PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Run across the street to an empty Fort Washington Park. The police will arrest you. Think about drowning in the Hudson River. Run downstairs to the freeway. Pause at the foot of the stairs. On the other side of the eight lanes of freeway is another park and after that is the Hudson River. Think before crossing. Feel the wind of the cars speeding by like they’re racing.

  Someone grabs your arm. Scream.

  “Give me money.”

  “I don’t got nothing.”

  The zombie puts you in a headlock and presses cold metal on your throat. He searches your pockets. “I’ll rip your heart out.”

  “I was born with a heart murmur.”

  Close your eyes. Pray to your stepfather. The zombie flies off you. Nino slams the zombie on the ground. He jumps on the zombie, chokes him with one hand and holds his jackknife with the other.

  “Don’t stab the zombie, Nino.”

  Nino looks at you. He looks at the zombie before letting him go.

  While on your way home Nino’s cell rings.

  “Yes, he was in the park,” he says. “His mother will call you.”

  Nino doesn’t ask why you punched Frankie.

  “Let’s make a deal, Mr. Rodriguez. If you don’t let Nilda leave to Spain I promise not to tell anyone about tonight. Deal?”

  “Okay, but tell me . . . is my stepfather in jail for selling drugs?”

  “Yeah, Raymond,” says Nino, and he pats your head. “I’m sorry.”

  Believe Nino. Your stepfather is in jail. You don’t want to snitch on Nilda but you’d rather be a snitch than hide something from Nino. So you tell him about Gregorio.

  “Mr. Rodriguez, you don’t gotta pretend you know Nilda’s friend. I won’t tell anyone about tonight regardless.”

  Don’t tell Nino anything else about Gregorio because it hurts his feelings. He doesn’t believe you because he doesn’t want to believe.

  The next morning Mary’s snoring wakes you in the bedroom. It’s Saturday but you don’t feel like watching cartoons. On one window the shade is halfway down so you see the dust the sun brings. On the other window the shade is fully drawn so there’s no dust. It’s better to keep the blinds down because the dust makes you sneeze.

  Mary’s cell phone vibrates on the floor.

  “Hello?”

  “Will you accept the collect call from Christian Ruiz?” asks a robotic voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Hello,” says a raspy voice.

  It sounds like your stepfather is crying. Stay shut. Listen.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” he says. “I didn’t want to—”

  “Nilda says men cry. You know Queeny is gone?”

  “I heard. Is Nilda that Children Services woman?”

  “Yeah. She helped Mary get a job but Mary got sick and lost it.”

  Your stepfather coughs. “If she’s sleeping give her a kiss.”

  Rub your nose against Mary’s and smell cigarettes. Love the smell. Remember how she used to laugh with a cigarette in her mouth, one eye squinting because of the smoke. Touch her lips. The dryness feels like torn plastic. Lick your mother’s lips.

  “Are you drawing?” he asks.

  “Yeah, tracing yours.”

  “You can’t trace my drawings or take the shortcut.”

  “Are you in jail for selling drugs?”

  He clears his throat. “Son, I told you I’m in school.”

  And even though Frankie, Nino, and the voice inside you all say that your stepfather is in jail, you decide to believe your stepfather.

  JP Infante is a teacher and writer who curates and hosts arts and culture events. He has taught creative writing at the City University of New York’s Lehman College and writing workshops throughout New York City. He holds an MFA in fiction from the New School. Through the “JP Infante in Conversation” series, he hosts talks with poets and writers. He is a contributing editor for Dominican Writers.

  His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Kweli Journal, The Poetry Project, Uptown Collective, Dominican Writers, POST(blank) magazine, The Manhattan Times, and other publications. His writing has won the Bernard L. Einbond Memorial Prize, the Aaron Hochberg Family Award, DTM magazine’s “Latino Identity in the U.S.” essay contest, and other awards.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  In Tamiko Beyer’s “Last Days 1,” literature and poetry become, for a few revolutionaries, “a system of belief, a way to navigate the dissolving world.” For the world, during these “last days of empire,” is indeed dissolving, into a mélange of “synthesized laughter” and “canned sounds” pushed by corporate omnipresence.

  With each read, we are taken by this story’s vision of the future and what it reflects of the present. This is more than an apocalypse story—it is composite and collage, a new way of storytelling that blurs all lines between poem and prose and essay. This is unnerving in the way genre-bending work should be. It reflects and refracts the end of the world.

  Yet there is love—real love, queer love—at the center, and it is the presence of this love that stands as a stark marker of resistance in the face of our modern future-present: drone-based surveillance, emptied libraries, vacated culture. Beyer connects us to these rebel poets, and she reminds us that there was once a world where literature and love flourished. She reminds us that we can make that world again.

  Chase Burke, Fiction Editor

  Cat Ingrid Leeches, Editor

  Black Warrior Review

  LAST DAYS 1

  Tamiko Beyer

  “Safe is an interpretation”

  —Kate Greenstreet, Young Tambling

  WE DIDN’T EXPECT the eagerness that filled us on the last days of empire. For what, we couldn’t exactly say.

  Metal glistened on the streets in the hot September days. The sun no longer a dandelion; the sun most definitely a muzzle. When it set, the Corporation—keen to kill the dark—flipped the switch.

  Then, the marble facades of buildings were suddenly up-lit, street-lights swirled incandescent, and thousands of people hurtled through the furnace of synthesized laughter, pop songs, and an unlimited desire for all.

  Some of us were on the edges, blocking out the canned sounds and lights as best we could. Building something new, something old. We could feel the northern half of our planet begin to tilt away from the sun.

  I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast.

  It was an experience and then it was a memory. And then a system of belief, a way to navigate the dissolving world.

  I wanted to become more salt-wind, less reflection. To become quiet enough to hear the ancestors.

  ANCESTORCHORUS

  Find the source at the underwater

  roots, at the mudline:

  fragile strands of a new language

  among cattails and seed casings.

  Trust the fibers

  will lean in the right direction,

  will not mislead you.

  Child, we have always laid

  one strand over, then under the next,

  over and under, over and under—

  until something like true

  meaning emerges from the twist

  of our fingers. This basket

  is for you: an exhortation, a map.

  Soon you will need to reach

  all of us in this river of time

  with the truest sentences

  you can weave.

  There were five of us in that small apartment, hauling water, coding and decoding, soldering metal, constructing strategies, drafting poems. I lifted heavy objects and learned to stitch up an open wound.

  I no longer thought of myself as a girl. I was often afraid. At the same time, I glistened in the everyday fever brought on by Wave’s eyes opening, the morning sky breaking.

  When we met, Wave said holding on was dangerous. The taste of hope could make us reckless. I knew what she meant, but despite ourselves, I came to love how she tasted more than I loved any fruit o
n my tongue.

  ANCESTORCHORUS

  Light breaks the glass

  separating you

  from the present.

  The dangerous words

  chime in the wind, spike

  into sand and grass.

  Behold the other kind of blade:

  power of seed

  turned blossom, turned fruit.

  In the afternoons we would cross the river on the train, skimming ancient tracks into the center of the city where things were bought and sold on a grand scale. We slid into the gaps of commerce, knowing all warfare is based on deception.

  So many people were building scaffolding against crumbling structures, using incantations from their fathers as mortar.

  But some attempted to excavate the signals buried deep within their bodies; some tried to listen to their heartbeats.

  Those were the ones we were looking for. We slipped them a scrap of paper, then dissolved back into the crowd.

  ANCESTORCHORUS

  Words can obscure like clouds

  or reveal like the tidal pull.

  Do you remember rain?

  The state of emergency is also always

  the state of emergence. Where does the water go

  when ocean draws out its lowest tide?

  When the new recruits followed the poem to find us, we put them to work or gave them maps to others in need of their skills. We were hundreds of loose groups across the country, fashioning transformation out of starlight and strategy, spindrift and solidarity.

  I was impatient for the waking, the sharp sensation of light and promise. I thought I understood.

  But there was still so much to learn. Wave reminded me of the libraries they had shut down decades ago, their floors like silk, books heavy with promise. That’s where we went: picking the locks, scraping away the dust, memorizing what we could.

  Power grids, water-sewer lines, and fiber optic cables snaked their way across the city. We became deft in mapping and coordinates, diversion and distraction. We discovered the patterns the Corporation relied on, found the back doors, planted the traps with care.

  Creating new economies in the heart of capital required cunning and poetic imagination. We knew we were being watched when the NICE drones paused above our fire escape.

  But cooking and dancing were not yet crimes. We could plan just as well stirring the pot in three-four time as in stillness around the kitchen table.

  The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. We hummed and we sang. We simmered soup and kneaded flour and water. We mapped out the next tactics.

  Notes

  “I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast.”

  —Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light”

  “All warfare is based on deception.”

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  “. . . the state of emergency is also always the state of emergence.”

  —Homi Bhabha, 1986 foreword to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

  “The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.”

  —Claudia Rankine, Citizen

  Tamiko Beyer is the author of Last Days, forthcoming in 2021; We Come Elemental; and two chapbooks of poems. Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Hyphen, Dusie, and elsewhere. She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, among others. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power. She lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and online at tamikobeyer.com.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  We selected “Good Hope” by Enyeribe Ibegwam for publication in the Spring/Summer 2018 issue of Auburn Avenue because of its enthralling portrayal of Nigerian Americans navigating life in the United States. It fit perfectly within our issue’s theme, “The American Story, A.D. 2018,” and gave attention to the complex—and often misunderstood—immigrant experience.

  In the story, a nephew confronts and takes stock of his estranged uncle’s life. These characters’ lives are split and reconvened and woven together in a way that shows each of their disappointments and, at the same time, their shared joys. Ibegwam questions where home is and the beauty and tragedies that live there. The narrative holds up a mirror to its characters, and its readers, and asks them describe all that they see.

  Chuck Huru, Editor in Chief

  Matthew B. Kelley, Fiction Editor, Spring/Summer 2018

  Auburn Avenue

  GOOD HOPE

  Enyeribe Ibegwam

  1.

  “What are we eating tonight?” JV asked, scratching his bearded chin. “You know I came to stay.”

  He was talking to my big sister, Uzumma. He was our mother’s older brother, our uncle, although we called him JV. There was never a time he wanted to be called Uncle—none of that respect-for-elder procedure with him.

  “My boy,” he would say to me, “does Uncle put any money in my bank account?”

  When I say I only knew that the J in his initials was for Joachim, nothing about the V, people flinch at me as though I have no front teeth. “Call me JV,” he said, his voice honed by years of smoking Benson & Hedges. There must have been a time when he was called by his name, and not by initials.

  Back then, all I wanted to do was assure him that there was nothing wrong with living like a teenager. What was wrong about living in my parents’ house, with no job or personal responsibility? I never wanted him to feel shame for himself, even though I was ashamed.

  “Sure, this is our house, you can eat whatever you like,” Uzumma answered him. I just wish she had hidden the sarcasm in her voice. I saw it as her eyes lit up. Covering her mouth with her right palm, she controlled her giggles at his retreating back. He turned, tossed M&Ms at me, and said I could give Uzumma some, if I felt like it.

  It didn’t take much to entice Uzumma and me in those days. Painted sepulcher, as my father used to refer to things he had no interest in. And if there was something JV had mastered, it was lavishing us with treats. Chocolate bars, wafers, cone ice cream, éclairs, colored popcorns, meat pies, and scotch eggs.

  JV CAME TO live with us the Easter Sunday of my seventh birthday; it would be four years later that I started having hair on my armpits. Not thick black hair, but hair anyway. From my earliest memory of him moving into our house, my father never seemed interested in him. My father and JV merely tolerated each other, or really they never liked each other. Back in the days, before my parents got married, JV had said my father was no good for my mother.

  Years earlier my father had used lyrics from Rex Lawson’s “Love Mu Adure” to serenade my mother. When all he had was his engineering degree, which fetched him a job teaching mathematics at the community secondary school in Emekuku while my mother was running her housemanship at the Federal Medical Center in Owerri. All that was a long time ago, maybe three years before Uzumma, who is two years older than me, was born. If family ground-talks are something to go by, JV was just looking out so his sister—my mother—wouldn’t marry a low-life engineer. But family hearsay also insisted JV had no means of livelihood after graduating from university years before his medical doctor sister, and that he still squeezed money from her. But this is about JV and me, not about JV and them.

  IN THOSE YEARS when he still lived with us, he idled at home all day and stepped out in the evenings when my parents returned from work, so he could play draught, drink beer, and eat peppered snails with the allowance my mother gave him every week.

  “Of what use is a rich in-law?” he always asked his drinking buddies in his tipsy state that made his voice rumble. It was in one of his rumbling-voiced moments one night that he announced to my parents that he wanted to go to America. It must have been a Friday, because Uzumma and I were still up watching reruns of The Jeffersons, those episodes that our parents considered age-appropriate for us. He wanted to study at the University of Mississippi, he
said. A friend of his already studying there had been sending him pictures and catalogues.

  My mother rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “But come to think of it, is it reasonable to school in the American South?” my father said, to no one in particular.

  “Ole Miss is the Harvard of the American South,” JV said. It sounded like something he had memorized with great care. In my life, I cannot remember a day that JV kept a job, and there he was, looking my parents in the face, between alcohol belches, insisting he wanted them to fund his American dream.

  Many years later, I would have a chilling recollection of my mother’s face that Friday night as JV addressed her and my father in the dining area of my parents’ house in Aladinma Estate. The way my mother pursed her lips, how her eyes became solid beads as she nodded yes in agreement with JV. A lie so good that JV believed it, even though I saw it for what it was. My father was, and still is, a man of few words; he didn’t say much that night, beyond small suggestions. He looked at my mother through the top gaze of his reading glasses as though it were she he was speaking to. For some childish reason, Uzumma and I pretended we couldn’t hear what they were discussing, even though in years to come we had our annoying cousin, Dominic, play the role of JV as we reenacted that scene until we were so good we could have won acting awards for our performances.

  JV stopped speaking to both my parents and lived as though he were a tenant in our house. So my father agreed to sponsor his brother-in-law. I learned about this when I listened in on my father telling my mother that all JV was doing was guilt-treating her. Need I tell you that JV traveled that year? To America, not England, where my father had suggested was better for him. My father, already a senior engineer with Shell Exploration Company, put his joined fingers to his lips and coughed out $7,500 for JV’s entire tuition and upkeep, which back in ’81 was little competition to the naira. I remember the night he left.