Cwa john Creasy (New Blood) Dagger

Author Biography:

Smith Henderson is the recipient of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writer Winner (in fiction). He was a 2011 Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University, a 2011 Pushcart Prize winner and a Michener Center for Writers Fellow. Henderson’s short story manuscript was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award and he was a two-time finalist for the University of Texas Keene Prize, the world’s largest student literary prize. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, New Orleans Review, Makeout Creek, and Witness. He has worked as a prison guard and social worker, experiences which informed his first novel Fourth of July Creek, set in his native Montana.

Extract:

The kid walked bowlegged and with his chest forward like he was breasting his way across a river, observing with badly concealed interest the panoply of animals and plants cut from construction paper and taped to the walls. He looked through an ajar door at a classroom taking a quiz and at the lockers and up into the staircase with the mute fascination of an ambassador. In the bathroom, the boy entered the doorless stall and regarded the sculpted porcelain a moment before locating the upright seat and pulling it down. He shat with Pete watching, shameless as a dog. When he washed his hands, he lathered promptly, and then rinsed with wary pleasure, turning his hands in the hot water and looking at Pete in the mirror as if he had to keep an eye on him, and not the other way around.

The child didn’t have hot running water. And he’d never set foot in a public school.

The boy wouldn’t let the doctor examine him, but the doctor said scurvy was certainly possible. Said to check his belly and legs for liver spots, if the boy’d ever let him. He told Pete to get him some vitamin C, asked after the boy’s stool, and when Pete described the quality of it, wrote a prescription for the giardia he’d probably gotten from drinking the mountain water.

There was no trace of the boy’s earlier violence against the principal. If anything, the child radiated studied calm. He spoke in the clipped cadence of a POW, announcing at one point that he’d renounced his citizenship. He stated plainly that he’d kill anyone who stuck him with a needle.