Search All Winners

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

DOU YI

My hands were packed in dry ice

Flown across the Pacific and

Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.

My palms open doors to

Rooms my feet haven't walked through and

Caress a woman my eyes will never see.

It doesn't snow there but my

Nails ache when they touch ice and

Scratch strange characters onto that

Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.

His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but

He knows they're words from a

Language his tongue never learned

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice

Across the East Sea a yam farmer

Uses my corneas to see.

She dreams of snow but thinks

It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.

On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests

Food that never passed through my lips

Food my teeth didn't chew

Food my tongue hasn't tasted

Food that could have made this spirit stronger

And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.

But my heart--

My heart beats in this town,

Pumping blood through a man

Loved by the son of an official,

A son who moved Heaven and Earth for

His Happiness.

His Future.

His New Harmony.

These offerings have given me strength

I feel my spirit reviving!

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice.

Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi

Justice.

Justice.

Justice.

But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?

Justice. 

Justice.

That is my heart. It should beat inside me.

(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

“Work?”

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press