We are excited to announce the winners of Chattanooga Writers’ Guild’s June non-fiction contest are M.D. (Peggy) Roblyer with “Apex Moments” and Tucker Pennington with “The Parrot and the Snake.” Thanks to all who entered! June’s contest entries on the theme “Apex” were judged by Sherry Poff and Michelle Rogers. Below are the winning works!
1st Place, Non Fiction: M.D. (Peggy) Roblyer
Apex Moments
“Sleeping together” would not be an accurate description of what my boyfriend Jay and I had been doing, unless it covers occasional car-sex in parking lots or back lanes near my University of Maryland campus while keeping a sharp eye out for police—a less-than-romantic experience, if you’ve never tried it. Nor would I recommend going at it while driving down the highway at night, a feat I still can’t believe we accomplished. What I wanted from Jay was all about our fireworks sex, never about commitment. In the course of five years, I had morphed from a prissy, better-than-everyone schoolgirl who eschewed kissing parties into a fully sexualized, orgasm-craving woman. If my mother had known, she’d have judged that her worst fears had come true; I had become like my “hellraising aunts.” I would not realize until later that I was in solidarity with many women of our time, discarding our parents’ morality and choosing our own path.
Jay was tall and thin with the lean-muscled shape that military duty tends to give young men, but it was his heavy-lidded grey eyes that had captured my attention. He had just emerged from a tour in Vietnam with a Purple Heart and a “ticket-home” foot wound from stepping on a Vietnamese booby-trap called a punji stick. He was scheduled to muster out of the Army the following year and major in pre-law at UM.
I asked him what Vietnam was like; we were just beginning to hear about the carnage, and a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old from my high school class had been killed. Jay drawled, “Just a lot of jungle patrols, but kind of excitin’—like huntin’. If I’d been wounded over there and couldn’t have kids, like some guys I heard about, I wouldn’t mind goin’ back and makin’ a career of the Army.” He was cluing me in that marriage and children were his priority. They certainly weren’t for me; I was at UM to achieve a degree in Freedom from Family and become a writer. But I was too captivated by those grey eyes to notice the gulf between our goals.
I met Jay on summer break in the late 1960s, the apex of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement, but I had not yet availed myself of a key development that enabled both these radical social changes: the pill. When he invited me to stay at his parents’ house and attend a New Year’s Eve party in his hometown of Oakland, Maryland, “meeting the parents” didn’t land on my consciousness as significant, though it should have. I was just focused on the “party” aspect and that we might occasionally have access to a real bed. Also, it was a great way to get away from my own parents.
Jay and I slept in separate rooms, but the night of the big party in downtown Oakland, we stayed behind long enough to grab some alone time in his childhood bedroom. Once we arrived at the party, he ordered nonstop whiskey sours and got completely legless. His brother Kevin persuaded him to leave just after midnight, and after we guided him wobbling into the house, Jay focused bleary eyes on me, wrapped his arms around me limply, and laid his head on my shoulder.
“I love you, baby; I love you sooo much,” he moaned. I stood there incredulous as Kevin peeled him off my shoulder and dragged him off to bed. Jay wailed down the hall to his room, “I looove you.”
Spring semester found me immersed in the nuances of two languages: German and the Czech-inflected English dialect spoken by the graduate student teaching my sophomore mathematics class. When my “curse” did not appear on schedule, the idea I might be pregnant did not even register; Jay had always used protection. In one of our phone conversations, I mentioned my lateness to him and how bloated and icky I felt, which must have rendered him dry-mouthed. Only after my period came did he confess that on New Year’s Eve at his parents’ house, he had had an “equipment failure” with the condom. I was furious.
“How could you let this happen! And when were you going to tell me?” I raged.
“Why worry you for nothing? Anyway, I would have married you.”
I tried not to think about my lost freedom and shattered future plans. Even now I wonder if Jay really had an accident or if he did what he felt he needed to do to get me to marry him.
Our romance lasted longer than most of my infatuations, but the fireworks faded, the inevitable victim of conflicting goals. He was laser-focused on getting married and starting a family before graduating law school, and he finally worked out that I was not going to consider marriage until I had my own degree and maybe not even then with him; we broke up in March. I ran into him on the UM campus six months later and learned he was married with a baby on the way. I remember how disappointed I was that I wouldn’t have a handy, on-campus sex partner. For me, the 1960’s was all downhill after that.
M. D. (Peggy) Roblyer is a retired professor of educational technology and textbook author who helped usher in the world of technology in education the 1970s. She authored a dozen Pearson Education textbooks, including Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, which introduced a novel approach to the field in 1996 and became its bestselling text; it remains so today in its ninth edition. Strong Glass: A Memoir of Escaping the Dark Memoir of Family History, to be published by Apprentice House Press in 2026 is her first non-academic book; she is currently at work on another. Website: https://mdroblyer.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/margaret.roblyer.98/, Instagram/Threads: peggyroblyer
2nd Place, Non Fiction: Tucker Pennington
The Parrot and the Snake
I don’t remember why I was chosen to drive, though of the four of us, I knew the way in the dark. Darkness seems absolute and solitary at four in the morning on the miracle of engineering called the Tamiami Trail, thirty minutes west of Everglades City, on a clear, moonless night. The road runs stick-straight through saw grass, palm hammocks, and swamp for miles and miles between Miami and Naples.
With agreement from everyone, Peter included, I stopped the car but kept the motor running – heaven forbid the battery fail in the literal middle of nowhere – and turned off the lights. Three of us stepped into the cool, early spring air. The cliché black night filled with mosquito hums, the low, primordial grunt of an alligator in the canal beside the road, and, above us, more stars than we could ever imagine. The Milky Way’s white brush swathed a broad line from horizon to horizon. Myriad stars salted the abyss all around. We stood transfixed until pinpoints of headlights appeared several miles behind, signaling we were no longer alone in the dark. For the rest of the drive, we three talked about the inky blackness and the surprising abundance of illumination provided by centuries-old starshine on the sawgrass.
We also talked about fish, specifically redfish, snook, and tarpon. As volunteer officials in the second year of the Collier County Red/Snook Tournament, we four were responsible for signing in contestants before the seven o’clock shotgun start. After the start, two of the guys would get a ride back to Naples with Ed, who had come the afternoon before and spent the night to ensure everything was set up. Peter and I stayed behind to check the boats in at the end of the day’s fishing.
Between the start and end of tournament time, Peter and I planned to kill a pleasant morning fishing some of the old rock quarries which had supplied the bedrock for the road we’d stopped on earlier. Quarries blasted into the lime rock hardpan years earlier and followed the Tamiami Trail at intervals across the Everglades. Mining the stone nearby had been cheaper and more efficient than bringing tons of rock from further north along the east coast, by Flagler’s railroad, or the west by Collier’s.
That is why, six decades later, Peter and I stood in ankle-deep water at the rain-swollen edge of one of the resulting pits. Water had overflowed the quarry ledge, and tufts of floating grass obscured the hard ground under our feet. We cast lures into the turquoise depths, as the midmorning sun burned off the evening chill in that sudden, searingly radiant way peculiar to south Florida, and I tried to get Peter talking.
“Ed tells me you were a Navy SEAL back in the day.”
“Yeah.”
“You must have stories.”
“Yeah. Don’t like to think about it.”
“I get it. Sorry, I asked.”
“No problem.”
“When we stopped on the road, you didn’t get out. Why not?”
“Tired. Didn’t feel like getting out in the cold.”
“Aw, but man, the stars.”
“Seen plenty of stars. Plenty of quiet. Plenty of swamp, too, while we’re at it.”
“Vietnam?”
“Yeah.”
“Ed told me you had to eat a raw parrot one time. That true?”
“Best bird I ever tasted.”
“Really?”
“Hadn’t eaten much in over a week at that point.”
“Was it training? What happened?”
“Missed an extraction. Got dropped. Charlies already got my pilot.”
“Your pilot?”
“Shot down. I was dropped to get him out. Gooks got him first. They surrounded the rendezvous point. I went silent. The parrot was a benevolent accident.”
“You accidentally ate a raw parrot?”
“No. I’d been making pretty good time back to friendlies when a patrol caught my trail, or at least, I thought they had. They were close. Close enough for me to read the AK-47 on their guns. I settled into the bush to wait ‘em out when a parrot lands within a hand grab of me. Nothing louder than a parrot when what you want is quiet. I snatched it and twisted its neck before it made a sound.”
“Then, you ate it?”
“Not then. Then, I was trying not to breathe. The patrol moved on, and I crawled away. I stripped the meat off, so it’d look like a wild animal killed it. Not much on a parrot.”
“How far did you go?”
“When you’re out like that, you aren’t counting miles.”
“Did you kill anybody?”
“I made it to a friendly camp. They radioed my platoon. Word back was they thought I was dead.”
“Sheesh.”
We continued to fish as the sun coursed higher and hotter. I’d been spellbound listening, filling in the gaps, the things Peter didn’t say. My legs were stiff from standing stock still, jigging a rubber worm up the quarry wall. I reeled in, prepared to take a step, and cast when I noticed a triangular reptilian head resting beneath the grass next to my left tennis shoe. My sphincter clenched. I held my breath and studied the predicament. At close quarters, a water moccasin is a beautifully elegant creature. Also, deadly.
“Hey Peter,” I said casually, “you see what I see beside my left shoe?”
“Yep.”
“That what I think it is?”
“Yep.”
“Think I should stand here? See what it does?”
“That’s what I’d do. It’s your decision.”
“Ok.”
Standing ten feet to my right, Peter calmly reeled in his spinner bait, and together, we waited. I don’t know what Peter thought as he watched me watch the snake. I thought that whatever happens, I’ll never see a snake as beautiful as this ever again. The snake must have been waiting for the temperature to rise, warm its icy blood, and allow it to undulate gracefully, blessedly beyond my feet and disappear into the gulf of water beyond the quarry’s edge.
It may have been a minute; it may have been an hour before our standoff came to a silent, uneventful end. I can’t say for sure. I can say that the threat of lethal peril takes an otherwise ordinary morning and elevates it in such a way that no morning will feel quite the same again.
When the snake’s glorious tail had entirely disappeared into the shadows of the pit, Peter said, “I think it’s time we found some higher ground.”
“Good idea.”
“And a change of clothes.”
We laughed and slogged to higher ground.
Tucker Pennington spent thirty years writing business emails in novel ways. He attended college to learn to teach high school English and somehow stumbled into a real estate career. Like many English majors, he wrote fiction when time allowed and told bedtime stories to his daughters. Now retired, he lives in Northwest Georgia, just south of Chattanooga. The need to explore situations, places, and people through writing will not let him rest. https://www.facebook.com/atuckerp
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month. Go to the 2025 Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE
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