The Scent of an Ending Winners and Finalists 2009-2010 Allison Alsup

First Place

the ending of

Rollin'

by Allison Alsup currently alive in New Orleans

In the end, who can say what it was all about? Blood in the street, secret tattoos, albino showgirls. I mean I was there and even I don't know.

Was it about settling old debts? Some might say anybody with a momma who killed their daddy is bound to go crazy. I say this: if a man looks in the rearview, he only sees what's behind him. In the end, it's all he said, she said, this and that. But this and that don't buy new shoes. It took five bullets, three knives and a tire iron before Tanboy learned that.

It goes to show you never know. As for me, I'm doing like Tanboy said before he got laid out. Best shut up.

Second Place

the ending of

West with the Sun

by Ruth Moon Kempher a New Jersey native living in the Florida woods with dogs

. . . she stood in the doorway, all leaning angles of elbows and tilted framework, even her apron hanging crooked like the lines of haggard face and drawn shadow. But her voice, when she finally did speak, was steady and she managed to sound more like herself than she had in weeks along; she said: "I need ice cream--sustenance to settle this grief."

Third Place

the ending of

The Heaving Bosoms of September

by Laura Loomis a social worker in the San Francisco Bay Area

Geoffrey removed the knife from my throat, and I realized that he had pretended to kill Camilla and then faked his own death in order to protect me from the Curator's revenge, and the true villain was the seemingly innocuous Mrs. Pence, who had escaped on her palomino moments before, and the long-lost heir to the McGillicuddy fortune was none other than myself, an orphan no more--and all the times I'd said I hated Geoffrey, and he'd reciprocated, were only to hide our true love which flowed deeper than the river that courses through the valley, causing occasional flash floods that strand catfish flopping on the banks-and I melted into his arms like chewing gum on a sidewalk, stuck to him forever.

Finalists

the ending of

The Bizarre, Perplexing Story of Quiet Rex and the Very Cold Jaywalking Man

by Mary Campbell a poet, a songwriter, an author, and a public speaker who lives in Omaha, NE

Thus ended Rex's dozenth project, which, the reader will recall, would have required him to speak, for eighteen months, only in sentences each containing all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet.

It was Rex's beautiful wife, Maizie, who caused his death by quietly lacing his saki with cyanide, though no jury would convict her. The only puzzle is that Maizie, rather than striking quickly with a meat axe, remained patient for twelve months before injudiciously poisoning her husband.

Eventually, she went quite mad, of course, composing little speeches merely to utilize words such as Azerbaijan, oxen, zygote, and Jujube, and implacably requesting, every hour, X-rays of the zone within the human brain that governs ankle movement and joint flexibility.

2009-2010 Finalists Continued

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