Search All Winners

            Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book.

             “So you know where your center is,” he said.

           “Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.

            “So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.” I cannot be certain this is true, but when I remember him saying this, I hear his voice catch on the word mother.

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

- You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

- I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.