Check out pictures from Masterpiece in a Day on Sept. 22 in Fountain Square here.

Art winners

Representational
1. Brian Priest

2. Jasmine Begeske

3. George Brookins

Non-Rep
1. James Ratliff

2. Mike Lyons

3. William Denton Ray

Writing
1. Shari Wagner:

The Picnic
(Store window for Days Gone By)

What we need is already here -
the woven basket with white linens
folded beneath a mason jar of purple crocus
and the straw hat propped, nonchalantly,
against a dresser. If we take out
the jar, then the wine bottle fits
inside the basket as do the olive
and bronze-colored grapes that drape
upon a chair seat and the lemons poised
to best advantage near a round, glass pitcher.
Let's leave the cabbages where they have rolled
but take the white ceramic cat that's curled
near the lantern with the red, decorative oil.

All we need to do now is choose our spot
from the acrylic painting that stands
behind the lime-green throw that is our blanket
or perhaps it's the grass since here
the ground is bare. It's late autumn and the wind
is blurring the brown and orange leaves. You thought
this was a spring or summer picnic. So did I.
But this is surely early November unless
we imagine it otherwise. New leaves
unfurl from maples and you are pouring wine
into a goblet that is really the lemonade pitcher.
Don't look too closely or you'll see
everything contorted like our reflection
in the glass. Nothing seems to fit,
not the straw hat perched upon your head
or the cat that tries to curl into my lap.
The sun that should be straight above us
is on its way back down and glares
like the bare bulb of the brass lamp near the basket.
You should have brought that kerosene lantern
I mentioned, but let's don't panic. Maybe
we never came here anyway. We're not
in a landscape but in the still-life
of a window, seated beneath lace curtains
and a string of faded, paper lanterns.

2. Maya Worman, "Work in Progress" - prose

Dear Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

I am sitting in the sun as I write, hopeful this letter finds your body warm from the suns rays in Mexico City where you have chosen to spend your retirement.

Mr. Marquez, all of the sudden I feel like my beauty has fallen apart on me, and I am hopeful that the work I have done up to date will make up for my newly realized odd shape and appearance.

And I seem to live in three rooms now, too. There is the outside room in which I sit with my family and my child and in this room I also work. In this outside room the beds are made and company can drop by and there won't be any crumbs on the counter if you peek in the window.

There is the other outside room where I can only go alone, where I quietly convince myself that I can be an ordinary woman living in a traditional pattern. And celebrate the monotony, monotony by choice, and here I chant, "Rivers to the sea, rivers to the sea," which to me means the smallest events contribute to the dark and salty ocean where I don't matter and that it is okay not to matter, compared to the ocean anyway.

But it is the inside room that concerns me, and this room I rarely visit. I shuffle by this room and avoid its presence, this room that reminds me of the rooms in my grandparents' house that are named after the people that died in them. The rooms remain functioning rooms, and you can use them to sleep or read or store winter clothes, but no one really wants to keep the door open, afraid the memories will paralyze anyone who realizes them.

Some days the inside room has no doors and I forget it is there and I carry the weight with ease, other days I am afraid to open my mouth, for fear the vines that push up and roots that push down from inside this room will creep out and I will have to explain why I have never let sunlight in the room, and never told anyone that is there at all.

And damn my ancestors for this weight and this certainty that I have to keep living the lives of dead people who worked hard to die poor with family fighting over scraps of art and a farm that has not been a farm in years.

So Mr. Marquez, knowing that my images do not float in the sky like fat ladies or colorful balloons, can they be (should they be?) revealed? Or are they just better off in my head?

Yours,

Maya Worman

3. Kimiko Martinez:

Always Peppy

There is no pep in the step of this long-haired woman standing before us, pad in hand, black apron a shroud of misery.

"What can I get you?" the waitress asks flatly.

The diner is dingy but clean, like well-worn denim - faded and ripped, but soft and still a favorite that fits just right.

The counter, the tables, the jukebox and servers all wear a layer of light grease on their spit-polished shine. The smell of French fries never quite stops sticking to their skin and sour smocks.

The biscuits and gravy are as gray as the smoke-saturated walls; the coffee stale as the old sailors and sunny, sunglass-wearing hipsters who sit side by side, coming for the familiar faces and food. They take their places at the counter, thighs well-acquainted with the thin, cracked vinyl padding, drink from thick mugs and consume the special of the day, which, it seems, is nothing very special at all.

Our waitress does not smile, holding her lips tightly over receding gums and years of overlooked oral care. Her weary eyes have seen more than her fair share of drunks, deadbeats and despondent divorcees in for brunch or straight from the bars. Long, Camel-colored hair hangs neatly in a nun-like braid. Fading forearm tattoos betray an innocence long lost - an unsaintly past that preceded children, husbands, prison and welfare.

This is a woman who has lived every sad country song in the jukebox. Her heart knows the words of Desperado just a bit too well.

The white thread in the Always Peppy embroidered across her chest has begun to unravel. But she, a pillar of sans-sanctimonious slum survival, does not, will not come undone. The seams of her life, though threadbare and frayed, will long outlast those of the designer divas who stare at her through their stupored gazes, pitying the woman who serves them a slice of life with a side of sorrow at 4 a.m.

$5.95 plus tip.

Music
1. Marcy Hook & Kory Quinn
2. T.J. Reynolds & Roger Baker
3. Scott Hall & Craig Stinson