Editors' Prize Winner | April 22, 2026

Flight 

Jim left his wife late that spring and drove to my mother’s house. He arrived in the afternoon, his yellow Volkswagen Beetle spilling over with his prized record collection, Jefferson Airplane’s Freedom at Zero Point, and the Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle, and a Paul Simon single, “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover,” and when he opened the trunk, they came spilling out, a torrent of vinyl liberation, a cornucopia of musical id splashing across the pocked and tarred macadam of the driveway. He was puzzled at first. He stood amid the various albums that had come to rest at his shoes as if finally comprehending what he was doing, the fact that he had left his wife with the stated intention of staying away for good, that it really might be true. His middle-aged legs tremored beneath him. He wore a baseball cap from Nantucket, and he wore a dress shirt with a pocket in which he kept a well-used Meerschaum pipe, and as he stooped to pick up his music, the pipe fell out and clattered against the drive, and as he stooped again for the pipe, his wallet fell out of the back pocket of his shorts.  

Afterward, he sat on a chaise lounge on my mother’s porch nursing a Hefeweizen, the pipe dormant on the table beside him, his forehead already sweaty from the unseasonable heat, pretending to make small talk while munching on my mother’s chilled potato salad, though small talk under the circumstances was impossible. 

“What I never understood before is what it means to be free,” he said, mopping away the sweat from his cheeks. “Then what it means to give up that freedom. Then what it means to reclaim it once again. Nothing could be more important.”  

My mother nodded ardently, even as she eyed the Hefeweizen with mingled envy and concern. “I support you in this. You’re a man, and a man needs to be true to himself.” 

“You really get me,” he said.  

I was sitting beside them, palming a hacky sack. I was agnostic about Jim, just as I had been agnostic about the others before him. It wasn’t that I meant to be contrary, even if in my budding teenage years my default conversational mode was exactly that. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” I said.  

My mother was unhappy with me, her lips downturned into a frowny moue, as if to say, All our lives we have waited for this, don’t screw it up now. But Jim nodded sagely. He chewed on a hunk of potato and turned to me with an air of flamboyant generosity, the Hefeweizen bottle now resting like an oversized ankh against the pallid flesh revealed by his unbuttoned shirt, its condensation spackling his chest hair in a semblance of morning dew. “You are wise in the ways of the world,” he said, and he jabbed a thumb into the area of his own heart. “Yet in all of these months, the only thing that kept me going to AA—and I mean the only thing—was the promise of catching sight of your mother.” Upon which he took another pull of beer.