David Shapiro's Editor's Pick
O-Blank-I-G-I-Blank-A-L
by Aaron Huertas
I'm usually not a fan of stories written in one run-on sentence, but this smartly crafted flash leaped to life with sharp scene-setting and charming characterization. The puzzle in the title said it all for me.
Each morning when Francis Merrimack, who went by Frank in person, sat down on the pedestal closest to the window at the counter of the Kensington Diner I promptly presented him with a menu so that he could confirm that we still indeed served eggs, bacon, silver-dollar pancakes, tall glasses of orange juice and piping hot cups of black coffee – a meal he called "The Five Food Groups," citing the fact that coffee plants are vegetables – which he consumed with regimented precision, sucking down the coffee in great gulps while the meal itself was cooked, then dipping triangular chunks of double-decker pancake into syrup and egg yolk, letting the bacon dissolve in his mouth like jerky, and washing down every other bite with a sip from the glass of orange juice, all the while pausing to peruse a copy of the Times-Dispatch, letting out swooning, sighing laughs – ahee hee hee hoooh – at private jokes he found between the lines of news ink, then finally, after the meal was finished and his fork and knife were placed criss-crossed like a coat of arms on his plate, he attacked the crossword, taking his Bic pen to the white squares of a twelve by twelve grid, all the while on the lookout for typos or ill-considered clues, pausing sometimes to stare out the window and project himself for a moment into his imagined public, and about once a week calling me over to point out a twelve-letter answer, usually to a clue that ended in a question mark, which I would compliment him on by calling it a "touchdown pass," prompting idle conversation about our team's performance or, in the off season, its prospects, before he did his final check: taking out yesterday's puzzle from his back pocket and comparing it to the answer box from today's issue because he found pride in never using the same answer two days in a row.
Aaron Huertas lives in Washington, DC where he is an undergraduate at George Washington University. He will receive a bachelor's degree in political communication this spring. This is his first work of published fiction.