Winner of the 2019 Delta Mouth Writing Contest

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Atlanta and working for celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay, Morenike Erinkitola decided to pursue her love of writing. She is a graduating senior majoring in creative writing and a member of the Roger Hadfield Honors College at LSU. The Chicago native is strongly influenced by her hometown in her fiction writing. Additionally, she credits her identities as a woman, Nigerian American and wanderluster as influencing her poetry. She recently defended her undergraduate honors thesis “Translations,” a collection of poetry. This is the first contest she has won since her 3rd grade spelling bee.

Make sure to read her winning story and poem here:

Cyclical

The seven thousand block of Yates Boulevard was nothing special. By the time Edward Johnson moved in to unit 2B of the apartment compound, the neighborhood had grown tired of cozying up to new faces. Had it not been for his white skin, he would have gone completely unnoticed with the exception of the “Hey, how you doin’” that the neighbors said to tenants they didn’t really know. 

What the neighborhood didn’t know, what no one could have predicted, was that Edward would sign a lease on the first Monday of August and kill his common law wife Monica in the same apartment a few days later. When the people in the neighborhood found out there was a dead body in the alley behind the apartment compound there were no signs of shock. The people in the neighborhood sighed a little and then kept on about their usual business. When the police came to investigate the death they canvassed the neighborhood and found unrelated bullet casings and bullet holes. There were no leads. All they had was a dead body and an abandoned apartment. 

Neither the people in the neighborhood nor the police bothered to ask the neighborhood drug dealer if he had seen anything. If they had asked him what happened in the hour before that Thursday turned into Friday, they would have learned that Edward came out to the alley to throw out a bag of trash. Minutes later, he dragged Monica’s body out by wire hangers and pushed it over the rail. Edward then walked down the stairs and into the alley. Stuck by his tall frame and neat appearance, the dealer could not even speak when Edward simply said, “Hey, how you doing,” as he walked out of the alley and disappeared.