Search All Winners

I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”

The boy’s name is Cecil Mayberry; he is twelve, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil’s mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool two hundred yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man’s name, Grayson “Tommie” Todman, and he knows that two .22-caliber bullets have made a mess of Tommie’s head. He knows the first one entered just below the right cheekline, cutting short Tommie’s last Fuck You to the world, and the second one grazed through his hair before nipping in at the peak and blowing out a portion of Tommie’s unlamented brain.

In fact, this is going to be the first time in Cecil’s life—but not the last—that he is an undisputed expert on a certain subject. He knows who shot Tommie, and why.

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue 
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music 
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum, 
the German word for dream. 

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.

1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.

2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.

3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.

4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.

5. Stay

6. Alive.