 Today Sacred Chickens is publishing the third and final winner of our writing contest. Be sure to check this and the other posts out! Happy reading! Third Place: "Master of the Marshes" by Danny Cove
We are still newcomers to this swamp, but I would venture to call it home. Little has been built, of course, but that is owing to our very rocky start. But soon that will change, as this particular clearing will become the homestead. Each family will build their house from whatever they can find – most likely mud, clay and driftwood which hasn’t yet rotted – and once they finish they’ll help out those who are still building. I began construction of my own house yesterday, drawing out its foundations and laying a floor of red clay that I’d dug from one of the banks that vanished into a mire. It should be dry by tomorrow morning, and then I’ll start work on the walls. All-in-all, there are seven families and eleven singles to form our community. It’s very small, and our original numbers – twelve families with twenty-three singles – were not so much greater. But this clearing gets enough sunlight that it should make for a good homestead, with some gardens between the houses and an adjacent clearing for more diligent farming.
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 Here at Sacred Chickens, we are going to be publishing the stories that won our writing contest over the next couple of days, and today we have our second place winner. Be sure to check them all out and happy reading! Second Place: "Jolene" by Ethan Willis
(Please be advised that this story contains graphic language and sexual situations) We thought a weekend at Hilton Head would be good for our marriage. We made the four hour drive for the most part in the cold silence we were accustomed to. He drove while I looked out the window or checked my phone, occasionally telling him to slow the hell down. He would say I was a nag. I would tell him he would get us both killed. Not that a small part of me wouldn’t have minded that.  Here at Sacred Chickens, we are going to be publishing the stories that won our writing contest over the next couple of days, with the first going up today in this very post! Be sure to check them all out and happy reading! FIRST PLACE: Coping Mechanism by Adam Padgett
Entry one, May 3, 2007 So the people in the white coats insist that I start writing down my personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings. I feel like it's stupid, but they'll probably take something away from me if I don't do this. I guess, since this is my first entry in this journal, I'll write a summary of things so far. I think my name is Max. It's what the doctors call me. I wish I could remember my last name, but I've been in this place so long now that I forgot. I guess I'm about sixteen. All of the “experiences” they want me to write down are boring. All I do is stay in this white room and follow a schedule. I wake up when the lights come on; I bathe and take my meds. Someone comes in and teaches me about math and English and crap like that until time to eat. After I eat, the therapist comes in and we talk about junk. She's probably the one who suggested this stupid journal. After that, I just do whatever I can in this room until dinner and lights out. That's my life as far as I remember. Same things happen every week. Nothing changes. As far as “thoughts and feelings” go, I've got nothing to write down that I haven't already told the therapist. There. I started the journal. Maybe this will be enough.  In this poetic map of his travels, McInnis traces the geography of his mind from wormholes originating in three dimensional spaces of the North American continent, inviting you into the insinuation.
 Morty has gotten dressed up this week to announce the winners of the writing contest. They are....
First Place: "Coping Mechanism" by Adam Padgett Second Place: "Jolene" by Ethan Willis Third Place: "Master of the Marshes" by Danny Cove Once again, thanks to everyone who submitted! The stories themselves will be published next week individually. Congratulations!  Tales from the Other Side With Uncle Morty Some of you have been asking about your Uncle Morty’s condition. How? You ask. Why? No offense, but the flesh-covered are dense, stuck in the material world like flies buried in Jello. I’m not sure I can really explain my condition to you. As to how? It’s complicated, technical and a little boring when you get right down to it. Why?Let’s just say I might have crossed a few metaphysical boundaries here and there while I was embodied. I might have broken a teensy rule or two on the other side too. Anyhoo…my bad luck is your learning experience. I’ve decided to publish a few tidbits of conversations from the other side. Here begins Morty’s transcription of messages from beyond. On old age and dying – Francine; disembodied, age 89 “I always thought getting older would be like building a mountain, a mountain of experience and wisdom. By the time you’re eighty, there you’d be at the top, perched like a white-robed guru. Younger generations would ascend the stones of your life to hear your words. The right way to feed babies, to handle a difficult husband, to work, sew, get up and feed the calves in the morning, gather the eggs, still get your pack of rascals on the school bus. Until I was in my forties, I honestly believed there was something solid ahead. Some perch from which reality would seem reasonable and I would know the answers. The joke was on me. Reality shifted. Not one amongst that lot makes bread, or gathers eggs, none of ‘em would know how to butcher a chicken if their life depended on it. Seems like the babies are a whole new species the way they cater to them now. If you don’t like a husband…leave him. Instead of teaching them, I sometimes envied them. They taught me how to email and fiddle with the TV remote. I realized there was no path. No mountain. Instead of building a mountain, I pieced a quilt. No pattern. A crazy quilt. And it may not win a prize or fetch $500 like granny’s old wedding ring quilt did when Anne sold it to go back to school after she left Danny, but it was pretty. I have to say it. There was my husband Frank’s old pajama shirt, there was Anne’s Easter dress I made out of that cheap blue calico. That patch on the corner was a piece of the gown Granny wore at the hospital the day before she died. All in all, it wasn’t bad, that quilt. In my old age, I laid myself down on it and touched this bit of flannel, that bit of calico, the linen from the suit that June wanted for graduation. The babies crawled around the corners of it on the one end and the dead tugged, tugged, tugged at it from the other. The teenagers, the adults? Those rascals couldn’t care less what you know or what wisdom you have to impart. If you’re lucky they’ll occasionally ask you now and then if you’re comfortable, there on your old quilt. Any rate, you’ve come to realize it doesn’t matter much anyway. Reality is wearing thin. Let them learn their lessons same way you learned yours. Let them piece their own quilts. Eventually, babies yanking on it from one end, the dead from the other, one day you know for sure there’s nothing under that old quilt but air. And you know which set will win the tug of war. The voice of your dead mother sounds closer in your ear than the babies laughing. Granny finally says, “Time to get on over here. Wrap that quilt around you and come on. It’s a cold walk over, but we’ve got a place for you at the table and we’re tired of waiting dinner.”  Mortimer Richard Wolcott is, quite frankly, not very forthcoming with his bio. We're not even sure if that's his real name. His work during his embodiments is not something he'll willingly share. However, his deathography is somewhat clear, at least from the time he showed up at Sacred Chickens Farm for a Halloween Party and never left. He is occasionally pressed into service to help write the blog and you can search the archives here for his wisdom. He enjoys hanging out with cats, the occasional cocktail, and dispensing sarcastic remarks to the living.  After listening to this set of songs the first time through, my first thought was that these would be great as a soundtrack for a couple trying to make their relationship work while dealing with depression or struggling through a break-up. When I looked up the husband and wife duo that are the broken fits, (yes, all lower case) I was pleasantly surprised to see that's exactly what they're aiming for with these songs. Steven and Amanda of the broken fits are advocates for mental health and believe "that an open dialogue can help to remove the stigma of mental illness, and quite possibly save a life." (Quote from their website.) All of these songs have an undercurrent of "this is us, this is how we get past the bad times, this is us surviving and remaining in love," feel to them. Singer-songwriters as wellness advocates. But not gurus: This is the two of them trying to explain how they make it work, through honest expression, with artistic merit, that they may not have all the answers, but this is what works for them, and they're trying just as hard as each and all of us to get by. That they're doing this through their music makes it all the more poignant and beautiful for the rest of us that get to hear their work. (Yes, art is work, in case you didn't know.)
 Don't go to your local medium!
Just check your email. Uncle Morty has commissioned Jarad to inform the winners. We want our winners to give us bio information, a photo or other art work they want to display with the writing, if they so choose, and how they would like to be paid. We will announce at the end of this month and begin publication of the winning stories!  Why is Morty playing a celebratory fugue? Because we FINALLY know the winners to our first annual fiction contest. We hate to keep you in suspense, but Jarad will be contacting the winners for their information and preferred payment methods. We will also check to see if the authors have any preferred photos, art work, and bios to go along with their entries. We should be able to make final announcements on August 30. We will publish first, second, and third place stories on this very site! Thanks to all our submitters for your weird and wonderful stories! In the meantime, we'd like to thank friend of the chickens, award winning author, Jeff Weddle, for judging the contest.  This book is an ode to middle age, to understanding without excusing the mistakes of forbears, to the dawning perception that the path of acquiescence, of having the edges rubbed off is inevitable. Borczon pays tribute to a strange kind of peace, the acceptance of the inevitable, the poetry of honest reflection, even if the view is through a liquor bottle or the haze of exhaustion from hard labor.
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