Editors' Prize Winner

The early September light on the lake is unreliable. It’s late afternoon, clouds race on the wind and the water laps the shore. Flashes of sunlight glint off restless waves in quick succession. The surface of the water changes from grey to bright blue as the clouds pass over the sun. I am looking out the window over one of the small lakes near our home in upstate New York. This is after I get married but before I get pregnant. I’ve spent the summer waiting for a baby to quicken; a baby I know is close, but elusive.

Juan opened the heavy glass door and the bells that hung on the rope clanged and rattled. It was dim inside and a little smoky. I followed him in, the musky smell of the incense familiar. For a moment, we were alone. He turned a corner, disappearing behind a statue of the Buddha, and when he turned back to make sure I was right behind, his dark eyes peered out from around Buddha’s fatty neck folds. Juan had very long eyelashes. 

We’d finally left behind Arizona and my father, and we were living with John in Salt Lake City, in the house that he owned. A beautiful place that I loved from the first moment I saw it. In that house I had my own bed. I liked to keep my eyes closed so that I could listen to the morning. It was the sound of water splashing: my mother washing her face, John brushing his teeth beside her. It was the deep and rhythmic breathing of my brothers, sleeping. And for the last few months it had been the rise and fall of voices, coming through the door to the living room, which we kept closed at night so that the refugee family that lived in there had privacy.

Here’s something I am curious about: when is a well-placed flourish, maybe even a flurry of adjectives and adverbs, perfect for a story, and when are the simplest of sentences called for? 

One of Marisa Silver’s goals as a fiction writer is to “change the angle of vision, both for the characters and the reader, just enough that some little aperture of awareness opens up to reveal a wider view of the world.” To that end, she says she always starts with the very, very specific. She’s not really compelled by “drama writ large, but rather the interstitial drama of behavior.” Her eighth book, At Last, may just be her best one yet.