Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
Daddy shook the box, kicked it, mumbled under his breath something that sounded like it had teeth. He came from around the house with a shovel and dragged it behind him, along with the box, to the woods. He would bury my dog, I thought.
Maybe he pictured just the nail,
the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised
the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill
and sank it with a single blow.
Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder
than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof
or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,
a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
Daddy shook the box, kicked it, mumbled under his breath something that sounded like it had teeth. He came from around the house with a shovel and dragged it behind him, along with the box, to the woods. He would bury my dog, I thought.
Maybe he pictured just the nail,
the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised
the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill
and sank it with a single blow.
Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder
than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof
or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,
a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.