Week 33 - Dec 2010

If you are planning on submitting to the Spring 2011 annual journal, you only have until Thursday, December 23! We accept work in all genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short plays or screenplays, artwork, photography, collages, etc. You may submit up to five entries. Each writing entry should be no longer than 3,500 words. For art pieces, please submit work with 600dpi resolution or better, and include the original medium of the artwork. Also include a title, location, and year for photograph submissions. Please send submissions as individual attachments to submissions@blackandwhitejournal.com. If you have any questions, feel free to email at us at editors@blackandwhitejournal.com!

To make up for our recent lack of posts, here is a prompt in which we had to include both a doll collection and a character screaming after a loud noise. These did not have to be central ideas, necessarily - they just had to appear somewhere in the story. Happy reading!

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Well, I'll Try To Be Honest
by Joshua L Durkin

Right before i did it I was in my daughter's bedroom. I imagined I had dog tags, because I had never been to war. I imagined that I had pictures of myself, and that I'd punched holes through all of the pictures of myself I could find. That I couldn't escape the desert. That I wasn't a father. But I was. But I wasn't. I hadn't done a good job of explaining.
   It was her doll collection that got to me. I imagined the dissonant sounds and the normal sounds making the weird, weirder, and the normal more distant. That dull sound a bullet makes when it smashes into concrete. I'd heard that before. Maybe soldiers hear that all the time. Maybe they don't. If they did, they probably wouldn't have time to think about that dull thud. Like the sound of God. Like the sound of death.
   There was a prince in my daughter's collection, a simple brown-skinned doll. Looked handsome. I imagined that I killed a man like that in a war once and didn't know what to think—I imagined I felt ambivalent, that it was inevitable and totally avoidable at the same time, the man's death. That brown-skinned prince. He would never feel precious again.
   Right before I did it I thought about the wars I paid for in no small way. That it was hard to know anything about the wars because the media catered to interests different than the public's. That I wanted control. I wanted to know the truth about the stories on TV.
   Then I called for her and she came in. She was embarrassed because she hadn't played with her dolls in years, and there I was toying with them. Trying to arrange them in orderly ways.
   I told her that there are truths in life that you can only feel in your heart and your gut, and they affect you there because it’s where you feel the most. I told her that I was guilty. That my money killed people in faraway places. She didn't understand, but she really tried, she told me so. She kept telling me to think about something else. I chided her softly.
      —No, honey, listen. I'm guilty. People die… they're killed.
   I began to cry but I held her close so she wouldn't see me.
      —Carly, listen. We're really lucky that we don't have violence in our lives like they do over there.
      —Where's there?
      —It's hard to explain, Carly. But I'll try to be honest about it-

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A Doll's Room
by Shannon Spada

Emily stared at the dolls. The dolls stared back.
   She leaned against the headboard of the white lace-covered bed. At the foot of the bed, Emily’s toes just touched the quilt her grandmother had made out of the remains of other quilts. Decades of memories, her grandmother would sigh. Emily thought it was disgusting.
   The dolls continued to stare.
   Emily had been sitting on the bed for an hour when her grandmother poked her head into the room. “How are you settling in, dear?” she asked, glancing down at the unopened suitcases next to the bed.
   “Fine.”
   Her grandmother blinked her tiny eyes. “Would you like some help? It doesn’t look as though you’ve begun...”
   “Gram, the dolls,” Emily said.
   “What about them? Honey, I’m sorry my doll room was the only available one we could move you into, but, look, now you have a whole collection of new friends!” Her grandmother picked up a small porcelain doll with brown ringlets and a crimson velvet dress. “This is Clarisse,” she said, clutching it to her chest. “She was my favorite when I was a little girl.”
   “The dolls,” Emily said.
   Her grandmother set Clarisse on top of the quilt at the foot of the bed. “I’ll let you unpack,” she said, and disappeared into the hallway.
   Clarisse, smiling calmly, stared. The others – all sizes, colors, ethnicities, styles of dress – stared. Some of them weren’t smiling at all.
   Emily slid off the bed and went outside to the garage. She headed straight for her grandfather’s tool bench, where a hammer hung from a peg on the wall. She pulled it off the peg, tested its weight, and went back inside.
   Clarisse was still facing the headboard when Emily returned to the bedroom. Grasping the hammer with both hands, she walked toward the bed. With each step, she raised the hammer.
   “Let this be an example to you all,” she hissed, and then slammed the hammer down on Clarisse’s head. A loud crrrack! resonated off the walls of the little room. Emily's eyes lit up at the sound, and she let out a wild cry, bringing the hammer down again and again on the porcelain doll. Finally, she spun around to face her silent audience.
   “Who’s next?”