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Winner of First Place in Gooseberry Pie’s First Writing Contest April 2024 (Tie)
by Jessica Klimesh
You’ve misplaced your happiness again, probably tossed it by mistake when you cleaned out the refrigerator, or maybe inadvertently dropped it off at Goodwill with some boxes of old clothing. Either way, you’re sure that someone else has found it by now and is parading it about, wondering who would discard such perfectly good bliss. You reprimand yourself, you really need to be more careful, because last time it took years to get your happiness back, and it only gets harder with age, but just as you’re wondering where to look, where you even found it last time, right there in the vestibule of the supermarket you see an advertisement for a pie-throwing contest, and to your astonishment, the grand prize is happiness. It seems too easy, too good to be true, but you have nothing to lose, so you choose a simple confetti pie recipe that the internet tells you will look like birthday cake, but will have a creamy enough filling to stick to the recipient’s face, sliding off at will, leaving the victim to wallow in a tacky, muddy mess of stunningly sweet, colorful gunpowder.
While you don’t have any particular vendetta against any particular person (except maybe your junior-high gym teacher who made you wear those scratchy polyester shorts that always felt like they were on backwards, or the boy in tenth grade who said your tits were too small, or the man who eloped with your best friend a week after breaking off his engagement to you, or the liquor store associate who brazenly told you that you drank too much), you can conjure up the face of anyone who’s wronged you at any given time, so you know with certainty that you won’t lose—that you can’t lose—when you throw your sugary stinger at the target in the competition. And this time, you vow, if you win—when you win—you’ll hold onto your happiness, generally take better care of it, and never accidentally give it away again.
Jessica Klimesh is a writer and editor whose flash appears in a variety of literary journals. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
