Honorable Mention by Layla Ormbrek

Behind dingy cellophane,

the photograph in the family album

encases me, where I grimace like I’m behind bars—

lips stretched taut across gritted teeth,

eyes plaintive, fixing my father, the resident cameraman,

asking any witness not to believe

the bottom half of my face.

My age, ten,

my hair, mostly brushed, my pantsuit, floral,

a K-Mart layaway acquisition,

my hands, clutching a certificate reading

“Honorable Mention.”

A bone thrown by the school district arts committee,

a pack of energetic, under-employed moms who

anoint the preteen illuminati each spring.

My drawing,

rendered in earnest, heavy oil pastel.

Social commentary, really.

A collection of chunky-fingered hands in

various skin tones, depicted with no joints or nails

because why complicate things, looking as though

they’re about to high-five.

The background, Earth in the shape of a heart.

What these creative decisions reveal

about our collective moment and my understanding

of planetary rotation, I have given no thought.

What I have given to the ceremony

is my haughty confidence, that of a vanquished queen,

flared nostrils, piercing gaze sweeping the room and scouring

the work of the other students in judgment.

I spy the blue-ribbon winner,

a grotesque collage, she didn’t even

do her own drawing,

the subject a bleeding man in a robe,

maybe a nightgown.

Letters cut from magazines and newspapers,

arranged like a ransom note, spell out beneath,

“HE IS RISEN.”

But who is He?

And how should I know Him?

I look back and forth between the other entries,

pictures of horses and baseball games, and then this guy.

The rules stipulated no violence, but he’s been

stabbed in the hands, the side.

Dewy El Greco eyes full of preemptive forgiveness,

telegraph the put-upon message, “It’s okay, I’ll do it myself.”

Though even I know that this is bigger

than putting away groceries or sweeping the kitchen.

I stare past the winning piece to the murder of

suburban mothers fawning around the artist herself,

a serene fifth-grade saint, who should rightfully radiate

her own halo, who should float

inches above the ground so as not to

walk the earth in dirty Keds like the rest of us

easy-to-clock heathens.

“Smile,” my dad says at that instant,

and I turn and grimace,

blinded for a moment by the flash,

captured forever in the second before I begin

to devise my artistic comeback.

Scrap the hands, I think.

Knuckles aren’t your strong suit.

Add a rainbow. Frame the earth in a peace sign.

Slam dunk.

Later I ask my folks about

the Bleeding Man, begin to connect dots.

Now, I was familiar with his baby form,

“Hark the Herald Angels,” etc. But I’d never

sat in a pew, except at

a great-aunt’s funeral, years prior,

rolling and writhing on the oak benches,

demanding to know when the buffet would start.

Unschooled, an ignoble savage.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, red-faced,

out of the loop.

It’s so morbid, they shrug,

Why lay that

on a kid?

So I am left to my unicorns, my fairies,

heedless of sin, only gathering years later

that this was a mercy, a boon,

its own Amazing Grace.