Winners of the 2012 Whatcom WRITES! contest will read their poetry, fiction and non-fiction from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12, at Village Books, 1200 11th St.

Whatcom residents were asked to write up to 800 words on this year's subject - "enemies," from grade school spats to family quarrels and global wars - as part of Whatcom READS!

Thirty top submissions will be published in a commemorative anthology.

Whatcom READS! is a community-wide reading and discussion program from the Whatcom County Library System and Whatcom Community College intended to encourage all Whatcom County residents to read the same book and create a county-wide book club experience.

At Any Age

SANDRA WALKER | COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

The house was built of pink stucco. Across the front stretched a white wooden porch wrapped in wisteria lush with foliage but robbed of flowers by the late spring frost that crept down Bell Mountain. The north and east facing walls were dusted in mossy green, the patina of the Pacific Northwest.

Eva Perkins stepped cautiously from porch to path, anxious to escape the phone. She'd hung up once on Lucy, but her daughter would not give up so easily. She paused to rest on a worn wooden bench and gazed at the little pink structure that was her whole world.

Stucco was not common in this logging community, and pink even less so. But back in the spring of 1953 when Billy Perkins built it for his bride, the house sat at the edge of town, so nobody bothered too much.

That first summer the rain never stopped and Eva, homesick for sunshine and warmth, planted anything with color in it. The townsfolk shook their heads and called it "The Garden of Eden" and whispered about "No good coming from marrying a foreigner." Eva was not foreign born, but when Billy met her she might as well have been. He was swept away by every feature of this wonderfully alien woman: lips rimmed in deep red; long, tanned limbs dressed in colors of a Caribbean sunset; slices of silver adorning her throat and wrists. Eva was older than Billy by nearly a decade, but that didn't matter. Ageless, she combined a childlike wonder with the wisdom of the world.

Eva surveyed the meandering flower beds she had nurtured over the years and tried to imagine what Billy would say about his daughter's demands. But lately she struggled to bring Billy's image to mind, much less what his thoughts might be about a child he'd never known. For in the fall of '53, heavy rains started a slide that gouged the side of Bell Mountain. Billy and three other loggers were buried, and Eva was transformed from newlywed to widow and seven months later to mother.

Some said Eva didn't grieve long or hard enough and scoffed as she filled the yard with plants too lush, too exotic for rocky soil in the shadow of towering cedars. Gradually, though, the town grew. The pink house became part of the town's center instead of at its edge, and Eva was embraced by the locals as if she had always been there.

Eva pulled herself up and over to a raised bed filled with herbs and bordered with nasturtiums. "Glad Lucy can't see me." She perched on an overturned bucket, nearly doubled over in order to see what was going on in her own garden.

"Damn. Aphids." They'd gotten off to a good start and she'd never even seen them. But they weren't the enemy. The knees wouldn't let her get down close enough to see what the eyes couldn't spot from a distance. Maybe Lucy was right.

Eva was pulling up nasturtium tendrils peppered with the tiny insects when a click drew her attention to the front gate. At least her ears still worked.

A tall girl latched the gate and bent to kiss Eva's cheek, long blue hair shrouding the old woman's face.

"Hey, Gram."

"What happened to your pink hair?"

Kendall tossed back her mane. "That was weeks ago, Gram."

Eva smiled and patted the space next to her. "Come sit while I pull out these plants. Then we'll have tea."

Kendall folded her long limbs onto the ground and handed Eva a crumpled brochure.

"Mom said to give you this. Sorry, it got scrunched."

Eva read aloud, "Fairview Garden Senior Apartments," and tossed the paper aside with a sniff. "Your mother is very persistent."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Kendall picked up a stone and flung it into the center of the raised bed. "She says I can't practice my guitar in the house anymore. But she's just doing it so I'll quit the band."

Eva retrieved the stone. "Your mother likes to think she knows what's best for people."

She looked around her. Lucy would have Eve give this all up, just as she would have Kendall give up her beloved rock band. Lucy of the beige carpets and white walls who would not recall what it had been like to be young and could not imagine what it would be like to be old. She spoke again to her granddaughter.

"There's loads of room in the barn. Bring the whole band to practice if you like."

Kendall's eyes widened. "Gram, you mean it? But won't Mom have a fit?"

Eva's eyes twinkled. "Oh yes, I would expect so."

Republic

JIM MILSTEAD | COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

In our classrooms we are told splendid legends of our land,

stories of its people, and their heroes:

Ford who invented mass production. Carnegie who,

resting on the seventh day, gave books,

and the Fathers of our country wanting liberty and justice for all.

We listen to fairy-taled promises: Scenarios of sweet safe lives

for all our children and the dignity of sun quiet on old rocking chair skin,

believing our future secure in the new game of shining visions.

In Wall Street there are no lyrics for the poor, in the beginning, the masses,

stopping on Baltic and Mediterranean, their heavy anger tethered

to hope, to ethnocentricity, filled with a promise of the long night ending.

We never learn of the beatings, hangings, bearings of false

witness, burning crosses decorating the dark. We are not there as

the passenger pigeon disappears, the plain is littered with the carcass

of the buffalo, and the forest falls to the ax. In our patriotic catechisms

we are never told of company stores, of pesticides burning the lungs,

mine walls closing on empty bellies, of strikers emasculated.

There is no explanation for Teapot Dome, for Army McCarthy,

no one mentions the wound in the sky that will not heal.

We wait for salvation to deliver us from the festering peril of our spirits

rotting in ghettos and voting booths, moldering in urban renewal,

our cities muted by technology, beset by commandment

and platitude. We see our thin illusions turn to dust,

feel the small dagger of our rage slip between vow and compromise.

We learn of Iran Contra, Enron Valdez, Hanford Love, Three Mile Island,

corporate scams, hostile takeovers, falsehoods of massed construction.

We learn of a thirst for war that cannot be slaked, of a need for dominion

that turns a deaf ear to love. We assemble, raise our voices, watch

law and order make its measured response, witness

how our dull stones soar but bring no changes.

Long afterward who will remember

the wide plazas leaking blood,

the gas searching the ground

for dissenters?

Battle

VALERIE MCBETH | COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

The kings stood, backs turned against each other

the last two warriors on the chessboard battlefield

enemies.

Controlled by the father and daughter

who played the mock-war game

but not enemies.

The father was tall, bearded, suddenly bald

the scar, U-shaped, fist-sized

covered the reason the daughter could play to a draw

covered the cancer which could not be removed

covered the enemy

of father and daughter.

Best Served Cold

DAVID M. LAWS | COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

Once I worked for a guy who was a complete jerk. Eddie was tall and thin, in good shape, immaculate in appearance, and evil in a supervisory kind of a way. He ran a 7-11 store and I worked the day shift.

He had me do extra tasks that were really his job so he could go mess around with his mistress, who was on him like an overpriced tumor. So I billed him overtime for the additional work. Eddie angrily told me there would be "consequences" if I didn't take those hours off my time sheet, but I wouldn't back down, so he fired me.

It took me over a year but I finally got my money, and a letter of apology from the president of 7-11. But that is not the best part of this story.

A year or so later I went to the movies. While I waited for the film to start, in walked Eddie, with a woman who was obviously his wife, well-dressed, well-built, lots of jewelry.

After the movie I made sure to intercept them, and I said "Hey, Eddie, how are you? How's the store? "And who is this lovely creature - your sister?"

Eddie knew what I was doing but he was stuck. He introduced her as his wife and I pounced. "Your wife? Well, gee, I'm confused. If this is your wife, who's the blonde you always have with you at the store?"

Her eyes widened, then narrowed as she turned on her cheating husband. I got out of there quick, no sense sticking around. Who knows what a guy might do when he's so completely busted? I figure a woman like her will take a skunk like him to the cleaners. At least I hope so.

From this experience I learned a couple of things: First, sometimes life is just too darned good. And, be careful who you turn into an enemy.

Fighting Reflections

EVA LANDIS | COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

Hibiki watched the wolf, a snarl building in his throat. The wolf raised his lip in reply, a pale ghost in the spaces between trees. Days past, Hibiki had been yanked back in convulsing, insane barking fury from the door and the wolf by his scruff, shouted at in words that didn't puncture his rage, and removed to the kennel in the kitchen. The humans could not see the wolf, only Hibiki's growing madness as the trespasser taunted him.

Hibiki hated the wolf. All dogs hate wolves. A dog is a dog as long as he hates the wolf. The line is thin, between dogs and wolves -- a wolf is all that they turned their backs on so long ago, and they hate to be reminded. So dogs turn on their own natures, on forests and fleeing deer and ice-cold moons, because the only thing that can keep them solid as one beast is to despise the beast they'd be otherwise. Hibiki knew this in his bones, and he fought devoutly to stay dog.

No one was home today to stop him. Across the room, Hibiki paused, hesitant, conflicted, head down and tail up. No one would stop him running off the beast. Slowly, he trotted towards the door. The wolf saw him and glided forward itself, flaunting and arrogant -- in someone else's territory.

Hibiki rushed, fur prickling as it bristled from his back to the base of his neck. His angry breath steamed a thick, hot fog across the chilled glass door, obscuring the wolf.

The condensation cleared, and there stood the wolf, the closest he'd ever been, a handspan away from Hibiki's furious muzzle. They glared into each other's faces for a brief instant. At each other's silent signal, both leapt for each other with a roar, the dumb beasts too stupid to see that each animal's eyes were as brown as his own.

He slammed into the white wolf, snapping and tasting blood that he didn't realize was his own as his gums met glass. Like a panicked bird caught indoors, he thumped against the glass again and again, beating what sense remained out of him. Until Hibiki and the wolf were one, and couldn't tell where one stopped and the other began. Furiously, he paused, barked, damning the wolf with the same eyes as him, then launched himself into the attack again, enraged, hearths and hands and collars singing in him. Glass rattled, not loudly enough to carry over the thick, rumbling barks that tore out of his throat. Bruises were forming across his chest and shoulders, and his neck started burning, but the wolf would not retreat.

A canine can't love everyone. Wolf and dog cannot mix, and not hating someone means death.

Fighting his reflection, he began to howl.

From spine to pulpy nose to battered chest everything ached like fire, but still he crashed against the glass, biting and snapping, and unable to get the mouthfuls of fur and flesh that would prove that he was Dog.

Rushing up from below to grab the wolf by the throat, his skull hit glass with a low, meaty thunk that barely registered over the dizzying pain in his head. He went down, nails scrabbling on the hardwood as he slid flat on his belly.

Hot breath and flecks of blood clouded the glass, but on the other side of it, the wolf was lying down as well, beaten and panting.

Pulling air harshly through his mouth, Hibiki lay nose to nose with the wolf, unable to move to meet him, staring into his own eyes.

He stayed there for a long time.