Congratulations to the winners of our April writing contest!
1st Place
“Chicken Suit”
Benjamin Headlee
2nd Place
“Can You Understand Me Now?”
Evie Groch
3rd Place
“Walking on Water”
William McCann
These stories can be found below along with author bios and social media links. If you want to see your own story listed here, visit the contest page at jwiltz.com and give it a shot.
Enjoy!
April 2022 Contest Winners
1st Place
Let me just start off by saying that I’ve done a lot of dumb shit in my life. Some of it I’ve made peace with; some of it not so much. Here’s the thing though: the way I see it, even with the bad stuff there is always a lesson to be learned.
I had a part time job in college making pizzas at this local place – we’ll call it Chicken Ranch. The whole restaurant was themed around the wild west in just the most gaudy, over-the-top way imaginable. There was enough cowboy crap hanging from the walls to make Clint Eastwood get the vapors. It’s got pretty decent food, though, and it’s cheap enough to stay busy. I’m sure you know the type of place.
During my time there, it was a pretty tight knit work environment. There were about six of us that were all going to college together and would hang out after our shift at least three times a week. Let’s put it this way: the group of us were about one drunken weekend away from getting matching tattoos.
So one December my friend, Chuck the dishwasher, was turning 18 and we decided to throw him a surprise birthday party. We all pitched in money to order an ice cream cake and had it all planned out to surprise him on his porch and scare the hell out of him. There was one missing piece, though.
The night of the surprise party, we asked the Chicken Ranch store owner, Boss Mike, to borrow the infamous chicken suit. See, back then Chicken Ranch had a hideous yellow chicken suit that we would bring out for birthdays. Basically, a half dozen of us would go out to the dining room with cowbells, surround the birthday child, and bellow “Happy Birthday” at the top of our lungs while the employee wearing the chicken suit danced around like an animal. The kid always cried. The chicken suit was legitimate nightmare fuel. It was perfect. Boss Mike told us that as long as we brought the suit back by 9:00 when the store closed, he was fine with us borrowing it for Chuck’s party. Game on.
All six of us carpooled to Chuck’s house and got into position with Steven-the-pickup-window-guy wearing the chicken suit. The whole thing went off without a hitch!
After about an hour we had eaten the cake, shot the breeze, and were getting ready to call it a night. I checked my watch. It was only 8:30. We still had a half hour before we had to bring the chicken suit back. What would be a good use of this hideous yellow chicken suit in the meantime?
Well, we ended up driving to KFC. Kassi the delivery driver had been a sexy cop for Halloween that year and her handcuffs were still in the back seat. Maybe ten minutes later, the six of us marched into KFC with Steven still in the chicken suit, both hands cuffed behind his back. My buddy Myk and I strong-armed him up to the register and slammed him down on the counter face first. Steven played the part, squirming and clucking like an absolute madman.
I made direct eye contact with the confused cashier and spoke to her in my most serious tone. “We’d like to speak to your manager. On the double.”
At this point, we had the full attention of the dozen-or-so customers dining in. There was even a family of 5 eating in one of the booths. Their three young boys, each of whom couldn’t have been over seven years old, watched us intently.
Within thirty seconds the manager came out to greet us with a foul look (pun definitely intended). She glared at us from behind the counter. “The hell you doing here?”
“We bagged another one for you, boss,” I announced to the store, “But this one here’ll cost you extra.”
A hush fell over the KFC. I looked around and saw the wave of realization wash over the three young boys’ faces. Their little eyes widened as they looked down at their meals with disgust, threw their chicken tenders onto the floor, and proceeded to ugly cry. I’m talking like that inconsolable cry that kids get on airplanes and at movie theaters. All three of them absolutely, one hundred percent lost their shit.
Of course the manager was pissed. She slammed the counter and shouted, “Y’all have got 10 seconds to get out o’ here before I call the gah’damn police.”
We booked it back to our cars and made it to Chicken Ranch with mere minutes to spare.
My heart sank in my chest when I saw that Boss Mike was already waiting out back for us. He collected the chicken suit and asked us about our evening escapades. We told him how Chuck’s surprise party went off without a hitch and assured him that everything was fine.
“Well that’s good.” he replied, “I just got off the phone with the manager at KFC. She was pissed. Here’s the thing though: I can’t fire all of you because there’d be no one left to open tomorrow. Just…don’t do that again, alright?”
My takeaway from the experience is this: the more people you involve in your stupid ideas, the better odds you have of it turning out alright.
Benjamin Headlee is an 8th grade History teacher from Iowa who started writing during the Coronavirus shutdown. He’s participated twice in NaNoWriMo and won both times. When he’s not teaching, Ben likes to play Dungeons and Dragons, read Ray Bradbury, and drink copious amounts of tea. Ben is the Dungeon Master on the podcast Lost Legends: Tales of Thurne, which is currently in its third season, and DMs games professionally for kids through D&D Club Academy on Outschool.
Be sure to check out his podcast, Twitter, and Instagram pages. Lost Legends: Tales of Thurne can be heard wherever you listen to podcasts.
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2nd Place
One very important quality I look for in others who want to befriend me is their sense of humor. If they have none, our relationship will be strained, and they will not understand me. So when, during my sheltering at home and cleaning out files, I came across my humor folder, I felt like I had dug up a priceless treasure. Among the pages I had filed there was a short piece I had written upon returning from our British Isles tour. It still had the power to amuse me.
Never before have I so enjoyed a single language distorted by five countries. I went looking for nuances, a sense of humor, and playfulness with words, and I found them all in the British Isles.
In London I learned that “chancing your arm” is taking a risk that may have a dire consequence. What a quaint way of saying “you’d be a fool to try that.”
Coffee shops? Yes, London’s got them. One that got my attention is called Forkin’ Good Food! Another is called That Coffee Shop. Enough said.
Perhaps an unintentional salute to one of our animated spokespeople from a few decades back, a sign hanging above a carpark: Max Headroom 1.98 m. Remember him?
Even the loo has its humorous bent, advising you of its simple rule: if you haven’t consumed it, don’t flush it. Isn’t that the perfect way to get your point across?
When the citizens of Wales decide to go all Welsh on us, I’m mesmerized by their speaking, but can’t deny that it comes across as Klingon in all its glory to me. The guttural sounds attack the ears, and never are towels offered with the words they spray. My advice: don’t stand too close to a Welshman if he starts speaking Welsh, no matter how lovely he is.
Soon I developed my own unique response to a Welsh person who asked where I was from. I’d ask, “Can’t you guess where I’m from by my lack of accent?” I got them to smile, but they refused to guess. That’s how polite they are.
Did you know that Dublin has its own yeast? I found the storefront with The Irish Yeast Company name on it. Must be a local specialty, or does yeast only rise in the east?
One of their Starbucks is on Bachelors Walk. It’s included in the sign, just below the round green symbol. Does that imply unmarried guys can’t brew their own coffee?
The sign for Fishmonger in Ireland is: 
Nothing to do with religion, thank God.
There’s also a railroad freight line called Kukla passing through the country. I wanted to yell out, “Hey, where are Fran and Ollie?”
I learned that the Irish are fond of saying that “where others use punctuation, we use swear words.” Clever explanation, I thought.
In Belfast, where the Titanic was built, they sell cups that say: Sometimes I tell Titanic jokes just to break the ice. They actually sell, but I just copy the joke to write about later.
There’s also an interesting chain of hotels in Belfast called Jurys Inn. I couldn’t have created a cleverer name myself. Kudos to them.
On Barra in the Hebrides, they rent cottages that are advertised as “self catering.” To me, that’s an oxymoron, but no native there thought it was funny. It simply means, as they patiently explained to me, that it doesn’t come with a cook, or meals are not supplied.
Twatt is a settlement in the Shetland area of the Hebrides, not a put-down to someone you don’t like. People from you-know-where line up to take selfies with the directional sign. I was one of them.
On Orkney, you’re invited to browse in a shop by a sign in its window saying “Come in an’ tak a peep.” I always thought “peep” was a sound, like “not another peep out of you.” I was expecting the sign to end in “peek,” but at least it didn’t say “poop.”
Yes, there are dollar stores in Aberdeen, but they’re called Poundland. One might mistake them for a shelter for homeless dogs.
Also in Aberdeen, a restaurant opted to go solely visual with its name. How would you pronounce: 🙁 + ☕️ = 🙂 ?
In Edinburgh, a restaurant boasting great Scottish food calls itself Thistle Do Nicely. Imagine the cleverness, combining their symbol with a play on words. I’d eat there.
At times in Scotland, I wished I had a closed caption switch to turn on to better understand the Scottish accent. I could catch a word every sentence or so, but I had to fill in the rest.
Just when I was so grateful I’d learned to appreciate the Isles’ sense of humor and playfulness, they sent me a parting shot of a gelato and sorbet parlor called Mama Said. That one I could never figure out. Can you? Maybe there’s a residential requirement to understand them all.
I realize now that I’m back home, that it takes an English speaker to appreciate the humor of another English-speaking country, but you still might require some coaching on expressions like “Bob’s your uncle” and “Just because he wears a cardigan doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.”
Evie Groch is a graduate school supervisor who finds topics for writing all around her, from waiting in line at the supermarket to meeting a stranger in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. “Once you become attuned to the possibilities, stories are everywhere,” she says. Groch challenges herself to find ten potential stories every day and loves writing them at her local extension office (i.e., Starbucks) where she also wrote her doctoral dissertation.
Her opinion pieces, humor, poems, short stories, & recipes have been published in the New York Times, The SF Chronicle, The Contra Costa Times, The Journal, Games Magazine, various anthologies and online. Her themes are travel, languages, immigration and justice. Her newly published book of poems is Half the Hurricanes is available on Amazon.
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3rd Place
It was dress rehearsal: the baptistery was full of water; near the back wall was a “boat” in which Jesus’ disciples were trying to survive a terrible storm.
“Oh, what shall we do?” cried out the postman portraying James, the brother of Jesus.
“We’ll soon be swamped if this rain and wind don’t stop,” yelled the bank president playing Bartholomew over the roar.
“Who was the idiot who thought fishing in a rain storm was a good idea?” muttered the preacher’s daughter (because there weren’t enough men to fill all the roles) playing Matthew.
“Not me,” yelled the third grade teacher playing Jesus.
“Stop!”
The noise continued.
“Stop. HALT!” commanded the elementary school principal who was directing. The fans were unplugged and the hoses used to create rain were first pointed into large buckets until the faucets could be turned off in the kitchen and the janitor’s closet. “Jesus, I mean Ed, what are you doing in the boat?”
“Jason’s not here. I was playing Phillip.”
“Well, don’t do that. It screws up the story for Jesus to already be in the boat. You have to walk on water towards the boat.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Miranda, sweetie, would you please say Jason’s line?”
“I’m here, Jeanette. I can say my line,” interrupted Jason as he walked in from the front hallway.
“Okay. Let’s try it again, then. From the top, please. Cue the rainmakers, turn on the fans. Action.”
The cacophony took up again in earnest. And after the lines were again said, Jesus walked on water toward the boat.
“Is that a ghost?” asked the fireman playing Thomas.
“Nah, that’s just Ed,” said Jason.
“That should be Jesus. Say Jesus, Phillip,” bellowed Jake.
“No, that’s Jesus,” repeated Jason.
The accountant playing Simon Peter said, “Master, tell me to walk to you on the water.”
“Okay, just do it,” commanded the Lord, who also worked part-time in a sporting goods store.
So Simon Peter stepped out of the boat, missed the small platform he was to have “walked” on, and fell face down into the water.
“Cut. Are you okay, Mark?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, “I’m fine.”
“Good. Well, that’s a wrap. We’ll eat lunch in the fellowship hall and then rehearse again at two o’clock.”
Later, both Jesus and Simon Peter walked on water. The next morning during worship they did it again; all to great applause.
William McCann is a playwright, poet, and flash fiction writer who is currently enjoying a nice string of multi-genre success. His prose poem “McGuinn and McGuire” was recently published in The Uncommon Grackle (Mt. Sterling, KY); his flash fiction piece “John Prine Woke Me Up” was published in Aurora (the online literary journal of the English Dept. of Eastern Kentucky University); and his story “The Origins of Blowing in the Wind” (a retelling of the Prodigal Son) was published by Nonconformist Magazine. His short play “Vacation Fallout” will be performed June 24-26 at Village Players in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky.
A lifelong theater enthusiast, Mr. McCann hosts a monthly radio series about theatre production in Kentucky for WEKU (88.9 FM) and serves as an arts columnist for the Winchester Sun.
We wish him the best of luck as he begins work on his MFA in Creative Writing at EKU this summer.
