PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

Why are you being this way with this woman? You agreed to this interview. You took off the red scarf and smiled into that camera. You will be thought of as the rebellious twenty-something who tore down the flag like a teenager who, frustrated with her parents, gets the red highlights anyway. You want to say: I’m tired of being reminded every day that people in this world hate me. That people want me dead. Felt strongly enough to fight and die in a war because they hated me that much. That they raised kids to hate and that even if their great-great-grandkids can’t admit it, sometimes they hate me, too. I want to walk to work and think about something dumb like my new Post-it Notes or that email I don’t want to send. I can’t be mad every morning anymore.

  All of that would be political, a word you know has somehow developed a poisonous connotation. You shouldn’t say any of that, should you?

  “The flag is back up,” you say instead.

  “Yes,” she says. She waits.

  “I’m going to take it down. They’re going to keep putting it back up, and I’m going to keep taking it back down,” you say.

  She looks at you with the spread smile and alarmed eyes of someone talking to a person who they just realized is crazy. “Okay,” she says, “but groups like the KKK are saying they are going to guard the flag at all costs. And you are—not to dismiss you in any way—just one twenty-something. Are you scared?”

  You lean back into the chair, a gesture that adds a dramatic effect you did not intend. “I’m done being scared,” you say. “You tell the Klan all the scared niggers are dead.”

  She is colorless, as if someone has vacuumed all of the red from her cheeks. “Oh my god,” she says, seemingly without even realizing it. Someone is gesturing wildly in the corner. Commercial break, they mouth. “I—we have to—thank you for joining us, and after the break, sports with Larry Potowski.”

  She doesn’t look at you at first. She folds her hands in her lap. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she says. When you don’t move, she looks at you. “Leave now, please.” Her tone is painfully professional, the way you imagine she talks to her cleaning lady. The security guard moves slowly toward the set. You leave.

  OUTSIDE, YOU SEE your mom is calling you. You told her to wake up early and watch the show. When you ignore it, she calls again. You ignore it. Now she’ll have two lectures prepared the next time she talks to you.

  You take another way home, so you don’t have to walk by the capitol building. You listen to your mom’s voice mails. You count the word “crazy” eight times. She asks, too earnestly, if you’re on drugs. There is a text message from him. The preview on your lock screen says, “Holy shit . . .” He still thinks you’re friends. You won’t text him back.

  You enter your apartment and the sun coming through the blinds is almost too bright. You took off work for the interview, and it’s rare that you get to be in your apartment in the height of the morning. You sit on your couch with a book. All the scared niggers are dead, you think to yourself and laugh. You have never liked yourself more.

  Jade Jones was born and raised in southern New Jersey. A former Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, she is a graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She is currently a lecturer in Writing Arts at Rowan University, where she teaches first-year writing and creative writing.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  As soon as we read the first lines of “The Rickies,” we knew that we had something special on our hands. Sarah Curry’s movement of you/me/we in these opening paragraphs dug immediately into the heart of this story, a tale of four young women who have all survived sexual violence and their singular and communal ways of coping with their assaults. “The Rickies” is brutally honest in illustrating its characters’ emotions and complexity. As Curry writes, the Rickies are “the bravest and worst parts” of these young women at the same time. It is not a story with a happy ending; in fact, it eschews a solid resolution to focus on the fact that the Rickies’ personal stories are still unfolding, are still changing.

  That this story came to us at the height of the #MeToo movement was not the reason we chose it, but it did serve to emphasize the universality of the experiences portrayed here—and also the grace with which Curry depicted them. We selected and published “The Rickies” as a finalist for Nimrod’s Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, which celebrate the work of new writers with original, distinct voices, writers who are just beginning to publish their work but who we are sure will go on to achieve greater literary success and share many more unique stories with the world. “The Rickies” was a perfect example of this kind of story.

  Eilis O’Neal, Editor in Chief

  Nimrod International Journal

  THE RICKIES

  Sarah Curry

  YOU DIDN’T KNOW me then.

  We were all girls, about the same size, no more than 5'3" and under 115 pounds, but that fall back on campus from study abroad we walked like we were men, nearly 6'1" and 200 pounds with a bum knee. Arms flexed and at our sides. We wanted to look like a stuffed gorilla won at a carnival by slinging little wooden balls as hard as you can at glass milk bottles. We walked as though we had sledgehammers affixed to our shoulders, and our names were Ricky.

  Why Ricky?

  You know, Ricky the mechanic. Ricky the prizefighter (or was that Rocky?). Ricky the uncle who belches the alphabet.

  It was a joke. Sort of.

  We met at a “survivors” group potluck where a bunch of female college students took dainty nervous bites of cupcakes and later cried as they told their stories. Except us. One after the other we left as a circle massage started to form, pretending we had to pee or had an emergency text. We met outside and called bullshit on “survival.” We didn’t even exchange names. We headed to the closest apartment and drank ourselves silly. Or should I say serious?

  The next morning we shed our flowing travelers’ skirts, our spaghetti-strap tank tops, our black ExOfficio bikini-cut underwear. One of us burned them. I can’t remember who. Someone else stuffed them in a Goodwill bin, and another cut them with kitchen scissors and threw them in the trash. I kept mine, shoving them deep into the box under my bed.

  We put on jeans and ironic T-shirts. We tied bandanas over our hair. See here, I still have them: yellow, purple, red, and turquoise. Sometimes, I tie one around Chloe, my dog, an Australian shepherd. But I always remember to put them back in the box and shut it tight.

  We dropped out of belly-dancing club and yoga and admitted we didn’t care that much about saving Darfur (though I did stay on their email list. I don’t know about the others). We went to the same corner of the cafeteria as the vegetarian meet-up and chewed on chicken legs and took big bites of Salisbury steak with our mouths open.

  At Kroger, we spied a Delta Zeta limping under the weight of three six-packs of hard lemonade, and we scowled. We professed a preference for bourbon. Bulleit. Because we liked staring into the bartender’s eyes and asking for it straight, the way he scratched his biceps uncomfortably as if he were trying to dig birdshot out from under his skin. We liked that—making others uncomfortable.

  In October, we got tattoos that said “Mom,” and when they healed we used Sharpies to add “Never a,” “Hate,” and “Blame.” Why was it our mothers’ faults? We couldn’t say exactly, but we knew we never wanted to be one. We vowed especially never to have daughters and, most of all, never to name them Lisa, Annabelle, Beth, or Claire.

  In November, we started going to the gun range for Ladies’ Night. There was an acrid smell in the air. At the range, we willed our arms to become part of the weapon and hurl pieces of metal through a paper target shaped like the outline of a man’s hyperbolic death throe. There’s a factory in Billings, Montana, that produces reams of these on recycled paper—neon green, pink, and black; the groin, heart, and head all “ultra-scale.” We kept the factory up and running. I still do. Each round released short hollow yips that echoed into one long scream, if we pulled the trigger fas
t enough.

  That semester after study abroad, freshmen girls with Bibles in hand-knit cozies were the worst. Anytime they saw a girl alone on campus, they invited her to Bible study: Free soda! Hot Christian guys! We patted their heads. They were wide-eyed Yorkies in a puppy mill and didn’t know it. We said, Sorry, we are atheists of everything. But it troubled us. Atheists sounded too positive. Nihilists was too descriptive. All -ists too reductive.

  We were the Rickies.

  It took weeks to lose the brown skin of summer and whiten, but by November we were the color of turned milk. People stopped asking where we’d gone, if we’d had fun, if they should ohmygod go on study abroad next year. To be clear, after our summers in different to-die-for locales, we no longer believed in the mysticism of Chichen Itza, Stonehenge, Chiang Mai, or Kathmandu, or in men named Sergio, Gavin, Sonthi, or Yash.

  We tried to remember and then not remember the faces of our rapists so many times and for so long that they blurred and merged. Their faces were nondescript and smooth as mannequins, as burn victims growing new skin, faces that could be anyone.

  So we avoided everyone.

  Not one of us had a picture of her rapist, so don’t look for them in the box. We searched the corners of selfies and pictures of impromptu street scenes, but they weren’t there. There was one picture on my phone (dead now, of course, and in the box) of my hand holding a piece of yellow street corn charred at the edges. There is a long shadow cast over the shot. Is that the vendor or Sergio? Or is it me?

  What is in the box? Belle’s ticket stub from her night bus ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok; a bar napkin Claire found in her purse the morning after she woke up puking and confused in a hostel bed that wasn’t hers; and the Gore-Tex raincoat of the expat who date-raped Beth in her sleeping bag in her backpacking tent on the third day of her ten-day trek through the Himalayas. The semester we met her, we got used to the heat of Beth’s apartment. She would crank up the space heater so she could sleep without bedding. No matter a blanket’s texture, she hated its roughness, its weight on her skin at night. It didn’t matter how cold it grew outside; we sweated at Beth’s.

  That Christmas break, as presents to one another, we went to the courthouse and stood in line with applications to change our names.

  Because like Madonna or Cher we would have no last names, we each decided to spell it differently. Belle called dibs on Ricky because it was her idea. She was weird and smart and always went a little too far. Claire pouted and then chose Rickey. She complained that she didn’t like how innocent it looked, but Claire looked like a serious sweet girl painted by a Dutch artist. It fit her. Beth said she thought she would be more hopeful with a name that ended in “i.” She helps troubled kids climb mountains now. I’d say Ricki worked for her. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, but Rickie seemed dull. I hoped Rici might look kind of cosmopolitan. Everyone asked me how to pronounce it.

  We filled out the paperwork, but they wouldn’t accept it or take our hundred dollars each until we put a notice in the newspaper for a week.

  “Like a paper newspaper?” we asked. We thought the news only existed online.

  The bemused clerk was irritating but helpful. “Yes. You know how when someone gets married the public gets to object? Same thing. You might be taking someone’s uncle’s name. All of you.” His eyebrows wriggled up and down with silent laughter.

  We turned away.

  We found newspapers in a box outside the courthouse that took only coins, which we borrowed from a woman standing at a bus stop. We touched the newspaper’s dry thin pages. Ink rubbed off on our hands. We said, “Do you remember?” But we didn’t finish, because the smell reminded us of our fathers and eating breakfast cereal in grade school and how mornings used to smell like Cheerios and ink and all of a sudden we wanted that. We wanted our fathers and Cheerios. But we weren’t going to get it, so we called to place a notice. We pictured rubber-banded pages tossed onto doorsteps in the freezing dark blue of morning.

  A few days later, in ten-point type on the last page of the local section, our notices, one each, were listed. Somewhere, people who still woke up at 7 a.m. read about us. We did not know anyone who woke up at 7 a.m. Not even people with 8 a.m. classes. We pictured ourselves as cowboys at dawn at the town’s breakfast table. We waited for gunslingers.

  But all that came was the mail. See here the notices, which my mother cut from the newspaper and placed in this envelope and mailed to my apartment with no note. None of the other mothers lived in town.

  Still, when no texts were sent, no flight itineraries emailed, two mothers called to ask when their daughters would be home for Christmas. They were sent to voice mail. Working on my senior thesis over break, Ricky texted. Ski trip with friends!! Barely a signal! wrote Ricki. The third mother did not call. She was on a cruise.

  And so legally we became the Rickies.

  We spent most of December and January in our apartments. We curled up on the radiators, drinking saucers of black coffee, looking out at the snow.

  Then it happened. In February of all months, Rickey and Ricki fell in love. With each other.

  “This is bullshit,” we (halved) said. “Love doesn’t exist.”

  “We believe love might exist. Especially if it’s between Rickies. Besides, you know we’ve always liked girls.” They laced fingers and called each other Ricky-baby.

  “That’s not your name,” we (halved) reminded them.

  That week they did not invite us to meet them for $2 hamburger night, but we saw them there anyway. It was awkward. They talked about old films we’d never heard of. A few weeks later they moved in together. And then, inevitably, they bought a kitten.

  They invited us over to meet the kitten. We made fun of the invitation but went anyway. Their apartment smelled of curry and clove cigarettes. Rickey heated up a pan in their coat closet of a kitchen. She swirled broth and tomatoes with chickpeas and potatoes.

  “Rici, will you toss me the garam masala?” She pointed to a shoebox of spices under their futon.

  Ricki sat on the floor smoking and waving a piece of yarn for the kitten. “We don’t eat meat anymore. You guys should definitely try it. Seriously, every time we eat chickpeas or roasted Brussels sprouts it’s like insta-Popeye. You feel so powerful.”

  We looked around. They had traded coffee for tins of green tea. We spied jogging shoes by the door. And there was the kitten.

  “You mean spinach,” we said.

  They looked at us blankly.

  “Popeye eats spinach.”

  “Oh, right. Well, he should have eaten kale. It’s a superfood.”

  We stared at the teensy cat asleep on Ricki’s lap, tired from batting its small pink paws at things. Its name was Mittens, if you can believe it. We couldn’t.

  Here is a teeny tiny shed claw from Mittens that I dug out of their rug and put in my jeans pocket. Is that weird? I liked running my finger against it to feel its little bite.

  “So, what will you do with the cat when you break up?” Ricky asked.

  We went weeks without seeing them.

  THAT SPRING, OUR last before graduation, we headed to class through a gauntlet of bodies. The quad was littered with girls in shorts and bikinis and boys tossing Frisbees. We stared straight ahead, sweating through our thrift-store sweaters. We saw Rickey and Ricki on a picnic blanket. We stood there while they discussed cheap flights to Morocco. Rickey mentioned a summer internship. They ate fresh fruit. Pear juice dribbled down their chins.

  We wanted so badly to feel the sun on our skin, to lick off the sweetness.

  Here is the pear sticker that Ricki playfully stuck to my cheek that I moved to my scratchy sweater, which I never wore again. In the box, all my clumpy sweaters from that time tangle together, a woolen nest to give rest to other ugly things.

  That night, the pear night, the two of us (the remaining Rickies) watched a movie about two girl lawyers who—surprise—fall in love. We sat shoulder to shoulder, the laptop askew as i
t balanced on our legs. Its warmth heated our thighs. We shimmied out of our jeans and crawled into bed. We wrapped our legs around each other and kissed. We kissed again. We swirled our tongues into each other’s mouth, hoping for some sweetness, like two halves of a McDonald’s soft-serve joining on a cone.

  Our grinding was effortful. As though we were taking some standardized test that we might pass if we could better darken the circles. We pushed our pencils down into the wood desk until the tips broke and the page tore through. We could not erase the summer. We just left streaks across a page.

  We did not fall in love, get cute haircuts, go somewhere sunny, or become girl lawyers in dashing pantsuits, defending the undefended and drinking lattes every day. This is not that story, though I wish it were. Because I do love Belle and now she has hair the color of a dead witch. Now she’s gone and not told anyone where.

  We did sleep. Oh, how we slept. We curled up in Belle’s twin bed like sisters scared of the dark. The last time I saw her we also slept like that.

  One night, during the last few weeks of college, we didn’t meet up. We had homework or something. We drank bourbon and Coke in our own bedrooms. It got late. I fell asleep but then woke hyper, buzzed, tingly. It was midnight. I didn’t text anyone. No reason. If I had given it any thought, I would have known then it was all ending, that our self-imposed solidarity was wearing thin.

  Do not be tempted to think of me in this moment as some butterfly breaking free. We were not and are not butterflies. Do not picture orange wings. There were no orange wings.

  You may imagine me as leaking caterpillar soup. You know, the point in a butterfly’s life cycle when a caterpillar has eaten itself alive, dissolved itself with its own digestive juices and is stew, an eyeball floating next to an antenna. A secret I did not tell my kindergartners when I still taught: some caterpillars stay soup.

  I do have some rocks from that night in the box.