if not from me? Your mother and I may have acted a bit irresponsibly on prom night, but when it came down to it, there was nothing that could stop our love for each other, not the judgement from her family, or the bullying from our peers, or even an army of federal agents…although they did come pretty close one time. But that’s a different story for a different day.”

He took a folded photo from his lapel pocket and held it out to me. “Even though I couldn’t be present in your life as you grew up, Annie knew that this day would come one day, and she wanted you to be prepared for it, hence the meetups disguised as cryptid-watching.”

I unfolded the photo and saw the final proof of my parentage. Lying in a hospital bed in the photo was my mother, holding me as a newborn, and in a corner of the picture was Sascha, bundled in scrubs and grinning so hard it looked like his teeth were about to fall out.

I sniffled and slipped the photo under the pall. “Mom never talked much about her life before I was born…would you tell me all about your time together?”

Sascha smiled and hung an arm around my shoulders. “Sure would.”

“Can you take me to your crash site too?”

Sascha nodded. “Sure can.”

“And if I took a photo while we were there to provide some development in Bigfoot lore, would that be cool?”

“…Don’t push it, kid.”

“Ok!”

————————————————————————————————

3rd Place

Her (unofficial) time of death was recorded at 20:16. And 21:24. And then 22:38.

And after that, she had to rip her way out of a large plastic bag and escape the confines of the largest freezer in the school kitchen. She was able to follow the sound of loud music and murmurs back to the gym. Luckily, her date hadn’t left. He was still sitting at their table amongst the garish garland and colored balloons, wearing his neon blue tuxedo and drinking the foulest-tasting bubbly beverage in the universe.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

 “Yes,” she replied. “Why didn’t you tell them I wasn’t glibflussen dead?”

Sometimes their attached translators missed a word here and there. Glibflussen, for instance, seemed to confuse him.

“I told ’em,” he said. “The chaperones wouldn’t listen. Mr. Holst, the biology guy, took charge when you stopped breathing.”

“So?”

“So,” he said, “he flunked out of med school.”

“Flunked?” she demanded. “What’s that word mean?”

“He wanted to be a doctor,” he replied, “but he failed in his attempt.”

“He pronounced me dead three times,” she said. “I wasn’t glibflussen dead! I can hold my breath for a week.”

“Cool,” he replied. “Well, Holst is an idiot, too.”

“Idiot?”

“Moron,” he replied. “A simpleton. A person who thinks he knows more than he does. . .”

“A twugdorp?”

“Sounds right,” he said. “Well, he got rattled when your head turned blue.”

Her gills puffed. “It’s not polite to mention the color of a female’s head,” she muttered. “Not in mixed company, at least.”

“Sorry,” he said. “So, why did it turn blue?”

She looked away. “It’s a sign of. . .you know. . .hurshmiffit,” she replied.

He nodded, confused again. “Is that why you stopped breathing, too?”

“No. That was your hurshmiffit, when we were dancing slowly,” she replied. “I could feel it. That’s why my mother told me I shouldn’t wear a backless dress, in case you touched my humfuzzen. Our boys are better at controlling their urges. You Earth boys are just so. . .obvious.”

“Sorry.”

He sipped his awful bubbly beverage. She gave him a look.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but your head’s turning blue again.”

“I know,” she replied. “More hurshmiffit, I guess.”

“So,” he said,  “do you want to dance?”

“Yes,” she said. “But try to control yourself.”

“I will.”

Her humfuzzen hummed. “And keep that glibflussen biology teacher away from me,” she said.