FIRST PLACE:

THE

GATEWAY jody shotwell

UTH let the tattered notebook fall to her lap and stared out of the window, seeing, yet unseeing her two young sons cavorting on the front lawn. A couple of the lines of the poem she had written many years ago repeated themselves in her mind.

"A gate sprang open there before her,

"A passage-way through Lesbos' wall

Yes, it had opened once. Long ago, as long ago as this forgotten poem in this forgotten notebook. But it had closed again, and left a part of her on the inside and a part of her on the outside.

"And what does this make me," she thought, a trifle whimsically. "A split personality or a dual personality?" It didn't matter superficially. What was left of her on the outside had healed and grown into a working organism. Only at times, like now, having discovered this old book deep in a drawer, did she ache with phantom pains for that of her which had been amputated.

She arose from her chair by the window and went to the desk to put the book away. Closing the drawer, she glanced in the mirror and then straightened up and stared at herself. She seemed lit by an inward fire that made her eyes luminous and her skin the color of youth.

"What has come over me!" she murmured aloud. This was the face that had looked back at her from her dressing-table mirror the night she met Lisa, ten long years ago. The face that had never been pretty, and was suddenly beautiful.

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