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.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.