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.
For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
The deaf hear only in their dreams. I am sure
I can hear nothing. My how the mountain leaps
towards the sea and the little village below.
Who sang for the white plate my father tossed
at my sister’s shadow? What funeral is held
for a broken compass? When cutting onions,
leave a candle lit somewhere near an old man
holding his wife in a napkin. In the torn light of evening,
there is enough treason for everybody. Excuse me,
I should say something about the beauty of cranes.
Once in a sycamore I tossed a brick at a boy’s head.
It opened like the sea. I think I saw a crane.
He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.
He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.
Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.
“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”
He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?
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.
For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
The deaf hear only in their dreams. I am sure
I can hear nothing. My how the mountain leaps
towards the sea and the little village below.
Who sang for the white plate my father tossed
at my sister’s shadow? What funeral is held
for a broken compass? When cutting onions,
leave a candle lit somewhere near an old man
holding his wife in a napkin. In the torn light of evening,
there is enough treason for everybody. Excuse me,
I should say something about the beauty of cranes.
Once in a sycamore I tossed a brick at a boy’s head.
It opened like the sea. I think I saw a crane.
He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.
He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.
Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.
“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”
He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?
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.