PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

Popcorn Sam came into the hutong and sang about his fluffy sweet popcorns. Soon a growing crowd of kids surrounded him. I couldn’t resist running up to join them, reaching out my dirty hands for a share. When the old maid howled again, my hands had become too full and my legs too stiff to turn back.

  MOM WAS TALKING to Char when I finally made it home.

  “I thought she was still an old maid. You know, untouched,” Mom said, her hands busy scrubbing a pot. “Where is she hiding these men? I don’t buy it.” She clucked her tongue.

  “Why not? She’s got those soul-sucking eyes men leave their wives for.” Char tapped on her cigarette and puffed out a line of smoke that sliced into the sky.

  Mom shook her head hard. “No. Not Andy. No way. Listen, the retard’s pretty but useless. Can’t tell the yins from the yangs on a good day. She’s practically old now. Andy’s too high-minded.”

  “Better be.” Char coughed a bitter laugh. “Or I’d break both their legs! I don’t care if she is a witch or a snake monster or the Skeleton Ghost!”

  Mom reiterated that the old maid was not worthy of worry. Then she turned inside with a stack of dishes. I paused near the door, unsure whether to back away or move forward. Char was quiet a second, turning on me next. “Where did you come from?” she said. “Were you hiding this whole time?”

  “No,” I said, irritated. “Are you talking about the old maid? And what does that have to do with Andy?”

  Her face changed from pink to ashen. She grounded the cigarette butts littered around her feet until they made hissing noises. She slapped me hard. “Look at you,” she said, “starting school soon and still hanging around that slutty old shoe!”

  I snapped, “Is she older than you? I bet she runs faster than you barefoot. Are you jealous?” By then, I’d forgotten that Mom was close.

  “Shut up!” Mom’s voice shook me. I turned to see she was trembling and staring me down. “Go wash up.”

  I started to tell her about the old maid and the boys and Popcorn Sam and how his machine had exploded and threw up soot. But she shoved me inside before I could say another word.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Shut up, oh, Pusa, shut up!”

  The moon was cold that night. Dad was coughing an awful cough when Mom finally came in to wash his feet, make tea. I peered out the window by my bed. One of the street lamps was out, so the rest struggled, hissing in the dark. A small mob of moths flew around the halos of the surviving bulbs, making an occasional dull clink. The old maid’s window was an even shade of black.

  I sank into my bed and listened to Mom and Dad peck at each other with words I didn’t understand. My head throbbed. I tugged and pulled on the rubber band clutching my hair to loosen it.

  After a while, Mom appeared by the side of my bed. “Want a hand?”

  I nodded and sat up. She hadn’t done this for days; it felt like ages.

  After she detangled my hair, she combed it from root to tip. I took a deep breath and leaned into her hands. Her warmth seeped into my scalp, making me sleepy.

  “What’s that?” She pointed to my window. The panes were coated in layers of dust and mud splatter from winter snow and summer thunderstorms. But I had cleaned a small circle in the center, so moonlight was pouring through it.

  “My secret portal. Everyone in the world passes through it,” I whispered, my eyes half-closed as she rubbed my scalp. When she pulled forward to look, she forgot to let go of my hair.

  “Ouch!” My eyes snapped open.

  Mom was staring out at the street below, and the old maid’s window. Perhaps another lover had returned. I didn’t know. But Mom’s face was far away and then really close. She told me to lie down, shut my eyes. Her voice a whisper but firm, tangled into my sleep. I dreamed she hovered there all night, her shadows keeping the moon from frosting my eyes.

  FOR THE REST of the summer, Mom locked me in the house.

  The house grew darker earlier as summer receded into fall. On one evening, I dipped a hand in the calligraphy ink tray and stamped the pages of Chairman Mao’s Poems with spiraling impressions of my fingers. Each was a twisted vortex. I was on the verge of finger painting the walls when Mom came home.

  The next day, she put away the padlock. School was starting. I was told to march straight from home to school and back again with an assigned walking group.

  THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF me running away that fall have faded over the years. But I know it started with a note my teacher wrote. She had sent me home with it out of the blue, a few weeks into the semester. On the way home, I snuck out of the walking group and hid behind the outhouse wall. When the other kids called, I told them to go ahead.

  Under the pagoda tree, I unfolded the note. It said that I’d never turned in my homework and that I got zero points on my quizzes. If things didn’t change, I might not graduate first grade.

  I read it again. The teacher’s signature stared like menacing eyes.

  “What’s that?” The old maid plopped down next to me. I was happy to see her, but the letter weighed in my hands.

  “It’s school,” I said, giving her a half wave, the paper flinging and making a tearing sound in the air. I hoped she would tear it and toss it over the roof.

  But she patted it flat and licked around its corners before settling down and reading the note, her head jerking back and forth. Her words sounded slow and a little blurry. “Is this for your dad?”

  “The teacher said I should get his signature.”

  “Will he get mad?” she asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Parents are mean,” she said slowly, petting the paper, as if it were a hand, my hand. And somehow I felt better.

  We sat awhile. When the sun began to breathe down our necks, she snapped off willow branches and made whistles out of leaves. We tried to make a song. Hers sounded good but I got a headache from trying. When she laughed at the way I puckered my lips, I laughed too.

  The old maid braided two willow branches together and it started to look like a wreath. “You want to come live at my house?”

  I wanted to say yes. But then she had a look.

  “No,” she said, changing her mind. “My lover will kick you. Plus, my mom’s here now. That witch is a pain.” She picked at a scar on her lips. It looked like a blister. “She only makes me want to run again,” she said. I hadn’t known that about her. Maybe some of the rumors were true. I tried to picture her running away, living in that magic cave, eating those mushrooms. “You should run too,” she said, “have an adventure!” She darted in circles around the tree. The paper fluttered in her hand like a dove trying to get free. I pictured myself as that bird, flying south, where it was always summer.

  I’d read about ancient heroes running away from their lives in the old books. But I’d never thought I knew anyone who’d done it. “Maybe I could take a bus!” I said, excited. “Then I won’t get too tired from running.” It would be my first bus ride, too, I neglected to say.

  “You’re right!” She flapped over to me and pulled me to a run. We turned from the hutong onto Peaceful Underworld Avenue. From there, the number 24 bus stop was only a block away.

  The bus was crowded. The old maid had to jam a shoulder against my back to push me through the crowd. No room for me to turn around and wave goodbye to her, but I figured she’d already left. The crowd smelled like fatigue, and they didn’t care who was getting squished. After a few stops, I found an open seat. The window was cracked and it was still bright out. An army of bicycles rang their bells; some of the riders put a hand on the side of the bus while they waited. The crowd had thinned on and off the bus as the sky changed its colors. Pink, purple, dark blue, gray. The Drum Tower looked big and forbidden for a second, then orange and gold, becoming a paper cutout in the end.

  The bus trudged forward, pushing away thick bubbles of night air. I looked down and realized the letter was back in my pocket. I didn’t feel like reading it again. Besides, the driver had turned off the inside lights. I closed
my eyes.

  “What’s your name, little girl?” The driver looked at me through his rearview mirror.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He looked kind, with curved lines around his eyes, but scary too. I remembered then that the teacher had said shut up was not my real name. But I couldn’t remember the name she said after that. So I curled into a corner of my seat and hid my face behind my hands. The driver didn’t ask me anything else, but drove me to the main bus station at the end of his route.

  There, an old lady smiled at me in the street. I told her all about the old maid and about where I lived with my parents. The lady nodded and wrote in a notepad the whole time. Then she took me home on her bicycle.

  THE POPSICLE LADY told me later that they took the old maid to an asylum for good. But I didn’t believe it at first. Was it because of me? The question churned in my head. In the days that followed, a man came and sealed her door with red strips of paper, as if her house was the site of something bad, a murder, or an anti-revolutionary coup. There were whispers. It was bound to happen.

  Char told me, “She’s probably dead now in one of those places, so,” winking, “forget about it.”

  I ran. And I stopped looking through my little portal. Mud soon reclaimed it. One day, I noticed my circle had re-blended with the rest of the glass. Not even my own fingers could trace a faint outline around it.

  DAD FOUND THE teacher’s note in my pocket the night I returned. After that, he changed his schedule so he could watch me do my homework and occasionally help Mom with dinner.

  One night, Dad told me Opium Andy and Char were getting divorced. And Char was moving back to Mongolia. My parents had stopped calling me shut up then. I would never learn to read Mom’s thoughts the way I could read the old maid’s, and Mom never talked to me the way she talked with Char. Still, when she came to comb my hair, I sat close, and ran my fingers through hers after she was done. She sat quietly while I brushed, and for those few minutes I felt a strange, animal sound rattling inside her, a cry she had stuffed down for so long it’d gotten lost, couldn’t find its way out. I kept brushing, but she must have sensed a pause in me, which made her say, “You are all grown up. Old enough to brush your own hair from now on.”

  Then she was gone.

  In a few years, the city would eradicate harmful insects, including the cicadas. The old neighborhood would look immaculate, like a street maiden being forced to put on a new dress, her hair combed and stuffed in a bun so she looked garish and pretty, different. No leaves, broken wings, or smears of green blood remained on freshly swept streets. The old pagoda trees had been uprooted, replaced with neat rows of willows, planted at equal distances, like soldiers marching in parades. The district around the hutong, in fact, was left in an eerie quiet, its last scream exorcised from a tidy, balled-up body. I strolled among the hutongs, alone, listening and waiting for a familiar pair of eyes to emerge, thoughts unread, waiting to climb onto a shrine, under blue-white streaks of this new moon’s hair.

  Pingmei Lan grew up in Beijing, China. She received her MFA in creative writing from Pacific University in 2018. Her work appears in Epiphany, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She lives in San Diego.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  To try and slow the joyously unending flood of stories that come in for consideration at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, we ask that all submissions come in on paper. This way my coeditor, Kelly Link, and I can keep up. I carry canvas bags of stories home and we read each story in the interstices of publishing and home life. From those sacks and stacks, only a few stories will fit our tastes—which is why for writers it is so useful to read a range of magazines to find where to send their stories. Many of those stories will find other editors who are looking for different stories.

  A. B. Young’s “Vain Beasts” stood out immediately. When I open those envelopes, discard the cover letter so that I can approximate the reader’s reading experience, and read, I am always hoping for a story such as this, where the writer takes the threads of story and weaves something new. Here is a writer who knows the rules of fairy tales, who plays with time and structure and familiar characters and ideas and makes something unique; who approaches the mysterious yet never leaves the reader ungrounded. This story, with its circles and repetitions, is a rich deep dive into the choices people make in their lives, and the costs and burdens borne by ourselves and others.

  Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, Publishers

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  VAIN BEASTS

  A. B. Young

  The unheard-breach of faith not

  Feigned feeling to fill other vacancies

  —Gloria Frym, Mind Over Matter

  DORIAN GRAY FORGETS to pray most nights, listening instead to the cat caw on the back porch; listening with the cat for the crows to caw back. Wind whispers to the tired plaster walls, and sweat drips from the roof to the carpet of browning roses.

  DORIAN GRAY CROSSES the village square on shoes that click as they lift from the cobblestones. The seamstress and her beau, with fingers curled around the edges of each other’s pockets, pause to watch him pass but don’t notice that the footsteps sound out of time. They look, instead, at the mask he wears beneath his hooded cloak. It is the taxidermied face of a fog-white wolf, fangs bared, eye cavities excavated. He walks with long, sure strides in the fading light.

  He speaks to no one, but does turn to look at those who stop to watch him. The wolf mask sits slightly crooked on his face, and the long snout tilts, as if the wolf’s head is cocked. Murk glares out from where eyes should be.

  When he reaches the edge of the woods, he follows a hard, worn path through the trees and to the grove of the moon goddess. An altar sits beside a shallow pool, and on it black roses float in a bowl of water.

  He stops walking at the edge of the pool. The sound of his clacking footsteps continues for several seconds after.

  He waits, silent, still. He waits for six minutes.

  “Your vanity makes you patient,” a woman’s voice says from behind him. He starts just slightly, his intestines pressing up and out against his ribs. Then he feels a palm pressed flat on his back before the fingers curl to grope his cloak. “And you smell of blue salts. Of neem,” the voice continues, moving closer to his ear, carried on warm breath. “How odd you are, Dorian Gray.”

  “You smell of cinnamon and coal,” he replies, because she does. He stays very still.

  The hand moves, cloak still clutched in fingers, across his side. Around to his front. She splays her palm across his belly. His shirt is thin linen, but he can feel no warmth at all from her skin.

  “You have a request for me, Dorian Gray. Speak it.”

  There is a moment of quiet and her order lingers. Something smells vaguely of burning.

  “Beauty,” he whispers, and her hand presses more firmly into his gut.

  “Tell me, Dorian Gray,” she says, and her voice is scattered flour, settling into crevices. “Are you afraid of wolves?”

  “No,” he replies.

  She says, “One day you will be.”

  CALLUSES CAPTURE SPLINTERS as the woodcutter handles his kindling. His hands are deft, like pliable bark; firm, but flaking. The blanket of felt is spread on the dirt and the leaves, and it’s green in the light of his lamp, black in the light of the moon. He bends at the waist, gathers firewood to his chest, and turns to place it on the blanket. He grunts with the effort of straightening. He rolls his neck. The sweat slinks down, and the pain in his strained muscles scrapes up.

  It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She opens her arms, opens. She says, You are tired, let me hold your axe. Her voice is melting snowflakes on the tips of his ears. The woodcutter wears boots lined with deerskin and a coat of stiff green linen, his beard perfectly trimmed to the shape of his chin. He opens the blanket and lets the cut wood shatter on the dirt. The blanket falls to the ground like a dead leaf.

>   She opens her arms, clothed by moonlight and not clothed at all.

  Their bodies fill to the threshold with splinters.

  THE FIRST NIGHT he is missing, the woodcutter’s wife lets her stew solidify to slush. The table smells of roses, pine, and cinnamon. She sits, back pressed straight, with the two wooden bowls, the two copper spoons, the firelight joyous and dying. Her deerskin shawl mutters to her cheek. The base of her back whimpers.

  His wife waits for him for a decade. When she marries again, her dress is cumbersome and cream.

  THERE ARE MANY nights that the woodcutter does not meet the fairy. There are also many nights that he does, and never returns.

  Only one night does he get lost on his way home.

  The full moon drapes its light over Dorian Gray’s shutters, crawling like a rejected lover across his pine dining table, across his face. His cheekbones are set low, jutting against skin covered in crusted craters. His wolf mask hangs by the front door, and his metal-heeled shoes sit atop the stove. His cloak is on the floor beside his bed. He sits slumped in a hard wooden chair beside the table. He holds a small mirror in his pale hands, and watches, waiting. He sits very still. Then he hears a tapping at his door.

  THE FRIAR COUNTS the witches who’ve been sacrificed to the devil. The devil counts his teeth.

  There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and at first he thinks it is the branch of a tree. He sits in his favorite chair, the one that closes around him like lips. He has lived here for years, in a house beside the grove at the base of the stream. There he built an altar, protected by a waystone. He tends to the altar nightly, leaving black roses for the moon.

  JULIET IS PICKING flowers in a field when her father comes home. She picks only the white ones, breaking the stems close to the dirt. She intends to take them home and weave crowns for her sisters. The crowns will die tomorrow and the three girls will sigh in sadness, their breath blowing like a gale over shriveled petals. But Juliet does not think of that now, singing to the deerskin shawl that razes her cheeks.