Search All Winners

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.

Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.

The misspelling stopped her.

“Next in line,” a teller called.

Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.

CLAUDINE: (covers her face, emotionally exhausted) I’m old.

LILY: (I feel old.)

CLAUDINE: Bonnie has four kids //

SHELLY: (Three) //

CLAUDINE: and she’s two years younger than me I’m gonna be twenny.

LILY: If I met someone you will.

CLAUDINE: But you’re pretty.

LILY: You’re stunning!

CLAUDINE: I’M FAT!

Daddy was often eager to play catch, since he felt society expected this from a loving, caring father. A confidence that soared and a glovehand that fell, still there was no baseball near either. Duplicity has killed more black men than gin. In a southpaw, what they appreciate most is this sort of "live arm." From his mouth words rushed like richly fed rapids, leaving him ever vulnerable to ascription.