The 2022 Lyttle Lytton Contest#
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The 2022 Winners
Hello, and welcome to the 2022 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest. In the twenty-two years this competition has been running, we have never had a contestant win the whole thing twice, let alone twice in a row, but as we headed toward the end of 2021, it was starting to look like we had a back-to-back champion in the works. As it turned out, the entry in question was caught just as the calendar turned, but still—the ’21 contest was won by an entry signed “Bianca M.”, and check out this year’s second runner-up:
From across the room, she held my eyes with the same grip with which she used to hold my hand.
Our first runner-up is somewhat similar:
Her face struck me like a baseball bat, kneecapping my heart.
Chris Barts
We have the same focus on a female character’s power over the narrator and the same semantic syllepsis applied to anatomy (holding hands and eyes, breaking hearts and legs)… though either would have been a worthy winner, I found myself leaning toward the Chris Barts entry mainly because it was a bit shorter and the phrase “kneecapping my heart” was so memorable. But, though it was a close call, in the end I wound up going with neither of these, but rather with a fairly late-arriving entry that read slightly more like the first line of a novel. The winner of the 2022 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:
Jason and Laura may have loved each other, but they were as sharply different as Pacific and Atlantic.
Elle Spohrer
The skin of her neck was bruised like a banana’s, and the shape of the marks betrayed that someone had left them there, unlike the banana, which bruises for unrelated reasons.
Natasha
Also drawing comparisons to food (broadly defined) were these:
“What do you think?” I asked Boss, but her lips were as firmly crimped as the edge of an Uncrustable.
Adrian Dooley
Bethany and Hubert Hummel sat happily making a gingerbread house, unaware that their marriage was as brittle as Mr. Gingerbread’s limbs.
anonymous
Her skin was pale, like a pale ale… but her hair was amber, like an amber ale.
@mattybtweets69, 2021.1126
quoted by William Lubelski
Moving away from food and drink:
Madeleine, the first brunette cheer captain in the history of St. Paul High School, fell like Lucifer from the roof of the Dwight L. Moody Memorial Science Building.
Corrine Shaw
For those who didn’t spend a chunk of the ’00s tutoring at Northfield Mount Herman, a school Dwight L. Moody founded circa 1880—Moody was a prominent evangelist of fundamentalist Christianity in the nineteenth century, so the idea of naming a science building after him is part of the joke here. A modern equivalent might be something like the Louie Gohmert Center for Climatology. But if it’s science you’re after, look no further than our next set of entries:
The sun shone through the window like a high-power COB LED collimated by a reflector dish and passed through a Tyndall-effect suspension to simulate Rayleigh scattering.
anonymous
Night fell like a hammer dropped on the Moon, at a completely uniform speed unaffected by air resistance.
Mike G.
Not unike how mitochondria gives energy to the cell, Alice gave energy to John’s heart and penis, both of whom containing dozens of cells.
anonymous
Mixing different types of jokes in a single entry is not usually a great idea—they tend to rob each other of their punch—but this one effectively combines several sources of humor: not only do mitochondria not necessarily make for the best simile here, but we also have a strained parallel (these organs also contain cells!), understatement (dozens of cells rather than billions), mangled language (“whom” in place of “which” and “containing” in place of “contain”), and the bathos of pairing “heart” and “penis”. And the mention of a penis suggests that we have reached the segue from entries built around bad comparisons to those of a sexual nature—though our next entrant seems to have asked, ¿Por qué no los dos?
Sunlight touched my breasts like I do during female masturbation.
Caleb Su
Her breasts heaved with anticipation, ready to go to space. Soon they would quiver at the slightest tremor, finally free after decades in a gravity well.
J. T. Helms
Of the entries to make this year’s list, the most explicit, if you can call it that, is this:
Mariachi song danced in my soul as my loins purred like the Prius we test drove that afternoon, scattering their bouquet inside her dynamite womanhood.
Bill Fishback
I believe that when Cardi B was on The Ed Sullivan Show to do her hit song, the producers asked her to change one of the lines to “Bring a bucket and a mop for this dynamite womanhood”.
I lusted for her like an asexual man who’d come to develop a strong attraction towards the opposite sex.
anonymous
What interested me about the entry above is that after reading through many, many thousands of submissions over the years, I don’t think I’d previously seen one that does precisely what this does: employ a simile that is simultaneously a tautology and a contradiction in terms.
My Tinder fling’s breasts vibrated with horniness as her lithe frame slivered out of her tiny black dress.
Emily Ma
The fan blew cold air making her nipples as hard and aroused as the audiobook of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto made my mind.
Lydia Ruth
It looks like last year the segue out of the sex-themed entries was to vampires, but this year we’ll go with some true horror, namely, modern politics. We’ll start with a Found entry:
Communism is all over the place.
opening text of the film 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus
quoted by Sierra Trenton
So, it all started the day I stood up to Tyranny. “I will not put on a mask,” I said heroically to the Starbucks employee like a modern Rosa Parks.
Bill Irons
Apparently this is basically the premise of the 2025 movie.
John Castor stared grimly at the shimmering holographic visage of the Chairperson, smirking wokely as she commanded him to choose his method of Cancellation.
Aimee Lim
These days I find myself increasingly inclined to select “Melancholia-style”.
The doors of my heart were as closed as those of the Capitol, that morning of January 6th.
Kyle J.
Ophelia had long dreamt of this, she mused, as she found a vampyre jaggedly masticating her crimson lifeblood.
Haley
On that note, here’s some more purple prose:
Jeffrey’s golden orbs gazed over the horizon, as the burning eye of the sun began to make its grudging appearance.
Maree Brittenford
A smile rolled up and parked itself on the scene that was his face.
anonymous
“This is why I hate your generation!” seethed George after his failed proposal to the girl whose 18th birthday was now ruined.
Jordan Plymale
Ouch! Ouch! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me loving that chick would hurt so bad?
Casey W.
Peru. Cambodia. New Zealand. Loneliness. Alexander Tremont was an explorer, not just of the world, but of his feelings.
Stanley Lim
“Schlormp” went the knife as she plunged it into my heart, breaking it not only physically, but also emotionally, since I loved her.
Matt Shivers
That “schlormp” announces that we have made it to the sound effects section; reigning supreme in this category this year is:
Boom boom pow, went my car’s elite sound system as I blasted the 2009 hot summer hit, “Boom Boom Pow”.
Madison Duarte
A quick postscript to the sound effects section—last year we had an entry that read: “KRAKOW!” went the bolt of lightning as it struck my 3 bedroom 2.5 bathroom house, burning it down. This year I received an entry that seems to be a reply to that one; it is too clearly an intentional joke to really qualify for this contest, but I wanted to share it nevertheless. Courtesy of W. G. O’Driscoll: “KRAKOW!” The lightning bolt cast by Zeus, besotted by the wine of Dionysus, was horrendously off-target, landing in Gdansk, not Krakow.
Back to stories of troubled love. These two are similar in theme, but the second one is sort of the “that escalated quickly” version of the first:
Sarah didn’t care what her parents said. She was wise beyond her years, and so she knew that Devon only lied to and belittled her because he was afraid of hurting her.
Caden Roylance
I walked up to the young painter, hand on the gun in my dress pocket. They had sent me back for him. “Herr Hitler,” I said. Our blue eyes met and I knew: I could change him.
Gunnar Þór Magnússon
More time travel:
“Cowabunga,” whispered the time traveler—lest the weasel-eared security robots overhear his totally radical tendencies.
Gary Dougill
“Prepare to die, gaijin!” vociferated Lady Oni as she swung her futuristic katana at master hacker Jack Shadow, her bulbous bosoms swaying jubilantly with her gracefully spastic movements.
Dakota Speagle
Dale saw the murdered wife and pet; his suburban, revenge‑less life was over.
Sam Thomson
This is another one that packs multiple issues into a fairly short sentence. The adjective “revenge-less” is one, all by itself. The suggestion that taking his revenge inherently means leaving the suburbs is another. Probably the main thing that marks this sentence is its curiously dissociative use of the word “the” in place of “his”, but what I came to appreciate just as much on my second reading is that our imaginary author doesn’t even bother to specify what kind of pet has met its demise. (Even the bland word “saw” contributes to the effect of the entry.)
Joe killed everyone he met because he was a murderer. He even killed a policeman before (you aren’t supposed to kill policemen).
anonymous
So he’s killed everyone he’s ever met, and yet in that entire time only one policeman has put himself within range? I guess that based on what we saw in Uvalde, that sounds about right.
“Oh no!” I cried, as a hail of bullets brutally murdered my three wonderful children.
Xander MacIver
To be fair, I’ve read worse examples of the Punisher recapping his origin.
Brazil: green in the summer, blood red in the favelas.
Toby Tettamanti
0.1 Selected Maps of the Land of Erbundia ......... clvii
Alex Frenkel
I’m always slightly dubious about entries like the above, since “first line of a novel” generally means the first line of the body text, not the table of contents or the acknowledgments. But I couldn’t resist that one. Nor this one:
Thanks to my family, without whom this book wouldn’t exist, and to Google Translate, without which François’s half of this book wouldn’t exist.
Oswald
Just a few more to go, so here’s a grab bag of the remaining honorable mentions:
The train maneuvered North by Northeast, yet Winnow D’Argento’s elven heart had long ago been totaled in a total derailment.
Thomas T. Carere
My mind was racing, NASCAR style.
Ellis Evan
Every time he smirked, David was reminded of his dad, who loved to smirk.
Arman Guerra
They say it takes a village to raise a child, but even a city could not dim Lexie’s spirit.
anonymous
The horizontal slit of an octopus’s eye is a door that judges us.
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
quoted anonymously
If being a wife were a corporation, June would have been a CEO.
Roseanne Cash’s eulogy for June Carter Cash
quoted by Sofie Z.
Still, even though its length is pushing it for this contest, ultimately I had to go with this as the winner of the Found division:
It is one of life’s richest surprises when the accidental meeting of two life paths lead them to proceed together along the common path as husband and wife.
“Simple Wedding Ceremony Script 1”, weddingceremonypro.com
quoted by Adam Williams
Not only does that read like the first line of a novel, it reads specifically like an impressively stilted rendition of the first line of a nineteenth-century romance: Jane Austen put back and forth through Google Translate a few times. It doesn’t even work syntactically, as we have paths somehow joining path-hands and proceeding down another path. Yo, dawg, I heard you like paths… 
A couple more. This one made me do a double-take when I discovered that it was a Found entry:
“So why this storm?” said Mespa, who was a black woman, renowned for her resilience, but who now looked close to being washed away by the rain beating down on the women’s heads.
Abarat by Clive Barker
quoted by Pedro Degiovanni
We had just visited Auschwitz, and I was ovulating.
Amanda Markowitz, kveller.com
quoted by Jonathan Schnipper
And so the time has come for me to make my usual concluding remarks. Thanks to those who help to spread the word about this contest, and particular thanks to the entrants themselves, without whom there would not be a contest to spread the word about. You are totally radical. To those who would have made the cut in the early years of the contest but had the bad luck to be living in the 2020s, when the competition is stiffer, I’m sorry. (Really, to anyone living in the 2020s in general, I’m sorry.) If you enjoy Lyttle Lytton and are looking for a way to support it, you can always toss a few cents at my Patreon account, the proceeds from which pay for my annual spike in hosting fees and allow me to devote some time to this and other projects. It would make a smile roll up and park itself on the scene that is my face.
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