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Return Address: The Labyrinth
 
The year I met you was an odd one. I was still nursing my wounds from a particularly painful breakup a year or so earlier. I had just finished graduate school and had no solid prospects for employment. Despite an auspicious prelude to my academic career, I had yet to receive any job offers from the hundreds of applications I sent out for teaching positions, ranging from the permanent and high-paying to the temporary and shit-paying. I was beginning to panic.
 
Leigh Stevens

 

Goin' Up the Country (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
In the week after my mother's death and before her funeral, my childhood friend Jimbo and his husband Michael came to Bessemer to help me grieve. My brother Mike and I met them at Jimbo's parents' house, just over the hill from where my mother lived. We had barely settled over cups of coffee when Jimbo suggested, with that familiar gleam in his eye I recognized as the kind of trouble I wanted to dive into with him, "Let's take a road trip."
 
Terry Barr