Read an original short story by the summer 2008 miniStories

Grand Prize-winner, John Jodzio. It's a tale of fathers and sons,

the perils of young love and even younger nephews, and the joys of a little deviant behavior.

I TOLD CARMEN I HAD A SURPRISE FOR HER. We were at Manny’s Good Time, and she was lit on gin and juice. She was acting like a little kid, calling me Ricky in this high, squeaky voice. She was sitting on my lap, and she had her skinny arms draped around my neck.
          “Tell me what it is, Ricky,” she said. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”
          It was a happy hour and I breathed it all in. There were two-for-ones and free hot wings and Darlene, Manny’s wife, was calling out numbers for the meat raffle.
          “I can’t tell you,” I told Carmen. “It’s a surprise.”
          While we sat there, Carmen’s long hair slid in front of my face. It smelled like apricots. I’d asked her about it once, hoping it was genetic, hoping that it could survive all the bar smoke and beer swill, but she told me that it was just her half-sister’s shampoo.
          “C’mon,” she begged. “Just give me a hint.”
          I looked Carmen up and down. She was my totally my type—too scrawny to have hips, long dark hair, mouth held in a constant sneer.
          “You need to learn some patience,” I teased. “That’s what you need to learn.”
          Carmen was wearing this low-cut, black dress and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin was nut brown from sitting by the pool at her half-sister, Jennie’s, apartment complex.
          I jammed a couple bucks into the jukebox, and I led Carmen over near the pool tables. It wasn’t really a dance floor, just a spot where the carpet ended, but I pulled her close and twirled her around and around.
          “Please,” she whispered into my ear.
          “Nope,” I said. The next morning, I opened the door of my apartment and Carmen rushed past me and ran into my bathroom. She slammed the door and I heard her start gagging.
          “Hey?” I asked. “You sick?”
          After a minute of dry heaving, the door creaked open. I looked through the crack and saw Carmen slumped over the toilet. Her left hand had gathered up most of her excellent-smelling hair, but there were a couple of loose strands hovering dangerously close to the porcelain.
          “There’s something stuck,” she said. “There’s something stuck in my throat, and I can’t get it out.”...read the full short story on mnartists.org

READ THE NEWLY COMMISSIONED SHORT STORY by the summer 2008 miniStories Grand Prize-winning author on mnartists.org

About the author: John Jodzio's writing has appeared in the Rake Magazine, Florida Review, Opium and in a number of places online, including McSweeney’s and Pindeldyboz. He’s won a Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and the Opium 500 Word Memoir competition and was recently awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to finish a collection of short stories titled If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home. The flash fiction which earned him the miniStories Grand Prize for this quarter is Shoo, Shoo, and you can read it on mnartists.org.

About the series: miniStories is mnartists.org's quarterly flash fiction competition. This new literary series is coordinated by Electric Arc Radio's Geoff Herbach (author of newly released novel, The Miracle Letters of T. Rimburg, published by Three Rivers Press), and it showcases previously unpublished short stories by Minnesota writers. These winning short-short stories are selected by authors, editors, and publishing industry veterans from across the country. Winning miniStories will be published on mnartists.org and in the e-magazine access+ENGAGE. One grand-prize winning author will be selected from each quarter's miniStories winners by series coordinator Geoff Herbach; the grand-prize winning author will receive a paid commission for a longer-form short story which will be published on mnartists.org. There will be readings at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis at the end of each quarter's contest cycle, at which miniStories winners and judges will read their fiction.An audio anthology collecting the inaugural year's miniStories winning fiction will be produced in April 2009.

Mark your calendars: our next live reading is scheduled for Monday, October 27 at 7 pm at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis.

Have a story of your own to tell? There's a new call for flash fiction for the fall quarter of miniStories. (Submissions deadline is OCTOBER 1, 2008) Click here for the full call for writers.

Want to read more? CLICK HERE to read the September 2008 batch of winning miniStories or CLICK HERE to read all the previously winning flash fiction from this year in the miniStories archive.

Artwork credits: Image (top) is Monarch by Celeste Nelms; middle left is "Army Men" in the My Seventeen-Year-Old Brother series of photographs by Annelise DeVore. Photo of John Jodzio appears courtesy of the author

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