When the Wind Blows the Water Gray

Award-winning author Clayton Luz debuts with "When the Wind Blows the Water Gray." Winner of the prestigious Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 2011, Luz's story offers an endearing, wry tale about a young man who accepts his mortality by learning to appreciate, not without considerable heartache, his family's damaged gifts. It wasn't complicated, this business of living like a human being. Guy Maurant had long ago come to understand that it involved one simple primum non nocere. But the precept needed to be plucked from the Hippocratic Corpus and set down in the maternity room instead, bestowed as a benediction upon every newborn. And in English not First, Do No Harm. Meet the infant's blood-crusted eyes squarely. Burble after First, Do No Harm. Say it again into his crabbed face. Say it once more in the hope that as the bee thinks of honey, so must the child through all its days in the meadow. First, Do No Harm. Only then should the infant be smacked on the rump, to set it crying over its first life that violence is the thrust of life made visible.