Selected for publication by Lena Valencia
Hold Hands, Children
It is Tuesday, and Georgie thinks, Tuesday is everything. Everything always happens on Tuesdays. Georgie walks after Luca. He has positioned himself behind Luca to watch the breeze lift the tuft of hair on the back of his head. The wind tickles it like the tail of a duck. In front of Luca traipses Eli, Wyatt, Miles, and Daisy—Wyatt’s little sister, bobbing hand in hand with Mrs. Bennet, their mother. Mrs. Bennet has told Georgie to call her Lola, but Georgie thinks Lola is too young for Mrs. Bennet, a mother of three and the wife of a banker. Mrs. Bennet, whose hands are freckled. It must have taken many years to freckle those hands. Lola could have been Daisy’s name, except Lola had already been given to her mother. Yes, Georgie thinks, Lola is a child’s name. So he calls her Mrs. Bennet. Mrs. Bennet is leading them to the performance. The performance has been littering the streets of the city for months, its red and purple poster catching in the sewers like sprouting wildflowers. Now, it is Today. Tuesday, Georgie smiles. No, Georgie frowns. Today is under case, today. He had asked Ms. Flora on Friday, and he had forgotten it by Tuesday.
Georgie looks at Luca’s tuft. I will commit every detail of this day to memory, Georgie thinks. I will not forget this day or the lift of Luca’s tuft or the hole in his smile from the tooth he lost playing in the shed last week. I will not forget the color of the performance, which will always be red and purple in my memory. I will not forget this day like I forgot to uncapitalize today. Today, the whole of the city is headed to the performance. The performance is one in a century. This was what Georgie’s mother told him this morning as she tied his laces. One, two, through the loop. You will remember it for the rest of your life. Georgie looks away from Luca’s tuft. Everywhere is teeming with passersby like field mice in a meadow. People are streaming down the streets, walking at a shared clip toward the south end where a thin wire—it seems as thin as a hair in Luca’s tuft—has been pulled between the St. Joseph Church and the large lean building where Mr. Bennet puts on his costume each morning.
Georgie tips forward and whispers in Luca’s ear, That’s where Mr. Bennet puts on his costume each morning. No, Georgie, Luca says, Mr. Bennet is a banker, and bankers don’t wear costumes. Bankers wear hats, and they keep clocks in their pockets. And it’s not a costume, Georgie, it’s a wig. Luca giggles and takes Georgie’s hand, giving it a pump for each step they take. They take many steps, and Georgie counts many pumps before Luca drops his hand. People are flowing around them toward the performance, people of all sizes and smells and shapes. A rectangular man in a purple waistcoat walks like a door. A gaunt woman beams in a yellow satin dress. She wades beside him. Georgie swings his arm back so his hand bumps and slips into Luca’s, but Luca does not hold onto it. The woman in yellow overtakes Georgie and then Luca and then Eli, Wyatt, Miles, and Daisy. Our six strides make up one of her large metal strides, George thinks. He quickens his steps and matches Luca’s pace so they walk together like two wind-up soldiers with painted red lips and blue bead eyes on their way to the performance. The anticipation in the streets smells like sour milk.
Georgie has been having a conversation with Luca in his head. When he isn’t talking to Luca out loud, he is talking to him silently. The wire is suspended between the leafy church and the long banker building, he says, and a Portuguese man who is small and strong like a heavy round stone is going to walk in the air. The man is the exact shape of a stone you should not skip at the shore. The man is going to put one foot in front of the other on the hairline wire and cross the air like a human cloud, slowly, swiftly gliding. Swiftly was one of the words Ms. Flora taught us last week, Georgie reminds Luca. I know you remember, Luca, because you know the best words, the kind that spark your tongue like a lemon fizz candy. Georgie looks at Luca. Luca is watching Mrs. Bennet ahead, but in his head, Georgie hears Luca recite the rest of the vocabulary words from last week. Swiftly, sagely, scoffingly, scorchingly, seasonally, slovenly. Slovenly is what Georgie’s mother calls him when he does not pick up the peas he drops on the carpet during Sunday suppers. Don’t be slovenly, Georgie, she says and purses her lipstick mouth and wiggles her pearl ears. Slovenly, smirkingly, snugly, soberly, sordidly.
The Portuguese man is not seasonally or slovenly going to cross the wire, but maybe sagely and snugly. He is going to edge along the wire, Georgie thinks, and it is going to give us the illusion he is floating in air. That is what the poster shows. The left half of the poster is red and the right half is purple. Drawing a line down the middle is a black stick that a round blob holds. The blob is the Portuguese man, and his shadow splits the red and purple. He looks like a bullseye in the middle of the page. A black bullseye without a face except for a small dime-sized white hole where a mouth should be. The black blob is perpetually speaking, or maybe he is frozen in speech. No, he’s gasping, Georgie knows Luca would say. The black blob that is the Portuguese man has tiptoed on a string all across the world. He has been a black blob crossing a thin wire in thirty-seven countries, and Georgie has remembered the name of each one. His favorites are Andorra, Aruba, Belize, Benin, Comoros, Cyprus, East Timor, Gibraltar, Kosovo, Malta, Senegal, Tuvalu, Uruguay, Yemen. He imagines they are the names of friends, friends whose names are short lullabies. The Portuguese man has tightroped in sleet, snow, two cyclones, a sandstorm, dense fog, sunshowers, and boiling heat. But he has never missed a step. He has walked the globe in the air, Georgie thinks, and now he will walk it in my little part of the world.
The children are islands of obedience among the chaos and commotion, and Georgie is thinking of Luca. As they shuffle through the throngs, pass by the stone library, pass by the square where the pigeons gather for breadcrumbs, pass by the oval gardens, Luca is on his mind. It is summer and I love him, Georgie thinks. He has loved Luca for a long, long time. He has loved Luca far before he knew that lawyers had costumes called wigs and that Tuesday was capitalized but today was not, even when Tuesday is today. Before he knew pigs moved slovenly, but not swiftly. It is summer and I love him, he thinks. He loves how everything about Luca is soft. He speaks softly, Georgie thinks. His voice floats from his mouth to my ear on a feather. His hair is soft and curls outward at the bottom like a frond unfurling in spring. His eyes are warm and brown and crowned by eyelashes that brush them like butterfly wings. During the fall and winter, Mandy may give me a piece of chalk. Our fingers may touch, and I may think to myself that it was her all along that I loved. During the fall and winter, Wyatt may recite lines of poetry about a sunken ship strung through with a beam of light from a far-off lighthouse. He may read this from his primer with his steady reading voice, and I may fancy that I would paint him in a forest playing a flute. But it is summer, and I love Luca. I love Luca, and I love his name in my mouth. It is smooth and spongy. When I call him, I kiss the air. The languid “l” puckers my lips, and the soft “a” dispatches the kiss. His name is far lovelier than Mandy’s or Miles’. It is the remedy to Eli’s, whose screechy “e” draws my mouth back into an awkward grin and then pushes my lips apart, sending one to the sky and the other to the ground. It is the inverse of a kiss; it is a goodbye.
Mrs. Bennet instructs the children to turn right up ahead. We’re almost here, keep up, she tells them, pulling on Daisy’s doll arm. Georgie feels the world wrenching away from him, peeling off and lying flat on the street he steps upon. The world is moving too fast to submerge myself in my thoughts, he thinks. Although he longs to sink into them like the warmth of a bath, he looks ahead and follows Mrs. Bennet and her clacking shoes, Daisy’s white sandals, and down the line until his eyes rest on Luca’s soles. I must leave my love for Luca on this day, Georgie thinks, or I will not remember the rock man tiptoeing on the wire or the weaving of the crowd to the south end or the pat pat patter of the multitude of shoes on the streets. I will only remember Luca’s tuft wiggling like a duck’s tail. I will only remember the soft precision of his soles thwacking the ground. I will not remember that it was Mrs. Bennet who led us like a Mother Goose through the oppression of strange bodies and sticky smells against our wind-up strides. I will think back to the schedule that Ms. Flora sent to our mothers for the outings. I will remember it was Tuesday, and Tuesdays were Mrs. Carpenter’s day to lead us. I will not remember that Mrs. Carpenter, Eli’s mother, slipped in the kitchen baking a quince cake with blue icing, and that the slip twisted her ankle so she could not take us to see the Portuguese man. Each week, our mothers cycle through being the leader. Mothers whose surnames begin with B, C, and F, because no child in our class has a surname that starts with D and E. We are Bakers and Bennets and Carpenters and Findleys, and we walk in a straight line and follow the Capital B Mrs. Bennet, even though it was Mrs. Carpenter’s turn today. Mrs. Carpenter is propped in her bed eating her quince cake with blue icing, so she is not here with us to go to the performance. I have submerged myself again, Georgie scolds himself. I must rise above the water and the rim of the tin tub.
He notices a poodle on a leash with a yellow polka dot bow tucked between its ears. Here, a fly lands on a bottle cap crushed under Wyatt’s heel. There, a swallow swoops between the broken nose of a hunchback who could have once been a lumberjack from a nighttime tale and the parasol of an old lady as long and slim as a light post, or is it a lamp post, Georgie wonders. She is dressed in white. A lace veil swings from her brim like the curtains surrounding a king’s bed. There, the swallow twitters at the stuffed canary perched on the woman’s hat. The swallow flutters around its inanimate lover, hoping to elicit a reaction, but the stuffed bird remains fixed in its place. Its heart is cold, and it does not dance. Here, Georgie thinks, I place my left foot on a scrap of newspaper that I cannot read but that may say a three-handed orphan has won the lottery or that a miniature horse gave birth to a pink kitten or that there is a strawberry sickness and there will be no more strawberries in a week’s time. The last one he had heard his mother whisper to his father last Wednesday when he had been pretending to be asleep in her lap.
We’re about to get our tickets stamped, children, Mrs. Bennet says and turns around, looking meaningfully at Luca, Eli, Wyatt, Miles, Daisy, and Georgie. With her freckled hand, she passes out a ticket to each child. We have stopped moving, Georgie tells Luca in his head, and we wait in line to have a red circle pounded on our tickets. Hold on to your tickets, Mrs. Bennet tells them. Luca, Eli, Wyatt, Miles, and Daisy straighten like their puppet strings are pulling. Ahead is a ticket booth where the red stamp reigns. We form a line, George thinks, a strand, and each of our bodies is a knot that can hold a pearl between us. We could be strung on the neck of the lamp post lady in white, and she would look like a queen in a tapestry hung up in the far-off corner of a museum by a lonely window that nobody visits. She is standing in front of Mrs. Bennet, and she is holding her ticket between her lace-gloved pointer finger and her thumb, which is pinched by a ruby ring. Ahead of her is a father standing between two matching girls in blue. He has one hand on each of their straw hats. The father turns sideways and bends in half, putting his hand on the shoulder of the girl on the right. He has the same soft face as Luca’s father, Georgie thinks. Luca’s father, who looks like Luca if he had been dried out in the sun for a whole summer, a Luca raisin. Georgie watches the man. In fact, he thinks, that man could be Luca’s father if Luca had two twin sisters, but Luca has no sisters and no brothers, only a rabbit named Hermit. The man glances behind. Georgie feels their eyes meet. They meet, and the look cannot be unseen. The look cannot be ignored. Georgie sees the father’s brown eyes moving toward his. They collide like bocce balls. Then, swiftly and slowly, the father pulls his brown eyes back and turns his head, and the look is gone.
Luca, Georgie nudges him, see that man? Georgie points ahead, past Eli, past Wyatt, past Miles and Daisy, Mrs. Bennet and the lamp post lady in white. But as he follows the invisible arrow issuing from his finger, he sees that the man is gone. So, too, are the girls. The line shuffles forward. The ticket stand looms closer. Luca looks ahead and then back to Georgie. Which man, Luca asks, there are many men. Never mind, Georgie tells Luca. There are too many men to find the one man. Now, the ticket booth is upon them, and Georgie forgets about the father. He holds his ticket between his two hands as if it were a small newspaper. A gruff voice says, Move up, boy. Georgie steps forward, and in one swift movement, a hand grabs his ticket and returns it red. Then the crowd surges behind him, and he is thrust forward and is knocked into Luca, who, like a domino, falls into Eli who falls into Wyatt who falls into Miles and Daisy. Daisy stumbles, her doll legs buckle, and Mrs. Bennet swings her up into the air like a paper bag. Into her arms Daisy goes. Hold hands, children, Mrs. Bennet calls behind her. We must stick together, Mrs. Bennet says. We are heading toward the wire.
They have now entered the square where the performance will take place. Georgie has birthday stomach. His father calls it birthday stomach because it always happens the night before Georgie’s birthday. But it also happens when it is not Georgie’s birthday. Birthday stomach is the feeling of eating undercooked eggs. It is the feeling of biting into a squishy plum. Georgie pinches his sides. Far in front of them and strung high up is the wire that the Portuguese man will traverse. It is bookended on either side by the church with the forested facade and the lean building that looks as if a great big sewing pin had been stuck into the fabric of the city. The square is bursting with antsy onlookers, and everywhere Georgie looks are solo acts by usurping carnival and circus and street performers. They clamor for their own slice of attention, the attention of an audience who has walked from one end of the city to the other to see the Portuguese man. Here, an acrobats’ club flies forth, shooting upward and plummeting down like fountain spray. There, a man with a painted tiger face blows fire through a ring. In front of Miles, a waif-like contortionist folds her limbs into a trunk shaped like an elephant. A tattooed magician looms close to Georgie. He tastes the saltiness of tin sardines and the sour bite of ale on the magician’s breath. The ale quakes his birthday stomach. The magician flashes an ace of spades and wiggles his tongue. His teeth are yellow, Georgie notices. His teeth are kernels of corn.
Shove past, children, shove past, Mrs. Bennet instructs. She clutches onto Daisy as if she were the last loaf of bread in a bakery. Luca’s soft hand slips into Georgie’s. Georgie squeezes it as they push through the throng. They head toward the wire, and the people around them amass into one large shifting creature. The creature spills into empty spaces and fills them in, encroaching and jiggling like gelatin. Amoeba was the first word Georgie learned in Ms. Flora’s class. Only when he looks close does the crowd dissolve into distinct shapes. Only when he nears a figure does it take on individuality, a nose, sharp elbows, a curious smile. I am a flashlight, Georgie thinks, I shine their lives. But look, there is Wyatt ducking through stilts. Eli ducks. Luca ducks, pulling on my hand as his hair tuft sighs. Now, I duck. We are nearing the wire. We are through the carnival men, the tricksters and the cheats and the lurid attractions. We have returned to proper society, Georgie thinks. Mother would approve. Mother’s favorite phrase is proper society. All around us are intelligent faces. Educated and well-meaning faces. We wear pinstripes and pastels and some of us hold a round glass to our eyes to spy the Portuguese man who has not yet appeared.
We gather together facing the wire. We link palms and fingers as if in prayer and face the wire. I have waited my whole life for this, Georgie thinks. My whole life has led up to this moment. He and Luca are rubbing thumbs in their clasped hands when the Portuguese man appears. Georgie is thankful the wire is so high in the air, or he would not be able to see it. Thank you, he whispers. A window creaks open on the side of the leafy church. The window is octagonal and small and a bald head pokes out. The bald head falls forward and looks at the wire beneath it. An arm, a leg, the other arm, the other leg sneak out from behind the head. The window is shut, and the man is standing on the wire. There he is, a voice squeaks from the crowd. There he is, another voice shouts. The whole crowd is now waving scarves and pointing and cheering at the man who has come from the window. But Georgie thinks, this is not the Portuguese man. He has no pole, and he is slim. He is the shape of a rock you should skip at the shore. Georgie looks back at the window. He looks down at the church’s entrance. He looks at its roof. There are no other men near the wire. If he is the man that is there, Georgie thinks, and there is no other man, then he must be the man that should be there.
In front of Georgie, a bowler hat points at the Portuguese man. The bowler hat, he must be a lawyer, Georgie thinks, Luca would approve, Georgie thinks, points and talks to his bowtie friend. Good man, he’s done it after all, the bowler hat says. Even after heartbreak. Even after betrayal, the bowler hat says. The Portuguese man has begun tiptoeing on the wire. He soars above the crowd and walks with strength and grace in the air. Luca squeezes Georgie’s palm. Luca walks with such strength and grace on the ground as this man in the sky, Georgie thinks. The wire is so thin it is hardly visible. It is as fine and gossamer as the webs the friendly spider spins outside my bedroom window, Georgie whispers to Luca. The Portuguese man is a raindrop caught in the web, and he slides across it, Luca whispers back. The wire is diaphanous, Georgie, the wire is flimsy and translucent. I am worried he will fall, Georgie. I am worried he will fall heavy as a stone. Do not worry, Luca, Georgie says, he is skillful and dexterous. He is masterly. He will not fall. See how he walks with such strength and grace?
The bowler hat is leaning on a cane that has just appeared and is speaking to the bowtie. His lover, says the bowler hat. Another man, the bowtie exclaims. And he found them together, says the bowler hat. Two men is unlawful. Three men is a tragedy. The bowler hat falls quiet. The bowtie falls quiet. Luca is squeezing Georgie’s hand. The Portuguese man takes a step. He is nearing the middle of the wire. He seems to be moving impossibly fast, although his steps are slow and measured. The bowler hat speaks. He threatened to cancel the performance, the bowler hat says. We thought he would call it off. How can a spurned man perform the impossible? Spurned, the bowtie repeats. Spurned? Georgie wonders. What is spurned, Luca, Georgie asks. Spurned is burned, Luca says. Burned, Georgie thinks. Burned was his hand when he tripped and caught himself on the radiator, his hand seared as a scallop. Burned left a scar like a dimple right below his thumb knuckle. Had this lover of the Portuguese man left a scar on him, Georgie wonders. Had he poured hot pasta water onto the hand of the Portuguese man or knocked over a candle or spilled freshly brewed tea? Georgie’s mother was always telling him to mind his cup of freshly brewed tea, especially in polite company. We are human, Georgie thinks, and our skin is thin and susceptible to flames. We are human, Georgie thinks, and we share blip scars on our bodies.
The Portuguese man is nearly at the middle point. He is a winged being rising between church and state. Those are Georgie’s father’s favorite words. Church and state. Never church and church or state and state. Not once state and church. Always church and state. In the morning, it is church and state. In the evening, it is church and state. The bowler hat gestures between the two buildings. He traverses the past and the present, the bowler hat says. A metaphor for modernity, the bowtie responds. He is certainly a modern man, the bowler hat says and shakes his cane. Georgie is tired of the bowler hat and the bowtie. He looks at the Portuguese man, but he is so high up and so far away that there is no possibility of finding his scar. He tugs on Luca’s hand. Let’s go, Luca. Let’s get closer. Luca tugs back. No, Georgie, we are close enough. Do not be afraid, Georgie says, and tugs again. I am still afraid, says Luca, but he breaks away from Eli, Wyatt, Miles, and Daisy in Mrs. Bennet’s arms. Luca frees his hand from Eli’s grasp, and it sends a shock down the line. We have broken the string, Georgie thinks. The pearls clatter to the floor and roll under the bookcase and the sofa and armoire and the lamp post lady in white is no longer fit for the tapestry. We have done something irreparable, Georgie thinks, proud that he has not forgotten another one of Ms. Flora’s words. As they dash through the crowd toward the Portuguese man, Georgie slips a look at Luca. Their clasped hands shake between their flying bodies like a swing pushed by a breeze in an abandoned park. Georgie sees tears in Luca’s eyes, and he knows that Luca knows that what they have done is irreparable. It is permanent. The pearl strand cannot be repaired. The pearls are lost to forgotten crevices and ancient shadows. Do not worry, Luca, we are free, Georgie tells him. And Georgie feels free. He feels the weightlessness of the air around him even amongst the pressure of foreign forms. Georgie understands why the Portuguese man walks on his wire. He wishes to feel the air under his feet, too.
The boys swerve between hard adult bodies around them. They find pockets of softness where the children stand and make room for their own bodies there. They squeeze themselves through the throng, and the nearer they are to the Portuguese man, the nearer the Portuguese man is to the middle of the wire. They are so close to him now that they have stopped running. They are so far away from Mrs. Bennet that her calls do not reach them. I am sorry, Lola, but he is not available today, Georgie imagines his mother’s voice speaking into the telephone. His mother hangs up, and Georgie is blissfully lost to the crowd. This is my day off from orders, Georgie thinks. Lola is a child’s name, and children cannot order around other children. I am human, and I have my desires. I wish to scour the Portuguese man’s body and find the scar his lover left him.
High up above, so close and so high that he is almost directly above Georgie, the Portuguese man turns his body on the wire. The crowd sucks in its breath like a communal hiccup. The Portuguese man turns his right foot, the foot that is in front. Then, when it is perpendicular to the wire, he pulls it back behind his other foot. He turns this foot perpendicular and twists his body slowly, first from his feet, then from his ankles to his knees to his hips to his chest, and finally he swivels his head. The Portuguese man faces the crowd. He is standing on the wire. He has stopped walking. He glances down. Georgie follows his gaze. What is he looking at, Georgie wonders. He must see the scar beneath my thumb knuckle, Georgie thinks. He must know that we have both been burned.
A figure slips between the women in front of Georgie and Luca. There is something familiar about the figure. The figure turns toward Georgie. It is the soft man. It is the father. It is Luca’s father. He holds onto the hands of the two girls. He releases the hand of one of the girls. He looks at Georgie. His face is no longer soft. His face is hard. No number of summers could ever make Luca’s face that hard, Georgie thinks. The man brings his finger to his lips. Then he grabs the girl’s hand he let go of and pushes through bodies away from Georgie and away from Luca. Georgie glances at Luca. He will tell him he saw his father. But Luca’s eyes are full of terror. Luca’s eyes are looking up. Luca’s eyes are looking at the Portuguese man.
The Portuguese man lifts his gaze from the ground and up toward the sky. Then he closes his eyes. He tips forward like a top that is losing its spin. The top tips forward. The Portuguese man tips forward. His whole body is straight. His whole body is as long and lean and flat as a paddle. He casts a shadow that tumbles. Briefly, the air holds him. The air hugs him and lifts him up. Yes, Georgie thinks, the air catches him, and he hovers above the wire. But all too fast, the air drops him. He will fly, Georgie thinks. He will fly. He must fly. He is swooping down to say hello, and then he will swoop up like a bird. Or there is another wire. Yes, Georgie thinks, there is another wire below the first wire. He will land on this wire and continue walking to the building. But the Portuguese man passes where the other wire should be. He missed the other wire, Georgie thinks. Where was the other wire?
As the Portuguese man soars toward the ground, the crowd lurches backward. People turn and run. A hand grabs Georgie’s shoulder and jerks him backward. The jerk rips his hand from Luca’s. Luca. Luca, Georgie thinks. Luca is watching the Portuguese man fall. He is watching the Portuguese man fall toward him. The Portuguese man is nearly on top of Luca. Luca, who I love. Luca, my love.
Georgie reaches toward Luca. He reaches toward him to pull him back, to bring him back into his soft world. But he is just far enough away from Luca that his fingers tickle the tuft of hair on the back of Luca’s head. Georgie lurches forward, and as he lurches forward, the Portuguese man reaches the ground. Georgie watches Luca’s eyes meet the eyes of the condemned man.
Luca holds the eyes of the Portuguese man as he touches the earth and crumples. He deflates as if he were made out of dust. He is an ancient ceramic sculpture who disintegrates once touched, George thinks. The Portuguese man collapses into himself like the Jacob’s ladder that Luca gave Georgie for his birthday. He folds into himself and disappears. Then his body reappears on the cobblestones. His body reappears in a pile of uncertain limbs in front of Luca. Is that a body, Georgie wonders. Was he human, Georgie wonders. He did not have a scar. His skin was not thin. It did not burn in flames. It crumpled in air.
Luca is standing very still. Luca is standing impossibly still. Luca cannot be breathing. Luca is my love. Luca is my everything. Everything happens on Tuesday. Tuesday is capitalized. Tuesday is today. Today is not capitalized. Even when it is Tuesday, today is not capitalized. Swiftly, sagely, scoffingly, scorchingly, seasonally, slovenly. Slovenly, smirkingly, snugly, soberly, sordidly. The Portuguese man fell swiftly. He fell slowly. He fell soberly. He fell in summer. In summer, I love Luca. Luca is out of my reach. I touch him, but he does not respond. Lost is Luca. Luca is lost.
A blurry spot in Georgie’s vision makes him turn away from Luca, Luca who he loves. The blurry spot emerges into the soft hard man. Luca’s father emerges, and he is shouting Luca’s name. The two girls run behind, and they are shouting father. The father’s face is no longer hard. It has returned to being soft. It is as if his face has survived many winters that have smoothed over the wrinkles and frozen its fear. Luca turns. One last time eyes meet eyes. One last time I look upon a look. One last time Luca is soft.
Anne Pritikin holds an MFA in fiction from the The New School. She earned her BA from the University of Chicago in Creative Writing and Cinema & Media Studies where she was awarded the Les River Fellowship.
Guest Judge: Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books/Dead Ink Books), which was named a Best Short Story Collection of 2024 by Electric Literature, and a Best Horror Book of 2024 by Esquire, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit.
