By Alan Sincic

And get this. Winners may be invited to an awards ceremony. A gathering of persons. Chocolate. And punch. And puppies a possibility. Should they appear—red ribbon round the collar and powdered with talc and spritzed with Aqua Velva and the zest of the lime—greet them with a hearty aloha. Take a knee. Unlimber the limbs. Up over the bone of the ankle they paddle to lick the back of the hand.

Rumor has it the winners get a plaque, mahogany slab with a topper of bronze no thicker than a slice of deli ham. Winner it says, and Cock Of The Walk, and I Told You So. Onto the face of the plaque they Dremel the name of the winner. That’s right. The winner gets a name. And a rub-down. A vigorous scrubbing with the pumice and the salt to obliterate the name tattooed at birth upon the butt. Away with the stain of the semen, the squall of the suckling, the bloody sheet of the afterbirth. With a branding iron they burn, onto the brow of the winner, a better name. Tab or Rock. Meg or Bo or Liz or God.

A single syllable, see, so when you speak it, it pops. The bells in the tower ring, the buffalo stir, the river swells and the bank overflows and the salmon leap, up into the arms of the fisher folk leap, and onto the griddle and onward, onto the plate and into the belly of the Mayor with the key to the city in the palm of that salmon-scented hand of his. The key to the city! And flowers. And bushels of corn.

At such an event a medallion for sure, heavy in the hand as the head of a hammer. And a blue tassel that dangles from the lobe of the ear. A pocket watch and a stogie and a cannikin of salve to heal the sick and raise the dead—Lordy! The very thought. Finger foods and bubbly and slivers of Carpaccio truffle. A turn about the dance floor to follow. A flight to Madagascar in the offing.

Up over the Andes the dirigible pillows. The winners gather at the railing, cinch up the alpaca parka and the isinglass goggles, wave to the eagle and the condor and the hawk. As the captain splinters the air with that silver whistle of his, the vessel rudders up, into the brace and the buckle of the wind. Onward. Onward to the sea, to the innocent air, to the bed of the cloud a buoy and the—ting-a-ling—time for tea. A thumbkin of Oolong, a bead of honey, a smidgeon of cream. Wicker the chair and the table, balsa wood the beaker of steam, hummingbird the dish of the day and Slim, the name of the waiter who serves, from off the sliver of the hand, an aperitif—a bamboo trencher topped with watercress and sunflower seeds on a filigree of toasted grasshopper. For dessert? Buoyant orblets of croquembouche.

But maybe too many. Maybe too much. The vessel escalators ever downward. The Atlantic fattens out around them as, piece by piece, they jettison the ballast. The boutonniere and the cuff-link and the silver tin of Dixie Peach Pomade for the twist of the ’stashe and the torque of the beard and the furbishment of the nether regions. Overboard the teabag, the table, the chair. The papier mâché antler and the cardboard safe and the aluminum baby grand. Overboard the captain’s wheel, overboard the captain, salty the air in the boom of the surf. At the cuff of the trouser the breakers nip. Land ho cries the cabin boy. As if rifled out the barrel of a howitzer, the winners spin up into the blue, tunnel up into the wind and over the dune to—with a double-somersault in the pike position—stick the landing.

Yes. Okay. Yes. Or maybe a simple affair. Finger sandwiches here in the bed of the pickup back of the stadium, and cherry Kool-Aid from out a canteen, and from out the shadow steps the President of the United States, incognito in a trench coat and a fedora with a Medal of Honor in a pendulum over the knuckle. With a whisper he proffers up the thanks of a grateful nation, accompanies the token with (after the manner of the French) a kiss on the cheek, then sidles off into the night.

You never know. Who’s to say? Or maybe a treat with, say, a posthumous flavor. Commemoration on the hundredth anniversary of. A wreath. Toddler to lay the wreath. Cadet with an oilcan of kerosene to goose the flame eternal. Or no. No. A prenatal affair. The Surgeon General dons the shin guards and the catcher’s mask and the oven mitts, wipes his brow with the back of his hand, drops into a crouch to await the blessèd event.

No doubt. No doubt. And certainly, without a doubt—and in a shape or a form of a nature fit, and meet, and just, and true—an audience appears. An ocean of souls, or a village, or a smattering of hangers-on and random passersby. Berry-pickers and truffle-hunters and snipers in the crown of the cedar and at the cap of the water tower. A gathering of elders round a bed of coals. The squad in the bunker, the drunk at the wheel of the cab, the posse plashing out over the bed of the stream, saddle-bag whapping the rump of the stallion, pebbles pinging up to catch a glint of sun. Hey-ho they say at the sight of you, crouched there in the hollow of a tree. Speech they say. Speech!

The wind shivers to a halt. The ears of the antelope swivel. The clearing of the throat. The tug at the tie. The cummerbund. Clothing a must. And shoes, so’s you don’t get a gash on the trek to the top of the stump or the dais or the brim of the volcano. And a microphone.

Oil the louvers on the semaphore, sure, kiss the lip of the speaking tube, give the walkie-talkie a slap, but the mike—it’s the mike that matters. Podium with a microphone and a fall of red velvet and a cubby that harbors a bowl of breath mints and a glass of water, that cradles a hankie and an ashtray and a toothpick carven of the horn of the Narwhal. A spittoon. A bugle. A Swedish Engholm pepperbox revolver with a circular flange and a knuckle-duster of beaten brass.

You blow on the microphone. Into a bouquet of Oleander and Lilac it blooms. A golden eagle spirals down to perch, ever so lightly, upon your shoulder. Your padded shoulder. The epaulette atop the manly swell of the shoulder. Out over the balcony you lean. Wave to the masses that people the plaza.

It might so happen a bride arrives—a wife for the winner. Or a husband. A mother. Should the winnings include a child, then surely it’s a given they get, every year in perpetuity, a birthday pony and a basket of coconut macaroons.

If. If it happens. If it comes. How will it come if it comes? Who will it be? Nobody—not the crowd, not the claimants, not the judge—knows. It’s an epiphany, see? The judges still themselves. Listen for the word. From out the earth a tic-a-tac of protons, electrons, mesons. From out the sky the cry of the raptor. In the cinnamon a hint, and in the bite of the lime, the breach of the hull, the nibble on the lip of the grail, a clue. The barcode on the box of condoms, the burble at the hydrothermal vent, the tag on the tail of the shirt (Pima cotton by Kuppenheimer)—there you go. There it is. The winner revealed.

Kill the houselights! Cue the spot! The envelope, please. The fella that fills the tux murmurs a word to the gal at the mike beside him, the gal of a shape like a flute of champagne, and behold—the seal broken. And hearken—the winner announced, and now the envelope—how could it be otherwise?—exfoliates into a powder that sifters backward into the past to purify the air the people of the past are breathing—the settlers and the homesteaders and the sodbusters, the plowboys and the cowpunchers, the hewers of wood and the haulers of water, the crimpers of pie and the pluckers of chickens. Word of the winner fills the lungs and stirs the loins of these people. Down the avenue they strut with the elbows cocked and the arms winging up at a jaunty angle. A giddy-up in the step of the father’s father, a shot of vigor in the veins of the mother’s mother, an extra bit of oomphf in every blit of sperm, back and back through a billion begets to the day of the bristly troglodyte.

And so it goes, and in the wake of the win, and perchance, in the fulness of time, the memory of every blow upside the head marinates, softens to a tap, and the tap to a touch, a caress, and the voice of the dead father swells with a word of praise. Attaboy he says, and A man after my own heart and Well I’ll be damned. At word of the win your brother appears, the dirt still dancing off the tangle of the collar and the hair, the red clay a glaze in the socket of the eye, the root of the yew in a grapple out the grill of the ribs. Like a truffle is he—pungent and rare. As he crumbles in the breeze, he gives you a nod and a smile and—with that last little niblet of flesh afloat in the ether—a thumbs-up.

Wow. Talk about a kicker. And over yonder here, look. Look. Far and wide the scent of victory sails to swell the bosom of the oak, shoulder away at the scrub, season the burrow where the badger hides and the cavern where the bear breeds, the fissure where the sulfur burns and the skin of the earth unravels. Wouldn’t that be something now? Here at the joining of the parts, here at the edge of the wild, here where the cricket trills and the heart beats and the sawdust quivers, it sings, the head of the nail, sings with every blow. In your hand the hammer hums. There you go, by golly. A fit. It’s a fit. The lid of the coffin clicks.

So on to the hinge. Lid with a hinge. And should it so happen you hear, in the distance, a procession wending its way through the wood, you pause. Rest your hammer. A shaggy thing from out the wood appears. A procession of one. Sniffs the wind. Into the sun it staggers. With a slash of the claw it severs the umbilicus. The placenta shivers away in a slobber of scuttle and foam and tuberous goo. Back into the body of the earth it goes, the afterbirth. Shloop.

I come to claim the winner, it says.

But I am not the winner, you say.

You smell like a winner.

You give yourself a sniff. Mercy. Go figure.

The creature moves as if it knows—from out the womb, from out the knuckle round the root and the bone and the boulder—the terrain. It sways from side to side as it strides across the clearing—the windfall oak and the fist of bramble and the crackle of acacia in the blast of the sun.

It has no eyes. Where its eyes would be it ferries a pair of what look to be stones that roll in the socket, side to side, bulbous like a tater, and buff. What the eyes seek is not a sightable thing. They ride upon a tide invisible, shift with every change in the shape of the air, catch of the breath, flush of blood in heart of the prey.

Come give us a kiss, it says, with its arms spread wide so’s to blot the sun and free the claws from the bracken and thistle that cover the breast. Shredlets of moss mottle the ridge of the brow.

You would like a kiss if a kiss were in the offing, but you wonder at where to begin. Where would they be, these lips? You see a cleft in the leathery jaw, and molars and incisors, bicuspids and grinders, undulating fistulas of porcelain shard, and you’d run if you could, but you can’t. Duty. Duty calls. Honor bright.

From the breast pocket of your overalls you finger up a mint, a breath mint—evergreen, yum—and open your arms, and close your eyes, and—like in the movies—wait. Wait for it.

At the end of days, at the sound of the trump, at the checkered flag, at the shuppetty-shuppetty-thump of the guillotine, it’s all of it a festival of bon-bons in orbit over the belly of the earth—is it not? And if such a thing should come to pass, here where the hungry earth hails and the body obeys (a kiss for the winner, a bounty, a boon!) could you, would you, you winner you, pray, and sing, and—with your final breath—keen again for the heat at the heart of the womb, the blaze of the pebble in the bed of the stream, the tongue of the lover in the moment of bliss?

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Alan Sincic’s fiction has appeared in Boulevard, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. Short stories and essays recently won contests sponsored by The Plentitudes, The Texas Observer, Driftwood Press, The Prism Review, Westchester Review, and other places. He holds an MA from the University of Florida and an MFA from Western New England University and has been a poetry fellow at Columbia. He is currently a teacher at Valencia College.

Read Sincic’s “Bacon” here

Read Sincic’s “The Deluge” here

An Interview with Alan Sincic

Liam Hilliard: If you had to pick one of your characters you identify with the most,  what would it be or who would it be?

Alan Sincic: If you’re thinking of the more slice-of-life stories, like the novel excerpts and the short stories I adapted from the novel manuscript, it might be the character of Maggie. She’s a woman, but a bitter beauty—cantankerous and angry at God and the world. I don’t come across that way in my dealings with people, but deep down, I feel like I’m in a wrestling match with God about being placed in a world we have limited control over, a world full of calamities that we do our best to cope with. There’s a part of me that’s hungry for some kind of answer or accounting.

When I was a child, I had a great aunt who was very feisty. She was the “bad cop” of the family, saying things nobody else would. I remember when I was four, a boy across the street picked a fight with me. My aunt, instead of breaking it up, urged me to hit him again. I wasn’t raised to act that way—my parents would’ve told me to work things out diplomatically. But I secretly admired her feisty spirit. It wasn’t in my nature to act that way, but I found her character the easiest to write about because she was so adamant in her convictions about the world.

I wouldn’t imagine that I am like her, but I think there’s a part of me that resonates with her spirit. When I write a story, I let that spirit loose in the character in a way I probably couldn’t in real life.

Family plays a large role in my writing, especially when it comes to character building. There’s a novel manuscript called The Vistarama—some of its stories have been published as short stories. It’s based on relationships in my family. I grew up with three siblings, two years apart, and I was the second oldest. I remember the laughter and squabbling, as we all tussled for attention. I look back with fondness on all of that.

One of my stories, “The Deluge,” is based on a real experience when I was maybe 13 or 14, or possibly 15. My family would go camping every summer, since my dad was a teacher and we had a couple of months off. I visited every state in the Union, except Hawaii, by the time I was 18. We never flew; we just traveled and camped everywhere. There are many stories I still need to write about that time.

When I was four, my dad converted a 1960s-era Volkswagen bus into a camper. It was an old beer delivery truck that they rigged with a bed, a table that dropped down to form another bed, and a roof rack. He drove it from Orlando to Alaska, up the Alcan Highway. Some of my earliest memories come from that trip, and that adventurous spirit became part of our family.

Fast-forward a decade or more: we were camping in Greenbelt Campground outside Washington, D.C. In the middle of the night, we heard pouring rain and continuous crying. It was probably after midnight. I woke up, and my dad woke up. Everyone else was still asleep. He grabbed his coat and took out his old service revolver. He wasn’t a gun guy, but he always carried it when we went on vacation. I was curious, so I got up to go with him.

We went out into the rain. My dad’s first concern was making sure my sister, who was sleeping in the Chevy Carryall, was okay. Then we came across a lost child in the campground. He had gone to the bathroom with an umbrella in the middle of the night and gotten lost. My dad gathered him up, and I walked with him, helping the child find his campsite. Once we got him back to his site, we returned to the trailer and went back to sleep.

That moment inspired me. I imagined what would have happened if we had gotten lost on the way back to our own campsite, and the story grew from there. It’s based on my memories of that time—the sensory impressions, the relationships, and my feelings as a 14- or 15-year-old boy, especially my relationship with my father. There’s an element of truth in it, mixed with the fiction needed to make the story work.

It’s a very different kind of story than “The Winners“ or “Donut.” Those stories, I guess, have a different origin.

LH: How would you describe your writing style in things like The Winners to someone who’s never read anything in that style before? 

AS: I recently wrote an email to a friend trying to explain what I’m doing with my work, particularly some of my stories like “The Winners.” It keeps coming up in my family and among friends—who are smart, but not necessarily literary people. They enjoy reading but don’t always understand the kind of writing I’m doing, and I think they find it a bit bewildering.

In the email, I made an analogy to Picasso. I hope I’m not misrepresenting him, but here’s my take: Picasso’s paintings, with their seemingly odd features (like a face where the nose is on the side but the eyes are front), reflect a deeper truth. Children often draw things in a very naive way, capturing multiple angles of something they see—like a face—at once. Our brains assemble these angles into a three-dimensional image, but if we captured every snapshot, we would only see fragments, like the profile, the front, the top, etc. Children simplify this into basic shapes.

I think that if we reduce or simplify the way we look at the world, approaching it emotionally and in the moment like a child, we get closer to the truth of human experience—moment by moment. G.K. Chesterton put this brilliantly when he said that we have a “hole in our head” that we fill with objects, and those objects become part of us. While we have sophisticated words to describe things, they often remove us from the childlike astonishment we feel when we experience something for the first time.

This idea is at play in some of my work, like “Donut.” It’s not about having the donut, but wanting it, in the way a child might express wanting something.

There’s another aspect I think about too. Since the turn of the 20th century, many writers have explored how we process the world moment by moment. We don’t remember events as tidy stories. We might recall a day chronologically when talking to others, but in our minds, memories rush in like an avalanche—sensations, emotions, no clear order.

For example, there are moments from my childhood, like riding on my father’s shoulders, that I can replay in my mind as vividly as if they just happened, even though he’s been gone for over a decade. These memories can drop into my thoughts at any time, uninvited. If I want to convey what’s going on in my head, I have to find a way to incorporate that.

It’s almost like trying to look at yourself in a mirror—you can’t see everything at once. Similarly, in Ulysses, James Joyce was trying to capture the flow of thoughts moment by moment, but it’s so detailed and fragmented it can become incoherent. The challenge is suggesting this experience without overwhelming the reader with every idle thought.

This is where Picasso comes in again. His work often combines different perspectives—like the profile and the front of a face—and he selects specific angles to create a coherent image. Similarly, in my writing, I aim to show a sensory overload, like an avalanche of perception, but in a way that still makes sense to the reader.

To be clear, I don’t write with this intention in mind. I don’t consciously set out to capture the moment-to-moment flow of experience. I’m more likely to have a daydream about someone obsessed with a donut, and the voice of that person is key. I want the voice to feel authentic, like the way people actually speak or could speak in a given situation, and that gets woven into the story.

LH: What is your relationship with theater and how does it affect your writing?

Alan Sincic: Well, it’s a good transition, because when I mention voice, I really think, I don’t know where the cause and effect comes in, but I know that so much of theater is about voice. For a script to be effective on stage, the playwright has to incarnate it in a character. It’s not just disembodied words floating through space; it’s somebody breathing the same air as the audience, coming out of a particular body at a particular moment in time, interacting with other bodies in space. The best playwrights do a superb job of that.

I guess you could say by osmosis, when I’ve had the chance to be part of a good production of a well-written play—I was involved with a theater in Orlando for a number of years that always did really interesting plays—I was able to step inside the script and be the character. When you do that, you get to appreciate every line. In a well-written play, every line, every breath has been carefully calibrated by the playwright for maximum dramatic effect. As an actor, you try out different ways of doing it and saying it, and then you begin to understand: Oh, there’s a reason why I’m pausing here. What’s the pause about? Is it just to give the audience a chance to breathe, or is there something happening in that silence? Does the blank space operate in a narrative way?

I was in the theater world really as a lover of theater, and I enjoyed being on stage, but I wasn’t necessarily pursuing a professional path. When I was in college, I was involved in theater, and did some plays and musicals. I’ve done enough singing that I could do okay in a musical. I developed a level of competency, but I wasn’t a theater major—I was a lit major. Then, a couple of years later, I ended up in New York. I had gotten a poetry fellowship at Columbia, which gave me a chance to land there. I didn’t stay with that program long because I had enough of grad school at that point, having been at the University of Florida, but landing in New York gave me a chance to say, “Oh, let’s go do some auditions.”

Why not? I can do this. Let’s just see what it’s like and explore what the world is like. I didn’t have any dreams of being an actor, but I managed to get cast in a few things. I saw, oh, here’s an opportunity to develop as a writer and performer when I’m performing. There was a stretch of time when I was really living out of a suitcase, doing temp work.

In New York in the 80s, there was something called the poetry calendar, where they listed open-mic poetry meetings throughout the city on a broadsheet. This was before the internet era, so you could go to Shakespeare’s Bookstore and other places, and every month, they would post it. I would highlight where the open mics were, and they were all over town, so I was traveling everywhere. Some of these were in little rundown venues or in somebody’s apartment or in a church that they had set aside for the night. It was a chance to get up in front of people and use words. I was writing some poetry, but oftentimes, for the open readings, I would write comic satirical pieces and get up and do those.

As the years passed, I found that certain pieces seemed to work with the audience. This is the thing about a comic piece: laughter doesn’t lie. If people laugh, you know they’re engaged and enjoying it. You could be writing something serious, and everybody is polite enough not to say anything; they’ll nod and clap at the end, but you don’t really know if they liked it. But when you write something comic, you get an immediate reaction.

Then I began to discover, oh, if I change it a little bit, I either get a better or worse reaction. Stand-up comics make a career out of reading an audience and changing just where a word goes, or where a pause goes. That can either get you a bigger laugh or a lesser one. So, I did a little bit of that. Eventually, these pieces began to coalesce into something that could work as an hour-long show. I had about an hour’s worth of material that had been tested. I did a one-man show, mostly for friends, just to get the whole thing done. But the writing of those pieces was shaped by getting in front of an audience with the piece, which you don’t normally have the chance to do as a writer.

You can be at a reading, and if people already like what you write, they’ll nod and clap at the end. But when you’re completely unknown, and the audience doesn’t know anything about you, and they’re not interested in you, you’ve got to win them over somehow. That’s part of the proving ground for some of those pieces, particularly the wilder ones.

LH: So, would you say you came to the theater more as a writer than as a performer? Would that be true?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t think I’m emotionally equipped to pursue acting. You have to be obsessive about it, and I’m not. I don’t disparage actors for that, but it seems to me that the people who succeed in that arena are truly taken by it and obsessed with being in front of people. It’s like they’re going to die if they don’t go on stage. I never really felt that way. I always felt comfortable on stage, and given the right script and production, I could do okay. I never considered myself a great actor, but I think I was confident, and that gave me enough to be part of it.

The other thing is, I became increasingly impatient when I’d randomly go to an audition in New York, stand in line halfway around the block, and look at the script of the production and think, I don’t even think this is that good a script. There’s not going to be a lot of money in it, and certainly not a lot of fame. What’s the point of all this? I’m not that hungry for it. At the same time, I was writing things of my own. I reached a tipping point when I was there and said, why am I doing this? Why am I busting my butt to be part of a production I don’t even think is that good, or that I don’t care much about, when I can write something of my own and own it? Maybe nobody else reads it, but I’m the one who created it.

And I said, let me see if I can take the things I’ve written and get them on stage. So, later on, back in Orlando, I did a one-man show and a small ensemble piece at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. You bid for a spot, and you get five nights to perform your show. That was really great as a writer to shape it. It was a headache to produce because you have to figure out how to get rehearsal spaces, and there are many vagaries in the theater you don’t have control over.

I had the opening night for this set of pieces I’d written. Everything came together, we rehearsed it, but the air conditioner was broken in the theater, and it must have been 100 degrees in there. And that was the night the three people from the Orlando Sentinel came. It was a disaster across the board with things I had no control over. But after five performances, everything had been shaped, and you learn from that too. Maybe next time, write it on a piece of paper that doesn’t evaporate when the performance is over.

That’s the other thing about it: They walk out of the theater, and the handful of people who remembered it had a good experience, but it’s gone.