Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…
I imagine my daddy’s mind
looks most like broken
dryer machines
scattered in a forest,
field mice living
in the leftover lint.
I imagine it looks
like stepped-on
syringes, too,
flies stooping
down to sop up
all the sweet.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.
My father’s dying was not news.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
A hole was worn into the snow, and I fit into it, arms and legs drawn up in front of me. The dog snatched and pulled at my mouth, eyes, hair; his breath clouded the air around us, but I did not feel its heat, or smell the blood sinking down between hairs of his muzzle. I watched my mitten come off in his teeth and sail upward, and it seemed unfair then and very sad that one hand should freeze all alone; I lifted the second mitten off and threw it away, then turned my face back again, overtaken suddenly by loneliness. A loud river ran in my ears, dragging me under.
I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…
I imagine my daddy’s mind
looks most like broken
dryer machines
scattered in a forest,
field mice living
in the leftover lint.
I imagine it looks
like stepped-on
syringes, too,
flies stooping
down to sop up
all the sweet.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.
My father’s dying was not news.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
A hole was worn into the snow, and I fit into it, arms and legs drawn up in front of me. The dog snatched and pulled at my mouth, eyes, hair; his breath clouded the air around us, but I did not feel its heat, or smell the blood sinking down between hairs of his muzzle. I watched my mitten come off in his teeth and sail upward, and it seemed unfair then and very sad that one hand should freeze all alone; I lifted the second mitten off and threw it away, then turned my face back again, overtaken suddenly by loneliness. A loud river ran in my ears, dragging me under.