The First Page Challenge 2024—2nd place

Congrats to David Hutto for winning second place in the First Page Challenge 2024! Here's what our judge (Michelle Barker) had to say:

"From the opening sentence of The Jaguar Dreams of Water, I was captivated by the mixture of real and surreal. Again, the author’s sharp eye for detail kept me glued to the page, as well as the unexpected turn the story took."

The Jaguar Dreams of Water

The angels with a billion names, moving in a line up the street, did not mind the drizzle in Valladolid, Mexico. As the feathers of their wings began to adhere and droop from dampness, as shimmering wet robes increasingly clung to their bodies, they moved to peer one at a time in the doorway of a café on the street Calzada de Los Frailes.

The angels were filing barefoot, on small perfect feet, out of the worn red courtyard of the convent around the corner, a space that would appear to any mathematical observer to be too small to hold a hundred angels, even small cherubs with folded wings. And yet the red courtyard contained not just a hundred, but hundreds of millions, milling about where the monks had once walked discussing the shocking price of cooking oil and how to convert these Maya pagans to the only true religion.

Fortunately for social tranquility, no one on the street could see the angels, so neither citizens of Valladolid nor tourists had to halt in stunned immobility or collapse in frenzied religious fervor. The angels spangled and glittered unseen up the street past the brewery with its pleasant shady courtyard, to peek into ConKafecito for a glimpse of Noah Terasso, a man in his early forties wearing a white linen shirt, with straight dark hair beginning to recede a bit from the front and with brown eyes that were often glancing about, observing the area around him.

Though Noah did not look like someone who had spent much time outdoors, he wore a pair of black leather boots with an incised pattern that he had bought years before in Idaho, which he only wore now when it rained. The trim athlete body of his youth could still be imagined when he stood in certain positions, but mostly these days he sat reading instead. He had long ago laid down the basketball and the tennis racket to pick up a book, followed by another book and then another book. His expression was nearly always calm, almost an absence of expression, in fact, hiding the twilight landscape within.

David Hutto's work is forthcoming in Brussels Review and Literally Stories and has recently appeared in Mudfish, Cable Street, The Galway Review, and Paterson Literary Review, as well as in Crazyhorse and other magazines. His experience as a writer includes a writers’ retreat in Mérida, Mexico in 2024, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, invitations as a featured poet at the Callanwolde Arts Center in Atlanta, and first-place poetry awards from state-wide contests in Alabama and Georgia, as well as first prizes for short story and poetry in the Northeast Georgia Writers Club contest (2024). Website: DavidHutto.com