The 2025 Bette Howland Prize

We are pleased to share "Pursued by the Furies" by Marisol Aveline Delarosa, selected by Deborah Taffa for the 2025 Bette Howland Nonfiction Prize. The prize was founded in 2017 by Honor Moore to recognize the work of a graduating nonfiction writer and honor the legacy of Bette Howland (1937–2017), who had mentored Honor Moore in her twenties and with whom she had lost touch. (Honor Moore wrote about their friendship in the afterword to Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland.)

Judge's Citation:

How does the prevalence of violence—quotidian, inherited, sanctioned, and illegal—haunt the lives of U.S. citizens in our current political moment? In “Pursued by the Furies,” Marisol Delarosa explores her identity as a New York bar owner, a Filipina with a vengeful imagination, a manager of immigrants who survive only because of her employment. Notable for the way she ponders upward mobility, Delarosa is self-aware. Feeling complicit with the destruction of the Trump administration, she implicates her own inheritance as a settler colonist, all while pondering violent acts that hit close to home. The essay asks us to examine the difference between stated beliefs and lived contradictions. Raw rather than polished, aching in its desire to do right, the essay reveals the near impossibility of living an honest life in a world run amok. In the end, it’s the honest pain in the author’s voice that engages us and makes the material sing.

Deborah Taffa is the author of the memoir Whiskey Tender (Harper). A 2018 Writing Fellow at A Public Space, she received her MFA at the University of Iowa. She is a citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, and the director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Pursued by the Furies

What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood? Ties to the spirit world, fierce pride, wounded pride, thirst for revenge, melodrama, fatalism, weeping and wailing at the graveside. We’re blessed with macabre humor and dancing feet—a floating nation of rhythm and blues. We’re our own worst enemy. —Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love

During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a female schoolteacher from Tacloban became known as the “Silent Killer.” Her name was Nieves Fernandez, and she had more recorded kills than most soldiers in the army. An American newspaper account of her life made a point to note that her first name means “snow” in Spanish, and that she was “paler than most native women” in the area. But the photos I have seen of Nieves depict a woman who looks like she could be my aunt or my cousin. Her skin is brown and her cheekbones look like they could cut glass.

After witnessing the brutal torture of her students and neighbors by the invading Japanese army, Nieves endeavored to fight back.

She taught herself the art of killing with a bolo knife, a long swordlike implement typically utilized for opening coconuts or harvesting crops. Nieves would sneak into Japanese encampments in the middle of the night dressed in all black and slit the throats of the soldiers while they slept. She targeted the jugular and then the carotid arteries so they would bleed out quickly and could not scream. She killed hundreds of men this way and is considered a hero to Filipinos.

Mira Jacob wrote a line in an Op-Art piece about how she manages this moment where nothing in the world makes sense; “I don’t know how to hold so much love and rage in a single body.”

My body feels ravaged by those conflicting forces right now.

One side of me is a generative reservoir of endless compassion. For me, it is impossible to be fully present as a New Yorker and not feel broken open by every soul perched on a street corner asking for help. I can never just walk by the women selling churros and sliced mangoes with chamoy sauce to support their families or the gaunt man who sits on a milk crate outside of the CVS with a plastic cup in his chapped hands. I keep a fold of cash in my pocket to give to them and to every child selling candy on the subway. I walk slowly through intersections when I see anyone older or less able crossing before the light turns so I can stop oncoming traffic for them. I work as a volunteer to bring groceries and hot meals to people who are unable to leave their homes.

But the louder, more intractable side of me craves flashier action, more destructive rebellion. When I consider the violence and cruelty inflicted upon the poorest and most oppressed people in the world knowing that so much of it is done by a nation that I call home[1] I am filled with a vengeful rage. And it's not just the horrors happening in Palestine and Sudan and Haiti and Cuba[2].

We perpetuate terrorism domestically as well. That one of the richest nations in the world has so many people without access to shelter, food, and clean water is disgraceful. We tell trans people they don’t exist and favor the rights of gun owners over the safety of school children. Women are forced to bear children against their choice and are not provided the support and resources to raise them. Legal citizens are being disappeared from their apartments and imprisoned without charges. Rapists walk free. Billionaires exist.

I may not be directly related to Nieves Fernandez but when I fantasize about myself at this moment in time, I imagine myself more like her. In the woods, sharpening my knives and planning. Deciding how to make myself a weapon and how to defend my home.

*

The idea of home itself invades my peace a lot lately. Or rather the idea that I don’t really have one.

Families in Palestine can trace their connection to their place on Earth through generations born on the fertile span of olive trees and sandstone. Whole lineages have been pounded into dust by bombs. We’re all watching it happen under scrolls of our thumbs. They continue to resist an overpowering force that aims to take their homes and lives. They resist and fight for their home. Their land, their trees, their sea.

I wonder what that feels like.

What it feels like to understand so strongly that you belong to a specific place. So fervently that you would risk everything, battle and even sacrifice your life for it. And vow to never leave the land even as bombs fall around you. To know that even in death there is one place that signifies your existence.

New York City is the only place I have ever felt compelled to connect myself to by name or geography. I could do a walking tour of different neighborhoods and tell you my many hilarious and depressing escapades. But does that make it my home or just a place I have lived? And how does one negotiate their existence in a land that is complicit in the destruction and stealing of another person’s home? Is there anywhere to go where you don’t just constantly carry the baggage of your own displacement and unpack it for the sacrifice of another’s?

I have an apartment in New York City where I have lived for most of my life. It is my home. But knowing I was not born and raised in the five boroughs, I still consider myself a transplant. Just a very firmly cultivated one. It is the only place I have abided that has felt like I belong, but the city, like the country at large, feels different.

It feels like the soil is starting to give way. The floorboards are buckling as damp earth pushes through. The foundation isn’t solid enough to hold and if it collapses, I don’t know if I want to salvage anything that remains. Or where I would even go from here. I talk about leaving because I cannot accommodate this internal struggle. I numb myself with drugs, so I don’t have to admit that I just don’t want to stay here and fight for a place I don’t even know if I love. A place that doesn’t want people who look like me to exist let alone thrive.

*

I can’t stop thinking about the man in the Brownsville subway station who got shot in the head by the NYPD. He was just minding his business as New Yorkers do, headed to his job at a hospital on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe he was listening to music or a true-crime podcast. Maybe he was thinking about his wife hoping she would make something for dinner that he could look forward to when he got home.

The only thing we can say for sure is he didn’t do anything that warranted getting shot. From what I have read of the account, nobody in the subway that day did. The police chased down a fare evader and started shooting in his general direction in a crowded subway station. One of the bullets hit the male bystander in the head. Another bullet is still lodged in a woman’s leg where it will probably remain. I read in the paper that she has to learn how to walk again.

Whenever this kind of violence happens, I think about my employees. The fifty-three people who work for me at the bar I run. Most of them are immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Even the white people who work for me were born in Ireland and don’t have a dark blue passport.

Many of my employees have children and families they support here and abroad. They live in every borough of the city as well as New Jersey and Westchester. Some of them travel hours to get to and from work every day. I think of all the number of horrible things that could happen to any of them during their commutes. How their families would manage the ripples of destruction in their lives that a stray bullet from a negligent cop would cause.

My business partner, Jack, migrated from Ireland in 1998 and he reminds me frequently that everyone has to work to survive in this city. He likes to point out that for many years I wore tight shorts, shook my ass and poured Jameson shots to make tips. How I forced my way into a position of authority by making myself indispensable to him. And that I sit comfortably in an office now, counting piles of cash and writing emails instead of flirting with finance bros to put cash in the tip cup. I come and go as I please, wear what I want and answer to no one.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have some level of responsibility for the people who work for us.” I play the role of Jack’s conscience out loud for him.

“No one’s saying that. But they’re adults. This is life.”

“Is it?”

*

“I’m sorry to wake you.”

I answered the phone even though it was too early in the morning because it was too early in the morning. Unless it was a butt dial, it was almost certainly an emergency.

“I’m at the hospital. Rafael got stabbed last night after work.”

The voice on the line was the closing night manager, Maggie. She was always calm and good in a crisis. The lack of tremble in her voice made me more nervous.

“Rafael is in surgery at Bellevue. I’m here now, but his family is on the way, so I am going to go because they only allow three people at a time.”

“Should I go there?” I willed her to say please say no.

Pause.

“I think you should.”

I took a cab to the hospital, but I didn’t go inside. There was a park next to Bellevue with wooden benches that have those bars jutting from the middle to stop unhoused people from sleeping on them. A woman slept sitting up and leaning across a metal pushcart filled with plastic bottles and soda cans. The sun had barely risen yet, so the air was still September-cooled. I thought about sitting down, too, but my feet walked me to find a deli and I called Jack to tell him what happened.

“If something happens to Rafael and he doesn’t make it—”

“He’s going to make it.”

“But if he doesn’t- “

If he doesn’t, what? I think about the answer to that question in the comforting state of now, in the state of hindsight where I know that Rafael made it through the surgery. That he survived and healed and came back to work after just six months even though I assumed he would never be able, nor even want, to be in a bar again.

When I remember my mind that day, I realize that I am a fucking hypocrite. I talk so much shit about justice and protecting people, but what the fuck would I actually do when it matters?

If he had died that day, what would I have done? Would I quit the bar completely? Would I learn how to do Muay Thai, buy and register a handgun, get the video footage from where he got stabbed by some fucking random dude who got denied service for being too drunk, somehow figure out that man’s identity, and stalk him to the ends of the earth? Would I pull off some Equalizer-style revenge where I enter his apartment, set a digital watch for two minutes and time myself as I meticulously torture and kill my friend’s murderer? Would that be the justice I could mete out?

What I did do that day was buy a coffee with regular milk that I didn’t drink. I sat on a park bench in front of a hospital and held a cup of coffee until it got as cold as the air outside. I would have waited until it evaporated, waited for someone to tell me that Rafael was going to survive. I convinced my brain that the other side of that day would be me helping him find a lawyer so he can get his medical bills paid and fast track his citizenship status somehow.

I told myself that is something this country would do. I convinced myself that if you get stabbed being a good person, the government will at least pay for your ambulance to the hospital and let you stay in this country and pay taxes and allow you the privilege to die here old and in debt no matter where you were born or the color of your skin.

I sat on a bench and watched a large group of students in matching yellow shirts from an Italian university walk across the park. They swung their matching bookbags from their shoulders and chattered loudly. I was glad to not understand what they were saying. No one looked at me, but they made a point to avoid walking near the sleeping woman with the pushcart full of recyclables. I didn’t do anything but sit and wait.

*

Almost two years to the day after Rafael survived his stabbing.

Almost a year since the man who did it pled guilty to attempted manslaughter and got sent to Rikers for nine years.

Almost to the point where Rafael’s stabbing became an incident of the past that we could almost forget, I had to tell Rafael that someone got stabbed outside our bar.

The bar where he has worked for over a decade and where he is considered such a trustworthy member of the family that he has a set of keys that opens every door and the access code to every safe. I had to tell him that I couldn’t keep the world out. That the place where he is supposed to feel safe so he can make money to support his wife and three children and the grandchild gestating inside his daughter’s belly was not a place exempt from violence.

I wanted him to hear the news from me.

I told Jack that he also needed to say something to Rafael.

“It’s traumatic. He could be retriggered. He almost died.”

I consider it part of my job to calibrate Jack’s empathy. It’s not that he lacks compassion—like most of the Irish people I know who honor their history, he always aligns with the side of the oppressed when we discuss the news of the world. When we first started working together, he made me watch documentaries about Bobby Sands and taught me the lyrics to his favorite rebel songs. The football club he supports is known for their fervent defiance of the governing body’s rules against flying the Palestinian flag at matches.

To me, he is a white man in a position of authority who can be counted on to stand on the right side of history, but he sometimes has to be reminded of how intertwined everyone’s struggles are. I just teach him how to have an appropriate amount of reactivity in situations where other people will not have the benefit of a fair outcome as often as he has experienced in his life.

“You need to tell him it’s going to be okay, Jack.”

“He should have sued that other bar. He’d have gotten a huge settlement.”

“Well, I think he didn’t want anything to jeopardize his citizenship application.”

“It wouldn’t have.”

“You don’t know that.”

I pushed a pile of twenties through a money-counting machine and punched 1-0-0 on the digital pad. The black plastic teeth whirred and spat, and a bill popped out, stopping the progress of the count. The bill had a light dusting of white powder caked into the thin threads around Andrew Jackson’s high arched brow.

I held up the bill and joked, “Looks like nightlife is making a comeback!”

Jack grinned. “When do you get yours?”

“My what?”

“Your citizenship.”

“I was born here, you asshole. I’m already an American citizen.”

“You always say that.”

“Fuck you, immigrant.”

Jack rubbed a patch of skin on his forehead that was rough and bumpy. He sees a dermatologist regularly to get precancerous moles removed from his sun-averse Irish skin. I told him that white people shouldn’t be the superior race for that reason alone. How can the people who get all the money and power in the world also not be able to tolerate sunshine on their skin?

Jack senses that I am upset about how Rafael might feel but because he is Irish, he doesn’t admit to having such sensitive feelings.

“Don’t worry,” he offers, “I’ll talk to him. I’ll make sure he knows we’re here for him whatever he needs.”

Even if he didn’t end up actually doing that, I knew he understood that he should.

*

I was the one to tell Rafael about the guy getting stabbed outside the bar.

We stood in the basement between three industrial-sized ice machines. The compressors hummed and slurped. Every three minutes a block of frozen water dropped into a large metal basin with a crash. A barback walked by and whistled through his teeth for no apparent reason, just to make more noise. Rafael started up the metal staircase that leads to a hidden door behind the main bar. I grabbed his wrist to stop him.

“SomeonegotstabbedoutsidelastnightbutitsgonnabeokayandifyouneedanythingjustletmeknowIloveyouIhopeyouknowthat.”

Another load of ice dropped. The basement trap door squealed open, and a delivery guy threw a metal keg down the concrete steps. It smelled like bay leaves, lime juice and dampness. Rafael’s eyebrows raised. I explained again slowly and added more details.

“I think the guy is okay,” I lied.

“He was still able to walk after it happened,” I told the truth.

“They arrested the guy who did it.” More truth.

“It was probably just a flesh wound.” More lies.

I wasn’t sure if I should hug Rafael, but it seemed like something that should have happened at that moment. Two years almost to the day, a guy stabbed him three times. Once in the shoulder and twice in the lung, barely missing his heart. It had to be triggering for him to hear this news if I felt that much unease saying it to him. It felt like the floor was slipping away but I was certain I was standing still. Rafael flipped his curly black bangs away from his face. He said it’s okay.

“Don’t worry. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“You sure, Rafa?”

He waved his hand over his shoulder, pushing something invisible away.

“That’s past hurt, Marisol. It’s over now.”

[1] And funded through the taxation of our labor and consumption.

[2] And DRC, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Nicaragua . . .

Marisol Aveline Delarosa is completing an MFA in nonfiction at The New School; in the fall will begin a second MFA in nonfiction, focusing on travel writing, in Barcelona through the pan-European MFA program at Cedar Crest College. She is a bar operator in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan.