DISRU Many thanks to our two judges for their time, patience and efforts - Tilly Lawless and Rick Morton, who judged the fiction and non-fiction categories respectively. We extend particular thanks to Dr Wenkart, our donor, and Cecilia Robinson, our Donor Relations Officer, for their tireless efforts in supporting, contributing to and giving momentum to the 2020 Honi Soit Writing Competition. We appreciate and thank all who took the time to submit entries for this competition. Last but not least, congratulations to the winners! For non-fiction: Eliza Victoria (first place), Oscar Eggleton (second place) and Emilie Heath (third place). For fiction: Amy Wang (first place), Edie Griffin (second place) and Alvin Chung (third place). Stay tuned next week for the announcement of the final prize - the people’s choice selected by your editing team at Honi Soit.
Winter Amy Wang|| First place fiction & it’s winter ’09my mother serves me sliced apples & i stuff them in my cheeks, ripe laughter spilling out of my too-small mouth & bounding off my tongue. in this moment & the rest, time is a freshly ironed sheet, crisp with the sun. every tree’s filtered light is a personal disco ball. i dance to almost-visible sound & my head is a tooth ready to fall. i think i could be the bobblehead on my father’s dashboard & i giggle at the sight of it. again again again i am just a child inflatable toes & always forgetting how real a body is. everyone has touched me but no one has Touched me & i am my body & everything more & it is all still mine & it’s winter 2020 & there’s a pandemic outside & it’s blooming. i am sitting in the bathroom trying to scrub the skin off of my body, pressed against the side of the sink. i hang it up by the fingernails to dry in the spilt drool of the sun. i am blacking out all the mirrors, braiding pearls into my hair, planting white lilies in the garden & i am still just my looted body & the skin holding it together & nothing more. time in the time of lockdowns is fruit-bowl stilleach second sits, ripe & ready to be peeled open. i watch them rot. i see my reflection hiding in the window & i am tangible again. someone Touches me to the chants of tired protests & the worldwide gravedigging. my body wonders if it can be a watch. wonders if it can be a stamp in the corner of an envelope-
Voices from the underground Edie Griffin|| Second place fiction CW: gendered violence, abuse, death his hands strung her throat in a wedding band and they clip her feet and bag her stiff limbs up; W’re unzipping all the unlived years from the choke of body bags – while other bones are battered into seaspray, and a dismembered mother is frozen like an ambered bug; Gathering our scattered bits and patching each to rediscover our remembered selves – as fathers knead his children’s flesh, curl them up like foetuses or umbered fronds; Unpurpling our bodies and Unfurling like September’s buds. And no – spiderlike, a groom ensnarls her in his silk, thieves to flaunt her jawbone as a necklace, her clavicle a crown; No more in your warzone jaunts will we be your usables, your playthings or collaterals – on the bus a stranger thrusts too close, his hunting tongue is rummaging for bits of her to eat; two hands in the bush halve her up two eyes in the rear-view carve her down; while battering fingertips wet their cheeks to manufacture streaks bleating sorrys that die on their lips Watch, as we unvanish each effaced one of us, unbend our spines, emerge from all the hidden places unbury us from bushes and car boots unfold from webs and freezers unearth from underground as bulbs found by daybreak. No longer evanescing phantomlike beneath your boots, the webs, the sleep. We’re coming, and spilling in from every edge, Us unkilled ones, us unstilled ones, scintillant as eastern suns that split horizons, Halo trees and soak the breeze in apricot – See us flooding in like dawn that steeps the windowpanes. That hum is the sound of us coming, coming, Each drumming foot, a shooting sun and see us showering the sky in fireworks rupturing the silence that protects none but the silencers. Not even spidersilk has the strength of the spine that mends itself.
