Fiction Contest Winners

First Place Winner: Aileen Ridings Bennett

"As we traveled around the country for my husband's engineer job, I collected bits and pieces of characters and scenes," says Aileen, a mother and writer who lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Read her blog at lifeloveandlaughter.blogspot.com.

"I'll Love You Forever"

I knew he ate mayonnaise on his hotdog but I married him anyway. He divided the bun precisely in half, shook off any loose crumbs, slathered each side with enough mayonnaise to choke a horse, carefully split the hotdog with the fork tine, and filled in the crevice with more mayonnaise, topping it off with only a hint of chili. He was a good man, or at least that's what magazine tests pointed out to me each time I took a pencil to one while sitting under a hair dryer at the beauty shop. Of course, with your brains baking under a galvanized hood, you have a tendency to imagine anything, except why the 80-year-old blue-haired lady sitting next to you is reading an article entitled, "Why Not Have Sex While Hanging from a Chandelier?"

Like I said, I married Derrick. He was a college graduate and already an electrical engineer by the time I met him. Mother kept referring to him as affluent, her eyes lighting up like the obnoxious Santa Claus with one eye missing that she put on the front porch every Thanksgiving night. "Turn on the lights," she would yell to Daddy, who lay by the outlet she had insisted he hide under the porch.

"Mother, Derrick has asked me to marry him," I imagined springing it on her, knowing exactly what her reaction would be.

"Thank you, thank you, sweet Jesus, you have answered my prayers," she would say. "Did you hear that Horace?" she would shriek, slapping Daddy on the arm.

I didn't tell her. I didn't tell anyone I was going to marry Derrick.

Mother pressed my yellow-flowered cotton nightgown when we got back home. The five-minute marriage ceremony was in a dilapidated building, performed by a man wearing sunglasses who finally picked up a constantly ringing phone receiver and put it in his desk drawer. Mother was also tearfully exclaiming how absolutely tacky we would look to the townspeople, her baby daughter not having the same showcase wedding she put on for her other daughters.

I should digress at this point and say I really had better nightclothes than a yellow-flowered cotton nightgown. Aunt Jo Lynn Cross Pendleton, Uncle Tad's wife on my Daddy's side, plied all of us girls with silk things for our hope chests. "A woman can't have too many things that slide around on her body," she would say, though at that point I had no intention of sliding my body around anything. Mother kept all of these silk things packed away in mothballs. Sturdy underwear was good enough for her mother and was good enough for us. And I knew if I asked Mother to get me out something silk to slide around on my body she would surely start wondering about me and Derrick. Sex was not a word Mother allowed us to utter, and certainly not something in which I could ever see her participating. According to her we were children of the divine spirit.