Ink Upon the Furrows
If you’re considering entering the 2019 Observer story contest, you could do worse than to write a story about a small Texas publication fighting an uphill battle. It’s no surprise we’re suckers for that kind of thing.
With “Ink Upon the Furrows,” contest winner Heath Dollar captures, in fewer than 2,500 words, the death of a newspaper, a language and an entire culture smack dab in the middle of the Lone Star State. Facing the end of his life, Daniel Zima, publisher/editor of Texaský rolník, the Texas Farmer, a Czech-language newspaper, delivers papers to his elderly neighbors in a nursing home while awaiting a buyer he suspects will never appear.
“I was taken by this story and its palpable sense of nostalgia,” writes guest judge Natalia Sylvester, “how it so quickly yet deeply expresses what it’s like to feel caught between two languages and cultures when one begins to fade along with the lives of those who lived it.”—David Duhr
He had broken his hip about a year ago while trick-riding on his walker, which he called the Silver Stallion, and he had never truly recovered.
DANIEL ZIMA PUSHED HIS WALKER across the linoleum toward the converted janitor’s closet that served as his office. Daniel had been the publisher of the , the , for the last four decades and had written for the paper since he was twenty-four, back when his father’s name appeared at the top of the masthead. His father, Dalibor Zima, died of a but had no takers. But then, who would want to buy a Czech-language newspaper in the middle of Texas? That was forty years ago, and somehow Daniel had managed to keep the weekly paper alive.
