Flash Fiction Contest
Third Prize
Dirty Rice
Liselotte Erdrich

Well okay, you take a pound and a half of ground beef and fry it up in oil with chopped onions and a cup and a half of rice, just raw uncooked long grain white rice and if you want Wild & Dirty Rice you might want to parboil the wild rice first before you add it to the fryins and cut the white in half. Shake on a whole lot of Louisiana powder while you're fryin and grind some good black pepper onto it at some point and do not forget the Tabasco. If you have some garden peppers chop them up and throw them in, and if you want Drunk & Dirty Rice then crack a beer or two or three meanwhile and throw some on the fryins when it's all browned and then put on the cover, you could use just water I suppose but I never do. And if you want Dirty Bloody Rice just throw in the Snap-E-Tom or a can of stewed tomatoes or tomato juice if you got some. You could use chicken livers like the bonafide but myself I do not want to think about my own liver let alone what has happened to a chicken. It just isn't right. Drunk & Dirty & Bloody Rice is about my speed today and it'll fix you up good, watch this! "The crowd roars its approval" when we introduce old Snap-E-Tom and Buddy Weiser. Yep I get a standin ovation for my cookin show. Never mind about the beans because rice and beans is just a whole nother subject and that's enough for now.

 

Author’s Note

Liselotte (Lise) Erdrich is a 2007 Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship winner in the non-fiction category. A collection of flash fiction titled Night Train is scheduled for publication by Coffee House Press in early 2008. Recent work is in North Dakota Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, and Traffic.

Editor’s Note

Lise’s original prize-winning story, “Beehive,” was accepted by another publication, so we are substituting another excellent story by Lise, “Dirty Rice.”