Matthew Salesses

2020 ELEMENTS CONTEST table of contents About CRAFT & the Elements Contest 03 2020 Results 04 Note from the Editor 06 “Shelter” 07 by John Haggerty “Artifacts: On Revising Older Stories” 23 by Laura Rock Gaughan “Splinter” 26 by Tobey Hiller Hybrid Interview: Matthew Salesses 43 by Candace Eros Diaz “This Dreary Exile of Our Earthly Home” 46 by Eliana Ramage “Art of the Opening: What’s an Opening to Do?” 68 by Albert Liau for CRAFT Excerpts from the Finalists 70 About the Finalists 82 about CRAFT Elements Contest Established in 2017 as a literary magazine CRAFT Elements is an occasional contest for fiction, CRAFT grew in 2020 to include featuring a different element of fiction in creative nonfiction. We explore how writ- each iteration. Elements: Conflict was open ing works, reading pieces with a focus on the for unpublished short fiction up to 6,000 elements of craft, on the art of prose. We words, including short stories and stand- feature previously unpublished creative work alone excerpts of longer work. We read for weekly, with occasional reprints, as well as the strongest use of conflict in otherwise weekly critical pieces including essays on well-crafted and well-rounded short fiction. narrative craft, interviews, book annotations Three winners were each awarded $1,000 and reviews, and more. All published cre- and publication. ative pieces include an author’s note and an editorial introduction that each discuss craft and stylistics in the work. We do not charge fees for our fiction or creative nonfiction submissions, or for our craft categories, and we are a paying market. Our general submissions are open year-round with no capacity limits. We value accessibility— keeping CRAFT free to read and free to sub- mit to is our priority. We work with all writ- ers, established as well as emerging. 3 2020 results winners John Haggerty: “Shelter” Tobey Hiller: “Splinter” Eliana Ramage: “This Dreary Exile of Our Earthly Home” finalists Marguerite Alley: “A Good Thing Going” Steven Belletto: “Uncle Neal, Mayor of Doomsday” Steven Bryan Bieler: “Schmitt Takes the Night Off” David Borofka: “Retirement Dogs” Sarah Freligh: “Revision” Steph Grossman: “Girl in the Forest of Fear” Maya Kanwal: “The Unlucky Storefront” Carol Keeley: “Wind and Embers” Will Lowder: “Catastrophe Is Kind of Sexy” Kathryn Maughan: “Gall” Justin Noga: “Heinz Baby” Connor Thompson: “Monsters” 4 the rest of Allison Alsup: “May Peace Soon Come” Vincent Anioke: “Ogbuefi” the longlist Madison Bakalar: “So This Is How We Go” Gina Chung: “Human Hearts” Dominick R. Domingo: “The Salt Flats” Georgia English: “Patterson’s Curse” Meredith Fowke: “Unsaid” Alma Garcia: “Shallow Waters” Becky Hagenston: “Wild Creatures” Sruthi Narayanan: “A Test of Fire” Nancy Nguyen: “Relic” Deesha Philyaw: “Dr. Sandman” Kyle Seibel: “Tara, A Ghost Story” Michele Suzann: “Bottom of the Hill” Michael Ware: “The God of Speech” honorable Casey Bell: “Luminous Through the Mist” Chad Gusler: “Sore Vexed” mention Gurleen Kang: “Turban Tying” Micah Khater: “The Mourning Place” Alexander Lumans: “The Future History of the Arctic” Sarah-Jane Martin: “Blackbirds” Sarah McElwain: “The Eggplant” Paula Smellie: “White and Jewish?” Beth Sutherland: “Whiplash Curve” J. Eliza Wall: “Cicada Crescendo” 5 note from the editor On behalf of the readers and editors of CRAFT, I’d like to thank each writ- er who entered short fiction for consideration in the 2020 CRAFT Elements Contest: Conflict. We are grateful you gave us the chance to read and consider your words. We’re delighted to share this digital compilation with you now, complete with the three winning stories, accompanied by author’s notes and editorial introductions; excerpts from a few of our favorite craft pieces, including essays and interviews; and excerpts from finalist pieces. Thank you for your support! —Katelyn Keating The 2020 CRAFT Elements Contest: Conflict Team Readers: Amy Barnes, L. Shapley Bassen, Cameron Baumgartner, Melissa Bowers, Winston Bribach, Hannah Christopher, Matt Dube, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, Thomas Ferriello, Mike Goodwin, Rosemary Graham, Zachary Kocanda, Albert Liau, Claire Lobenfeld, Claudia McCarron, Jesse Motte, Hayley Neiling, Kathy Ngoc Nguyen, Vandana Sehrawat , David K. Slay, Cynthia Zhang Editors: Alex Berge, Suzanne Grove, Katelyn Keating, Jesse Motte 6 shelter John Haggerty’s “Shelter” is an incredibly creepy short story. Rich with conflict, tension, surprise, dark humor, and plot, this piece is well executed at the line and global level. Suspense and mystery are in perfect balance here—never toying with the reader by withholding information, Haggerty delivers each detail right on time to keep us guessing. His choice to combine present tense with a second-person point of view is effective to keep the reader in the now story and deliver the necessary puzzle pieces over the full arc of narrative time. Alongside a command of pace lending to a mounting sense of dread, and authentic dialogue that enriches charac- terization, it is the setting that may be the real stand out here. The air-raid shelter is vividly ren- dered, which allows the reader to climb down underground beside the narrator and revel in the atmosphere and claustrophobia: “You turn off the flashlight, and you lower yourself into the hole, feeling with your feet for that first rung. The air in there is always cold, even on the hottest summer nights, and has a bitter smell you can’t quite identify. You inch your way down the shaft in complete darkness. The rungs, which are starting to show their age, are very rough on your hands.” Before heading back to the top for a second read, don’t miss Haggerty’s author’s note about reclaiming plot as an element of literary fiction. —CRAFT 7 There’s an air-raid shelter in the backyard. It was built in the fifties, back when such things were fashionable, back when, if your neigh- bors didn’t have one, you made it clear to them that at the sight of that first nuclear flash, they were totally on their own. It never got used, of course, and when you bought the house it was pitched to you as a conversation piece—oh, and you’ll never guess what’s in the backyard, the realtor said, giving you the perky smile she saves for property features that might prove problematic. There is a steel hatch, the faded green paint badly chipped, a little bit rusty. It’s got a padlock on it to keep the neighbor kids from killing themselves. Especially Kevin, who is just the kind of child who would end up dead in a sixty-year-old air-raid shelter and who, in your darker moments, you think might be improved by a little bit of killing. He’s a dead-eyed, slack-mouthed boy who is purported to have a collection of animal bones so extensive he couldn’t pos- sibly have obtained them by honorable means, and who rides his bike in tight circles in front of your house for hours, giving your girlfriend Sharon—your ex-girlfriend Sharon—a major case of the heebie-jeebies, even after you’ve closed the blinds. Yes, Kevin’s just the sort of boy who would be found, neck broken, at the bottom of the entrance shaft of your air-raid shelter, and no matter how airtight your alibi, no matter how many people saw you at the auto parts convention in Cleveland for an entire day before Kevin went missing and for two more after he was found, a weird cloud of sus- picion would always follow you around, and you would eventually have to move three hundred miles away, but you would still feel it, the Curse of Kevin, just in the way people would look at you when they said hi. So that’s the deal with the padlock. 8 Sometimes you go out there at night, more often since Sharon left. You don’t know why, but it’s always night. It’s near the back property line, concealed by some bushes. You have to know what you’re looking for. You take the lock off and pull the hatch up. It’s heavy. The hinges give off a deep groan that makes you vow to oil those damn things once and for all, but you never do. At your feet is a dark vertical shaft of concrete, descending down into the blackness. The beam of your flashlight plays on the narrow walls. The concrete is smooth. You ad- mire the workmanship yet again. They weren’t kidding around with their bomb shelters. It’s almost anthropological, this strange dwell- ing beneath your backyard. You imagine future researchers and their speculations. They were clearly of importance to the people of the time, the scientists say to one another. No doubt they had some re- ligious significance. On the near wall, U-shaped rungs made out of rebar protrude from the concrete. You turn off the flashlight, and you lower yourself into the hole, feeling with your feet for that first rung. The air in there is always cold, even on the hottest summer nights, and has a bitter smell you can’t quite identify. You inch your way down the shaft in complete darkness. The rungs, which are starting to show their age, are very rough on your hands. Sharon complained about that, the one time you brought her down here. You made some mistakes there, you admit. Maybe you should have laid the groundwork a little bit better, talked to her about it first, tried to explain what it meant to you. The fact that you did it at night was definitely a bad idea. In hindsight, the daytime would clearly have been better.

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