by Amy Hempel
He thought he should stop the car.
He thought again about the pistol, and this time, he did glance over, just barely turned his head, but it was too much, he knew instantly, and he knew, without any question, they’d been wired to each other or welded, fused in some permanent way, and he made for the glove compartment as quickly as he could.
Jill was faster. By the time his hand left the wheel, her fingers had already tripped the compartment release and gripped the pistol, and then she extended it, pressed the barrel to his temple, and cocked the hammer with her thumb.
It was fully dark now.
The blacktop clicked against his tires.
“Drive,” she said.
Aaron Gwyn is the author of the story collection Dog on the Cross, finalist for the 2005 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the novel The World Beneath, published in 2009. His short fiction has been featured in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Glimmer Train, The Gettysburg Review, and other magazines. This is his second appearance in New Stories from the South. He is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, where he teaches fiction writing and contemporary American fiction.
I wrote the first section of “Drive” pretty much as it appears in this anthology. Then I put it away. Almost threw it away. I thought the characters’ behavior too extreme, bordering on implausible. The thing kept eating at me, though, and I picked it back up. As the writing progressed, I discussed the story with a woman friend. I read the first section to her, and when I paused she said, “A guy actually did that to me once,” then went on to explain how, indeed, a guy had. I thought she was a isolated case. A few weeks later I read the section to another woman friend. She said, “You know, this guy I dated last year did that to me.” It was their last date, she said. I mulled all this over, and then one day, at the coffee shop, I read the section to my friend, Adam. He nodded a few times and brushed a hand through his stubble. He said, “I actually did that to this girl one time.” I realized I’d stumbled onto something.
Emily Quinlan
THE GREEN BELT
(from Santa Monica Review)
The dinner party started deteriorating when Barb burned her eyebrows off, but if every action has a reaction, then the fire resulted from the cognac, which resulted from the celebratory mood, which resulted from Leo’s unexpected visit with a jujitsu belt in hand. He had taken the train down from Manhattan to Morocco, West Virginia, a thirteen-hour trip. He surprised his parents on the Fourth of July. Originally he had said that he wouldn’t be able to make it down to the lake house for the holiday, but this was the way Leo created surprises and pleasure, by first creating disappointment. He brought his new girlfriend, Jiyoon, with him. Jiyoon ran an SAT prep academy in Manhattan. She was the one who had taught Leo jujitsu.
Dennis, Leo’s father, bought some cognac, the good stuff, for drinking. Barb thought it was for cooking and the chicken was already skinned and crackling in the pot before Dennis thought about how he could snatch the bottle away from her. Barb was his sister-in-law; she was not a chef, not even really a decent cook, so cognac de poulet seemed doomed. When the column of flames shot up from the pot Barb screamed and sprung at the fire. She seemed to think that she could blow the flames out, as if the conflagration were one large birthday candle.
Dennis took the chicken out to the grill. He felt a little sick. He thought that Barb’s eyebrows were probably peppering all the breasts and thighs. His wife stood behind him while he grilled.
“Not yet,” Pamela said, indicating that the chicken wasn’t done. She said this a second and then a third time. She said it again when he brought the chicken inside on a platter.
“It’s done,” he said. “Trust me on this one. You don’t even eat meat.”
“It’s still bone white,” she said. “People like their meat charred. People like to see those grill marks.”
What people? These people? “We’re not feeding the world,” he said.
She had begun to talk in terms of “people” quite a bit, even when it was just the two of them: “People don’t understand how to use this food processor.” “People need to throw these sheets in the washer.” Dennis partially blamed the ladies’ thespian group she had recently joined. They did plays in swimming pools, in bank vaults, in bowling alleys, in Dumpsters. The audience was required to remove their shoes and sit cross-legged on the ground. Once Dennis watched Pamela recite Ophelia’s monologue while holding a pig’s head. It was a real pig’s head from the butcher. She had stayed up late the night before with plastic wrap, tin foil, garbage bags, and ice packs, trying to figure out the best way to transport the pig’s head from the middle of their living room to the auditorium. It was the same finical care she used to take when packing the children’s lunches.
Nobody ate much of the chicken. Everyone pushed it around on their paper plates. Jiyoon even served herself extra salad, only to use it in covering up her chicken. Maybe people did prefer grill marks, thought Dennis. Or maybe people believed that Barb’s eyebrows were on the meat. He thought it was nice of Jiyoon to consider his feelings, though he didn’t really care about the dinner—he was more excited about the dessert he had made. He smiled at Jiyoon and she frowned, as if she had caught him mocking her. He was glad to have all these people in one room together: Pamela, Leo, Jiyoon, Barb, who was Pamela’s sister, Pluto, who was also Pamela’s sister, and Ray, Dennis’s business partner. They owned a sink company together.
Pamela, Barb, and Pluto were fraternal triplets. When the flames had licked Barb she ran into the bathroom and shut the door. Everyone was alarmed. Pamela almost called for an ambulance. Barb screamed that she was fine. They heard water running. The door was locked. She screamed for someone to run out to her car and bring in her makeup bag. Pluto tried talking to her through the door, something about how she had gotten stoned once and set a fern on fire in Milwaukee. Now, after dinner, Barb sat on the deck in a rocking chair, pumping herself forwards and back a little viciously. The hood of her windbreaker was up and she held ice packs to her forehead. When Ray approached she let out a laugh like a hiss and said she was super and tightened the hood around her face. Dennis felt badly for Barb. She was fifty-two, built like a cabbage, and still had acne. She wore plaid jumpers with appliqués and holiday sweatshirts that played music when she touched a hidden button sewn into the sleeve. Pamela and Pluto were wispy. Pluto wore sandals with socks and smoked a pipe that used to belong to their father. Pamela was getting skinnier by the day. She wore ballet slippers everywhere and bought necklaces as big as boulders. Her favorite was an amber choker with little flies fossilized inside the beads, which Dennis found disturbing. He smiled again at Jiyoon. She crossed her arms and stared back at him.
Dennis looked at Ray, who was a good sport but always sat too far away from the table when he ate and dropped food on his slacks. Sink sales were pretty good. Neither of them needed to be at the store quite so often and Dennis had more time to spend in his garden. He called the Farmer’s Weather Hotline every morning at four o’clock. He didn’t grow any vegetables, but still—he liked to hear about humidity, the soil index, the rain water levels. His roses were doing especially well this year: Candied Girls, Angel Faces, and Blue Baby Climbers leaned in every direction. Last year he remembered how there had been a sudden cold snap and he and Pamela were up all night in headlamps, making newspaper teepees, heating bowls in the oven. They used straw, cordless hair-dryers, even their own warm breath to try and save the flowers. It felt good, working with Pamela like that. It felt good to be tired with her.
The sisters were getting drunk. They tried to experiment with infused vodka and shoved coffee beans, basil, and apple skins down the bottle necks. Pamela proposed swimming out to the float, two hundred feet away from the dock. Dennis said he didn’t think it was a good idea to swim on a full stomach. Barb refused to wear her swimsuit when there was daylight out, but Pluto and Pamela tossed themselves into the water still wearing their clo
thes. They swam quickly and well, gulping the air with obscene sounds. Once on the float they started hooting and hollering and pounding their fists against their chests. Dennis was worried about them. He thought he should take the rowboat out with some life jackets. In the shed the jackets hung on nails. Their foam orange panels were spread wide, like mounted butterflies. There were the two large ones for Dennis and Pamela, and the three small ones, that Dennis had never bothered to replace with larger sizes. There was Leo’s; there was Paul’s, who lived in Boston and never visited; then there was Carrie’s life jacket. Carrie, who was dead. Triplets ran in the family. It was hard to be a triplet! You couldn’t blame anything on anybody. Always you were there, sitting right across from two copies of yourself who were doing correctly what you had just done wrong. A couple of shadows were on the heels of your mistakes, like someone taking caution to step over the slippery spot where you had just fallen down. He had gathered all this from watching his three children when they were young. He himself was an only child. Pamela said he could never understand.
It was ten o’clock before Dennis brought out the vanilla pudding cake in the shape of the American flag: strawberries and whipped cream for the stripes, blueberries and cream for the stars. They ate on the deck.
“Wow. This is terrific, Dad,” said Leo. “Very festive.”
Jiyoon looked skeptical. Pluto, shivering in a beach towel, stuffed tobacco into her pipe. Angela had showered and shampooed her hair, even put on some lipstick. Dennis jogged next door and invited the neighbor girl for dessert—he was trying to teach her how to garden but she killed everything in her path. Sometimes she popped rose heads off with her thumbnail just to watch them float on the lake. All she ever talked about was her sixteenth birthday, which was coming up in August. Pretty Virgo. Dennis called her this in his mind, though just Virgo to her face. Her real name was Gemma. When the girl asked for a second piece of cake he saw Pamela glance at Pluto who glanced at Barb who was peeking out from under her hood, finally having been coaxed to the table. He didn’t know what they were communicating to each other. He used to be better at that, that knowing. These days he brought Pamela coffee when she wanted to sleep, tried to kiss her when she was dreaming of salad. While they ate the cake Leo talked excitedly about his jujitsu training. He looked at Jiyoon every few sentences for affirmation. They could see sparklers moving on the far shore across the lake. Purple and blue Roman candles shot through the sky.
“You’ve got to learn better time-balance,” Jiyoon said to Leo solemnly. “You’ve just got to. I can still deliver a kuzushi kick to you in under six seconds.” She went on to talk about her testing academy. She said that her training methods produced some of the highest SAT scores in the city, in all the boroughs. “The Bronx is getting close,” she said with scorn. She explained how she wrestled with students who were tardy; she made those who forgot their homework push a Dumpster around a parking lot. A failed quiz resulted in wall-sits and push-ups.
They were all quiet.
“Well,” said Pluto. “I guess somebody’s got to love those kids an awful lot to put them through all that.”
“Corporal punishment is illegal,” Ray offered.
Jiyoon said it was only illegal if the students didn’t want to be punished.
“Well,” said Ray, “actually not. No.”
She shrugged. “Why do we train a dog by shoving its nose in its own urine? Tell me that.”
Ray began to glance around for his car keys.
During a strange moment when the liquor was gone and people were stretching and crumpling up their napkins, Jiyoon announced that she was pregnant. Leo smiled and started crying. It was the happiest Dennis had ever seen his son. Dennis thought it was strange that the green belt, not the baby, was the news they had shouted as they stepped off the train. Everyone hugged Jiyoon. Ray was drunk and clapped a little too loudly. Virgo was young and perfect, so she only wrinkled her nose—Dennis supposed that childbirth was grotesque to her.
Jiyoon and Pamela began talking about placentas, about water births, about how women used to have babies in a squatting position, hanging onto a tree limb and biting on wood. Apparently some parents buried the placenta in their yards, or even fried it and ate it.
“Say,” said Dennis, “couldn’t a baby drown during a water birth?”
They looked at him. Jiyoon blinked and Pamela began twisting her huge coral necklace around as if she were screwing off the lid to a jar. “Babies spend nine months in fluid,” said Jiyoon patiently. “We were meant to be amphibious. A water birth is the only way that bond stays intact.”
“You might have triplets,” Pamela said.
Jiyoon nodded. “We’ve already thought about that,” she said, indecisive, as if they had a choice in the matter.
Dennis went to get some citronella candles. “It’s awfully buggy out tonight, folks. Bug City.”
Nobody could fall asleep. They milled around the house, not talking, slamming in and out of the porch door. At midnight Pamela and Leo played one of their mother-son piano duets in the den. Dennis looked at how erect they sat on the piano bench, how he could see their spines stretch and move slightly under their clothes with the rhythm of the song, which he couldn’t remember the name of. Jiyoon looked surprised. She said she didn’t even know that Leo could play. People picked at the cold dinner that still sat on the table. The pieces of chicken were bald, unseeing, either under or over salad. They wouldn’t let Ray drive home and so he sat at the water’s edge with crossed arms and was petulant. Since they all forgot Virgo was there, nobody told her that she had better get home. She arranged her limbs on a lawn chair, her whole body splayed open towards the sky as if the sun were out.
At three o’clock Dennis called the Farmer’s Hotline but there was no recording posted yet. He sat and dealt a hand of solitaire to himself. Pluto thought it would be funny to wake up her friend on the West Coast with a phone call. Barb swam in the dark and then drew some eyebrows on herself and fell asleep on the pull-out sofa. Pamela stood and watched Leo and Jiyoon wrestle in the yard. She turned the porch light on for them. Leo did a move where he brought his foot towards Jiyoon’s jaw. Dennis gasped, but in the last second Jiyoon turned from him and drove a heel into his gut.
What had happened to Carrie was common, but also not. Nineteen years ago someone came into their house in the night and took her from her bed where she slept. A few days later, a few miles away from the house, her body was found in a wide green field, in a clear plastic bag that was sealed with packing tape. It was the summer she had refused to get into bed unless she was allowed to wear her blue bathing suit and her witch’s hat.
“She is pretty,” said Pamela, watching Jiyoon aim a roundhouse at Leo’s ear, just before she sat on his back and twisted his arm behind him. A thin net of yellow pollen rose from the ground when they landed. Dennis didn’t know if Pamela meant Jiyoon or Virgo. He hoped she meant Virgo—that would signify that she could read his mind.
He stood with his wife and watched the jujitsu. It didn’t seem very fun to him, but competition was always good. It meant there was a prize. It meant there was something at stake.
Emily Quinlan was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the University of California, Irvine. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and Santa Monica Review. She is finishing a novel and a collection of short stories and currently teaches English in Florida.
This story, like most of my stories, is about family and violence. It is about both the large and the small crimes of our lives. “The Green Belt” started with Barb’s singed eyebrows, a small injury. Next came the jujitsu belt, an equally small recovery. And so it went on: familial nicks and abrasions, then bandages and poultices. Finally, I realized that this family’s efforts to heal themselves with holiday cakes and gardening lessons sprang from murder, from a loss that was very wide and very dark. And I have to say that growing up in a small town al
so influenced this narrative. Small towns have an intimacy, a collective complicity, that makes each onslaught of terror ring louder and longer. Oh, and I like funny things, too. A story has to be funny. A story should also include a lot of food.
Stephen Marion
THE COLDEST NIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
(from Tin House)
After the big snow a bright day came, so bright it hurt the eyes, and it was followed by a dusk so long and deep the earth seemed to be spilling into the sky. First it was light blue and then purple and eventually a lingering deeper blue again, and at the end of it everything was fixed and still. Even the snow, which was deep, went hard. It didn’t take long to notice the cold. It was cold of a different kind than Marcus had ever felt. The surprise-meat sandwiches and even the big cart he had pushed them in on were extra cold.
It wasn’t as bad in D Block as it was in solitary. When Marcus delivered their trays the two child abusers were bunnied up in the corner. Marcus looked at them and they blinked.
You shaved your head, said the one with fleshy lips.
Marcus didn’t say anything.
How come you to shave your head? said the smaller one.
Marcus waited for a minute with his cart and watched them begin to eat. They had built a tent of blankets. The bread of the sandwiches themselves was chewy it was so cold. The child abusers chewed on it hungrily.
You be sorry you shaved off all of that hair, said the first one. Cold as it is.
Even among D Block it had gone quiet. The cold came right through the walls and hung around like a thick gas. Marcus didn’t want to, but he went to the slot window and looked out. The jail made unusual popping and groaning noises. To him it was like a ship, or an ark, frozen in an antarctic sea. He wished he could get someone to realize what was happening, but no one did. Earlier while they were cooking breakfast somebody opened the side door and they got to see out. They saw the snow. The world was soft white and blue and black and it went all the way across the trees to the mountains, which were woolly white too. It was as if the mountains were right there in front of his face, instead of miles away.