George

(The challenge was to write a 300 or less entry set in a restaurant. Judges comments are below my entry.)

George Malkos was shy. Weird, people would say. He worked at the local Italian restaurant- Angelo’s- where, again, he was quiet. But he did his job so no one really wanted him to quit.

It was there, at Angelo’s, where he found her.

It must have been the women’s boutique next door that threw her out. Her face was smashed in on one side and her hair was matted.

George didn’t care.

He found her when he took out the trash one evening. Shoved in the dumpster, legs askew. He had pulled her out and stared at her for a long time, looking into that half-dented face.

He had carefully placed her back in the dumpster and retrieved her later when everyone was gone. Everyone except the manager Barry, who most nights locked himself in the manager’s office with a bottle of gin.

George brought her into the walk-in cooler and there, amidst the lettuce and juicy tomatoes, he held her. Whispered into her ear that she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. He stroked her messy locks.

They danced. Cheek to cheek.

He hid her in the back of the broom closet, after wrapping her in a cook’s apron as a dress. Every night at the end of his shift they would dance amongst the produce, a world away from Angelo’s.

George was in love.

One night he walked in and she was gone. Frantically, he asked Barry if someone had cleaned the closet.

“Yeah. We had shit in there we didn’t know we had,” was the response. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

George rushed outside to the dumpster but it must have been trash day because it was empty.

He held onto the side of it, stared in as his heart broke into a thousand pieces.

K: Oh, George. Can you be the protagonist of a long comic novel? I want to read more of you. I’m instantly engaged with this character and his attempt at love a la Lars and the Real Girl. The story never overexplains itself, allowing the reader to connect the dots, which I always appreciate. Sometimes with these high-concept stories, the writers don’t trust their concepts and say too much. GOLD

P: This kind of hurts to read. It’s one thing to be manipulative about the reader’s emotions, it’s quite another to allow those emotions to build naturally. This one succeeds at the second (or maybe it’s just really, really subtle at the first?). The George character is great.

SILVER