Short Story Competition Winner 2008
'Julian's Yearbook'
by
Jendi Reiter
Good old Diane, my neighbor, my study partner, keeper of secrets. A short and cuddly freckled blonde, she collected pictures of Elle McPherson, on which she gazed with disinterested worship, seemingly unaware of any obligation to measure herself against this ideal. That's how I began to understand fashion. They don't belong to us, those insect goddesses, those long-legged robot queens. Like Whistler's mother, they're arrangements in color, abstractions that deign to take human form so we might learn to forget ourselves. Then the moment passes, and we buy their favorite rings and shoes like relics of vanished saints. It's a living. If I'd been born 500 years ago, I'd have enjoyed being pope, one of the wicked ones who sold the knucklebones of St. Edwithius to pay for the pageboy's satin underwear and wound up ass-deep in a lake of fire in Dante's Inferno. Instead I work for Harper's Bazaar. Diane's still on my gift-subscription list. She divorced early, owns a B&B in Savannah that I've never visited. Too close to home.
Return to Short Story Competition.