"We Have Created a List of Things for Paul to Do and There is No Paul" by Eric Lee—Our December 2022 Gold Medal Winner

Eric Lee is our first place winner from the contest posted in our December 2022 issue and her story will be published in the March 2023 edition. Congratulations, Eric!

What the judges had to say:

“Very inventive and an interesting concept that elegantly takes us on a journey to an unexpectedly deeper place.”

“Excellent premise for a story, and very well executed! This story echoes elements of Oscar Wilde’s fictionalized (non) character of Bunbury in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” (with) a strongly humorous component.”

“This story completely knocked my socks off. I fell in love with the concept of Paul, the name a vessel for holding love with no place to go.”

Meet Eric

Eric Lee is a writer whose work has appeared in F(r)iction Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Ten Stories Down. He is learning to slow down enough to watch the clouds go by. He loves and is inspired by his awesome family.

(photo is of Eric’s dog, Grover)

We Have Created a List of Things for Paul to do and There is No Paul

an excerpt of Eric’s winning story

We created Paul out of nothing, without really meaning to. I think Aneta was the first. While we all stood waiting for a cab in the rain she said that Paul was expecting her for dinner, that he had studied the art of making sushi for weeks now and that this was his “big reveal.”

“Truth be told,” Aneta said, “he isn’t that good at cooking, but he throws himself into things so much that you just want to support him.” Paul’s genesis had been born of the need to avoid a co-worker’s insistence that they all needed to run over their project one more time even though it was already six thirty. A week later, without sharing her story, Aneta heard from Daniel that he had told someone at the gym that Paul had started his own band and had written a song called “Blue Giraffe” that captured both the philosophy of Lao Tzu and made culinary critiques on the pre-historic cartoon The Flintstones. The only practical recipe for dinosaur was discussed in the third verse. Daniel was motivated by nothing more than the need to be interesting to strangers. When he and Aneta discovered their co-creation of Paul, they laughed for fifteen minutes straight before agreeing that Paul could barbecue, but that he was lost with seaweed and rice.

Word of Paul’s adventures and wisdom percolated through our group of friends over the next few months. According to our new and ever-evolving legend, Aneta’s husband had dated Paul’s cousin before he met Aneta and realized that he couldn’t live with a vegan after all. Paul taught me about true deep mediation after he took a year off and built birdhouses in Antigonish. There is nothing so Zen as the gentle tapping of a hammer by the sea. And Mark assured a potential love interest that there was in fact a proper and socially acceptable way to tell someone that they were fat. Paul had accomplished this with Mark’s cousin Martha, and afterward Martha had felt better about herself than she’d felt in years. He taught her to own it and to give it a grace.

…

to read the rest of the story, order your copy of the March 2023 issue.