River Edge, New Jersey
Congratulations, Andrea!
Andrea’s Bio:
Andrea Kahn’s fiction has appeared in many literary publications, some of which include Prairie Schooner, The Santa Clara Review, Re: Arts & Letters, The Malahat Review and The New York Press.
In 2006 she won the E.M. Koeppel Award for Fiction for a section of a completed but as of yet, unpublished novel. Previously she received The Thomas Wolfe International Fiction Prize, The Bananafish Short Fiction Contest and The New Letters Literary Award.
Andrea’s fiction frequently addresses the invisible boundaries of class in America. She is a self-taught writer, as well as a proud mother of a daughter from China. As a child she wrote and illustrated her first books on folded paper napkins. Born to circumstances where both chronic poverty and illness were the primary facets that shaped everyday life, the arts seemed to Andrea to belong only to the privileged.
Andrea now works as a publications writer and art director in New York City, and lives with her husband, daughter and dogs in New Jersey. She is very grateful to be a writer.
Freedom
People don't like sickness. They like parties and vacations and good times. Sickness is messy. Nobody wants to know the actual specifics; what it smells like, how unpredictable yet tirelessly repetitive it is.
The first time I saw people turn away from sickness was when my father came home from the hospital. Sickness put his inner workings on display, like one of those see-through plastic figures used to teach anatomy. Not for an instant could I forget the faulty drainage of his arteries, the knotted tangle of his colon. Every one of his organs was ripe with the promise of malfunction. His breath escaped in erratic little huffs that distracted me from my homework, the ordinariness of my thoughts. There were seizures, surprises, like the time a boy I invited over to watch Star Trek found my father in his underwear on the bathroom floor, unconscious and twitching.
One afternoon I came home from school and found him crumpled across the sofa, snuffling into his hand. By the stink I knew he had shit his pajamas. I held my breath against the odor leaping maliciously from the private clefts of his body and tore away his soiled clothing. His astonishingly large penis flopped meekly against his thigh.
I had never seen a penis before.
"The sofa is wet," he whispered. "I peed too."
Eventually I grew accustomed to the bland boredom of doctor's waiting rooms, the packet of overdue bills lying on the kitchen table, the large-size clear plastic bag filled with rattling pill bottles. I grew accustomed to making frantic phone calls to doctors who were not in until tomorrow. I grew accustomed to unexpected visits from collection agency representatives and to my father's fouled sheets agitating gloomily in the washing machine.
The sickness belonged to my father but it took over everything. Years later when I was finally an adult, I invented this motto to live by: Take your troubles and run with them or sure as shit they'll run right over you!
When my daughter was pronounced autistic, I took it, ran with it and maybe even loved it. Sickness is who my child is, I told the trustees of the ballet academy, and to deny her admission because of it is against the law.
Take it and run with it, I advised, or I will.
I married the first man who asked and popped out my daughter soon after. I wrapped around myself an impenetrable shield of routine and obligation, like a snug-fitting armor. My father, he died in the nursing home where I put him after I got married. I wasn't expected to make his dinner or clean his shit anymore. I had a husband to feed and a daughter to care for.
I was free.
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