Third Prize: JANET’S COTTAGE by D.H. Tracy i. That visitors arrive today is good and bad. The tulips insist too firmly on the sweetness of youth; the flagstone on the walk has cracked, and dust piles on the cellar sills so deep it shows the footprints of a mouse. One door sticks. One won’t shut. The slipping clutch of their jalopy whirrs in the coomb like a domestic quarrel. They will have passed the rapeseed not yet in bloom, and the painting of the fields they will take away will remind them of a place it does not say. That is good and bad. The infant sleeps. The boy senses something and is soothed but not comforted. Is that the sun or moon, he asks, pointing to the flattered summer on the easel. The embarrassing languor of a private life stretches to the horizon. Hasn’t the cart, left for months beside the haystack, at the foot of the hill, slept under both? Someone had better take care of it, no? If a stray were at your door, wouldn’t you show a saucer’s-worth of kindness? The house’s stones gather moss. In her puttering Janet reveres a chipped enameled teapot, a black-wool sweater, a pot of chervil. The smells of earth and turpentine make the visitors more alert and less. They rustle in a museum of the thorough. Things will be back to normal tomorrow. ii. A coppice of bottles rises from the mantel, no two of them alike. They flare flat-bottomed or teeter on their rounded ends and glint in blue and all the colors of the beech. They catch the fire—and the daylight and pass it among themselves, a market of willowy and skittish spirits, baskets full of tinkling snakes, dried and brittle lungs of beached sea-creatures, candy. It seemed as if she had, in private, charmed ice into forgetfulness of melting, or promised them refuge, or somehow knew the arguments they were susceptible to, and now, in the heat of someone’s gaze, they will twinkle and abide their keeping still. What if we break? they do not ask. You shall not break, she does not answer, nor ever spill that strange, clear distillate we sip from them, although the threat of it burnishes the reflective and transparent skin almost disappeared, and yet a skeleton. The visitors draw in the breath that blew you. So a rummaged flask decants them of the fear they had not noticed, and its delicacy shows each of us inadequate to the place he knows. iii. Janet’s rusted and creaking bicycle goes rolling down past the churchyard and past the rapeseed and the wheat fields, and Janet hums a tune that never goes anywhere or repeats itself. The gray afternoon, affixed to her spirit with a hundred strings, leaves her, for that, uncompromising as a bird. Her brakes sound their tiny squeal, and she watches an ochre mastiff lumber out of a hedge. It sets itself in her path and growls. She breathes and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. The mastiff barks. If she feels fear, it is the kind one feels alone, at home, at eleven or at two, unsure suddenly that one is equal to what seemed a simple task, wherewithal gone as utterly as time. The paintbrush is a wheelbarrow full of lead and bricks. A thousand acres of stationery lie immaculate in a keepsake drawer. The kindness of a mastiff seems a thing she will never get round to, even as it disappears rump-last through a gap in the hedge. She hears nothing, and then the clucking of her gears. iv. Over a far down a transport drops eight paratroops for practice, as if a girl had plucked a dandelion gone to seed. Neither gone to storm nor drought the day takes its terrifying middle way, terrifying to all but Janet, who commends the tousling politesse of light and shadow, and pretends the easel is the world and the world the easel. Is it or is it not pretend? The village houses, seen from the hills, or even from the street, inch closer on such quiet days to hamlets made for model trains of matchboxes and of cotton wool, and of a meticulous variety of love. Enter from the east a model train, as quiet as a cloud. Janet watches it until it disappears, occluded by the houses she is almost pleased with. How splendid they are, she thinks. The iron, the Georgian sandstone, the gables. A little quibbling with the oils will make a light love-labor of their toils. They have, already, all but captured it. v. Time sheets off the shingles of Janet’s cottage, though a moment of impatience pry the mortar from between the stones as surely as a pick. The starlings nibble fistfuls of breadcrumbs flung on the winter ground, and starlings nibble on the winter stars. For years she does not mutter Off with his head. She quenches, somehow, the foolish always-wanting, the tantrum, the listlessness and the burgeoning list, the wail, the wrenching and the brittleness, the whispers by the garden fence, the cruel intimations in the saved letter, the frayed silk of her change-purse, the expectations and the running toilet, the endless tergiversations and the will choking itself on the end of its chain. How did she build her cottage with scraps at hand to weather the thousand entropies of privacy? The paintings hang on its inside walls, delible shadows, frail as paper, frail as glass through which my demented fire axes pass. More noise! and a lonely cottage will seem the less the way one should have proceeded, and ignored to acquire tastes for vanity and discord. Spur the needs of the body, prod ambition, pound the fist at God’s failure or man’s to see men’s will or God’s made evident through me. Let in by the window imps of politics and sex to paste up willy-nilly their unrolled verdicts-- ‘precious,’ ‘twee,’ and ‘quaint.’--But Janet, Janet goes riding her bicycle behind the windbreak trees she plants within one’s mind, her attention catching all of that whose lack has made of life an arithmetic of the shallow and coarsened for good the matter of her praise. Say no corner of the heart can hate her small insistence that the small is greater, once warmed before the image of her blaze.