Edwin L. Shuman Fiction Award
An excerpt from “Egged”:
At first, I’m scared to sleep at night in my new room without you. There are shadows here in the yellow house that I can’t explain. At our old home I knew all the shadows, and if I couldn’t sleep, I had you to talk to. But here I’m all alone with dark spaces I don’t recognize, and there’s nothing in between my bed and the ceiling but space, so much space. For two weeks I think about crossing the hall to see you every night, but I know you’ll call me a baby, so I stick it out and eventually I learn the shadows and get used to the silence and all the space.
Now that you’re in middle school, you’re too old to draw with chalk or play hopscotch, so mostly we sit outside on the curb and watch our new neighbors and make up stories about them. We sit at the edge of the house’s front lawn, right next to the driveway, far away from the thinned-out patch of grass where Appa has started to drop his used-up cigarettes, and just ten feet away from the hose he has installed so we can water the flowers Amma plants on either side of the front door.
The yellow house is in a quiet place, outside the city.
We are deep in the suburbs, you tell me, and I nod my head knowingly although I am not quite sure what that means.
White fence, sprinkler, cul-de-sac lanes. Straight-lined-hedges, one-way streets. Golden-haired people with golden-haired dogs on leashes, and unlocked bikes tossed on their sides in front yards and driveways. Linda and Mike mow their lawn often, and they have a cat that goes in and out of the house on its own. I am always worried that the cat, whose name I learn is Cindy, will get hit by a car or attacked by a dog or something, but Cindy never seems to have any desire to go beyond the edge of the Carlsons’ yard.