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.
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
It happened inside a single room.
For me. Forgive me
If you feel with this assertion I diminish you
Or the integrity of your story.
But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,
On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—
Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—
Counting the tiny holes
In the radiator cover, dark eyes
Piercing through painted-white metal.
When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.
Not even other nothings, like me.
Do you think I take from you?
I do not take from you, I am you.
“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”
She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.
The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”
He sent this key from Florida.
I think. A key to what?
I tried the car, the trucks,
tried every door – nothing fit.
My wife thought it was his idea
of a joke. I never got his jokes.
Not a word from him, just things:
a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;
a snapshot of himself from Aspen,
arm in arm with somebody, but
both faces had been scissored out.
A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.
Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,
collect, and I knew it was him,
though he always used a different name.
At times enough to make you laugh:
Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,
will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.
Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,
turbos throbbing in the labored
dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing
pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,
smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though
he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,
snowy lights below. There might have been
freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know
I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,
glanced again at the two feathered props
out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.
But freed all at once from months of killing depression,
elated strangely, almost uplifted.
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
It happened inside a single room.
For me. Forgive me
If you feel with this assertion I diminish you
Or the integrity of your story.
But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,
On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—
Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—
Counting the tiny holes
In the radiator cover, dark eyes
Piercing through painted-white metal.
When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.
Not even other nothings, like me.
Do you think I take from you?
I do not take from you, I am you.
“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”
She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.
The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”
He sent this key from Florida.
I think. A key to what?
I tried the car, the trucks,
tried every door – nothing fit.
My wife thought it was his idea
of a joke. I never got his jokes.
Not a word from him, just things:
a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;
a snapshot of himself from Aspen,
arm in arm with somebody, but
both faces had been scissored out.
A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.
Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,
collect, and I knew it was him,
though he always used a different name.
At times enough to make you laugh:
Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,
will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.
Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,
turbos throbbing in the labored
dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing
pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,
smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though
he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,
snowy lights below. There might have been
freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know
I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,
glanced again at the two feathered props
out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.
But freed all at once from months of killing depression,
elated strangely, almost uplifted.