Search All Winners

After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”

When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.

Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not

in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid

atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop

damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball

in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,

not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,

an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like

the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark

so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous

wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my

wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...

Who can give           an account of occasions

Can     mechanized description so falter

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

if I curse you just right

TOLEDO: Go ahead, then. Spell it. Music. Spell it.

LEVEE: I can spell it, nigger! M-U-S-I-K. There!

            (He reaches for the money.)

TOLEDO: Naw! Naw! Leave that money alone! You ain’t spelled it.

LEVEE: What you mean I ain’t spelled it? I said M-U-S-I-K!

TOLEDO: That ain’t how you spell it! That ain’t how you spell it! It’s M-U-S-I-C! C, nigger. Not K! M-U-S-I-C!

LEVEE: What you mean, C? Who say it’s C?

TOLEDO: Cutler. Slow Drag, Tell this fool.

            (They look at each other and then away.)

Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!

            (TOLEDO picks up the money and hands LEVEE his dollar back.)

Here’s your dollar back, Levee. I done won it, you understand. I done won the dollar. But if don’t nobody know but me, how am I gonna prove it to you?