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.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.
hyphy dancehall — no can
hear tings demur.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer
whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.
ain’t neck breaking like dutty
when she whine.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.
hyphy dancehall — no can
hear tings demur.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer
whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.
ain’t neck breaking like dutty
when she whine.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.