Editors' Prize Winner | April 16, 2024

Invasive Species 

We couldn’t decide between killing lionfish or common starlings. Harry voted for lionfish because spearfishing them would require a trip to Florida, a place on the map contrary in every way to the subtle habituations of a pale-skinned sommelier. During this season of our steady uncoupling, Harry was trying to step out of his box, show me he didn’t always have to be so rational, so easily accessible. Lola and Iris, our fourteen- and twelve-year-old respectively, whom Harry and I had certainly disappointed with a marriage they’d never attempt to recreate for themselves, voted for common starling, a tyrant of a bird. From the time our girls were toddlers, they’d not loved birds like kids should. When I’d pointed out a circling hawk or a hummingbird pricking a citrus blossom, they’d glare silently at my forefinger, as if the creatures were a figment of my frumpy excitement with things that defied gravity.  

“Dad, how can you want to kill a fish? They’re so innocent and bubbly,” Iris said to Harry. We sat in the dining room, the four of us, a hyper-normative family preparing to eat carb-veggie-protein in taut silence. Harry must have recently orange-oiled the oak table because it had tinted my elbows mahogany.  

“Guess I was thinking that the dumber species is the better one to take out,” Harry said.  

Lola picked at the swollen spackling of acne at the temples of her heart face. “What do we kill the birds with?”  

Harry clumsily mimed the pull and release of a slingshot.  

“It’s not killing, you guys,” I reminded them, though I’d been guilty of using the word myself while researching this family vacation. Come to find out, the travel industry had already coined a term—“Invasive Species Tourism”—and the need for participants in this man-eat-world war was ripe.