PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Her father calls to her from the barn.

  Her bare feet murmur to the soft spring soil as she lifts her dirtsmeared skirt and races the breeze. Her father stands at the door, tall as a cliff-face, axe over his left shoulder.

  He says, “Come, Juliet. I have brought you a gift from my travels.”

  She asks, “Have you brought me a rose?”

  It is all she had asked for.

  He replies, “Yes, my beauty,” and produces a black rose to add to her armful of daisies.

  ON THE NIGHT he gets lost the woodcutter is caught unprepared by the speed of nightfall. He realizes he has gone too far in the wrong direction, but he can’t remember the way he came.

  He wanders until he comes to the cottage of Dorian Gray. Except, this night, the cottage is a castle. The stone towers cast shadows for a mile, thin and straight, like pine trees stripped of their branches.

  When the woodcutter comes to the gate he places a hand on the rusted metal, and the grimy cold of it bites into his palm. The cobblestone path is covered in dirt, gray moss sprouting between its cracks. The high hedges bordering the path, however, are pristine, rustling in the breeze. Moon-white flowers bloom among the dark green.

  The woodcutter follows the path, ignoring the prickling at the back of his neck, ignoring how the chill in his palm creeps up his forearm. He hears the crunch of the dirt under his feet. His footsteps echo strangely, and it’s as if he can feel them in his jaw, out of time.

  “Hello?” the woodcutter calls, but the word is instantly gobbled up by the wind.

  He notices the stone gargoyles peering down from the tower roofs. They mark his procession through the garden, and the woodcutter imagines that if he could get closer to their faces he would see the eyes were only excavated cavities, and their snouts were howling like wolves.

  The woodcutter sees the wall of a tower where roses climb. The roses are black, their velvet petals shimmering in the moonlight. They nestle among thorns that are long and curved like fingernails. He moves toward the wall, drawn to it. Enchanted. He reaches out a hand and presses it to a rose. He presses until he feels the thorns digging into his skin. He presses until they break his skin, until the rose petals are crushed and smeared with blood in his palm. The cold crawls farther up his arm, nearing his shoulder.

  He withdraws, thorns embedded in his skin.

  A voice behind him demands, “What have you done?”

  BLACK ROSES SHRIVEL with brown, drift on brown water, ensnared in brown bowl.

  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 warmest chair, the one that closes around him like a curling tongue. His knees shudder as he clambers to his feet. In a nightgown of felt, he shuffles and creaks to the door.

  He grasps the oyster-shell knob; its edges nibble his palm. He opens the door and the leaves of the trees applaud. The smiling flames in the hearth make the room glow gold, and when he opens the door, her hands look copper.

  THE WOODCUTTER’S BLANKET is made of felt and the leaves and twigs come closer to feel the static, then stay. He wraps his firewood, and the bundle could contain an adolescent girl, all uneven limbs. He clutches it to his chest.

  It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She wears a deerskin shawl. Her silver hair floats on the heavy air, and she says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.

  But he’s left his axe among the tree stumps.

  DORIAN GRAY HAS roses on his dining table. His cottage smells of cinnamon and pine. He was beautiful once; he remembers this. He looks into a shard of glass and sees pale hair, thin eyelids, mouth plucked at the edges of naivety.

  His wife sings outside, by the window, voice tumbling in with the sunlight as she tends to the roses. She sings to the sun of the moon’s envy.

  The cottage is all brown and gray. Wooden rushes on the floor, ashes in the hearth. Dorian Gray sits at his dining room table and listens to his wife sing and the cat mumble to itself on the windowsill. The moments pass like cricket croaks and finally he shouts, “Oh, fair sun!”

  Juliet stops singing.

  ON THE NIGHT the woodcutter meets Dorian Gray, he meets not a man, but a wolf. A voice says, “What have you done?”

  In fright, the woodcutter presses the thorn of the rose farther into his finger. He turns to see the fog-white wolf, eyes scarred and black. “I’m lost,” he replies, his voice small and glassy.

  “Do all lost men steal other men’s flowers?” asks the wolf.

  The woodcutter stutters. “You are not a man.”

  The wolf cocks his head and barks a laugh. His breath smells of blue salts and neem. He says, “Tell me, woodcutter, are you afraid of wolves?”

  THE WOODCUTTER IS indeed afraid of wolves. He tells the fairy this, as he watches her chop firewood. She places a log on the stump then nudges it to the center with her mud-covered foot. Her temporal thigh pulls downwards, pulsing away from her bones in waves. The woodcutter says, “The wolves will come if we don’t leave soon. Oughtn’t you go home?” He brushes his nails against his bollocks, looking around for his linen jacket.

  The fairy says nothing, removing her foot from the stump. She raises the axe, both hands tight at the edge of the handle, and she flings it back over her head so her whole body must follow its procession. She balances on her toes, her body the waning crescent moon.

  In the distance, a crow caws, and a wolf whimpers back. The pressure of the axe blade splits the log and it crackles.

  THE GROVE BESIDE the friar’s house shudders like dragonfly wings. The waystone flicks shadows over the base of the stream, wind fingering the water until it shimmers.

  There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and this time he thinks it is the devil come for kindling.

  DORIAN GRAY LOOKS up at the moon through the dark green leaves. He savors the scream in the base of his back and how it scrambles, all splintering nails, up, hollowing the muscles either side of his spine, to clench his shoulders. He feels the muscles pulled taut as bones try to escape his skin, pushing like the foot of a baby against the walls of his mother’s womb. He is warmed by the fur that breaks through his skin like goosepimples. The cracking of bones is drowned out by pants and howls. He listens, hoping to hear the caws of crows.

  THE FAIRY TELLS Dorian Gray, I will trade you the greatest of pleasures for your beauty. He licks his lips. His eyes follow the fall of her black hair, hung heavy to touch the moss and tickle her ankles. He asks, “Are you afraid of wolves?”

  Her lips turn up into the waxing crescent moon.

  JULIET PULLS THE deerskin shawl tighter. Her breath, mist before her face, clears away to reveal looming towers and murky turrets that were not there moments before.

  “Tell me, Juliet,” says her father, “are you afraid of wolves?”

  HER BACK GOES cold like there’s water seeping up, under her skin. Dorian Gray is very close behind her. If he were to put a hand on her, the heat would sear through her dress. His chin mists along her neck, and with lips at her ear, he says, “Juliet, you are beauty.” She swallows and the saliva won’t pass the stone she feels in her throat. It bubbles back up and she gags. His hand hits her flat in the center of her back. Her diaphragm seizes, her shoulders shudder forward, and the burp races up, spherical slime, through her chest and carries drool out and down her chin.

  Dorian Gray’s laugh is like a bark, and it reverberates in her chest.

  THE WOLF TELLS the woodcutter, “In exchange for stealing my rose, you will bring me your most beautiful possession.”

  The woodcutter trembles. He wishes he had not left his axe back among the tree stumps. He could split the wolf into equal halves, had he enough force behind his swing.

  The wolf says, “My vanity makes me patient, woodcutter. I have waited many years for beauty.”

  The woodcutter lies through his sharp teeth. “I have no beautiful possessions. I am a poor woodcutter.”

  “What?” says the wolf. “No w
ife? No daughter?”

  THE FIRST TIME Dorian Gray asks Juliet to marry him, she looks at his cratered skin, firm but flaking, and she says no. The next day when he proposes again, he wears his wolf mask, and watches her through the excavated eyes as she rejects him again.

  On the twentieth day, he pushes her up against his cottage wall, an arm crushed to her throat, and she spits her “no,” saliva filled with brown-blood hate, into his face.

  Between the fortieth and sixtieth proposal, Dorian Gray falls in love. He cooks for Juliet, venison and goat-milk cheesecakes and stews that fill her with temporal heat. He presses rose-petal kisses to her hands, warm fingers into her palm.

  On the seventy-third day, Juliet says yes.

  Her beauty becomes his.

  THE FIRST TIME he comes home with blood on his lips, Juliet seeks a reasonable explanation. She whispers to the cat that he would never hurt them. After all, he loves her.

  THE FRIAR SAYS, “Juliet, I thought you were the moon goddess come to collect my soul.” Then he sees the blood on her hands. He sees it smeared across her pale lips. She breathes through her mouth; her warm breath grazes his cheek and smells of cinnamon and burning. There is a tingling beneath his scalp. He says, “My dear, what has happened?”

  She says, “I killed the woodcutter. He was a wolf all along.”

  The friar barks a laugh, and splutters hot spittle onto her cheek.

  ON THE NIGHT of her second wedding, the woodcutter’s wife goes into the woods. She wears a deerskin shawl over her wedding dress, which is not white. She chops wood for hours, feeling sweat chill against her skin.

  It is this night that she meets the fairy.

  She is naked as the moon, a slender sliver. Her hair floats on the humid air. She says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.

  Juliet is indeed tired, she is not often up so late. She holds the axe out, head down, and watches as the translucent fingers of the fairy grasp it. She notices rough divots in the skin, like craters. The silver blade glints in the moonlight as the fairy lifts it over her head. She swings it forward to meet with Juliet’s white rose crown. The axe splinters bones, slow with shyness, as flesh and golden hair quiver away from the blade. Black guts splatter fairy feet. Juliet tumbles to both sides as separate halves.

  DORIAN GRAY LIES in bed and ponders the fickleness of women. The strangled screech of a crow that cawed back to the cat seeps in with the wind through the sweltering walls. The cat’s tail quivers.

  A. B. Young learned to tell stories from playing with Barbies. She learned to tell stories well at California College of the Arts. She now teaches kids how to read stories and write essays about them as a high school media and English teacher.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  When Erin Singer’s manuscript arrived out of the blue at our office, we were floored by the originality of her voice. The complicated but always moving family portrait that emerges against its backdrop of hardscrabble life in Saskatchewan offers unexpected insights into a life seldom depicted in prose. Singer shows familial love manifesting itself in hauntingly different ways, and she manages to capture the all-too-common struggles and affections of a fractured household in a unique setting, while subverting conventional expectations of female narratives. With memorable nuance and diamond-sharp wit, “Bad Northern Women” reads like the work of a seasoned writer, one possessed of vivid wisdom beyond her years.

  Bradford Morrow, Editor

  Conjunctions

  BAD NORTHERN WOMEN

  Erin Singer

  WE ARE TOCKERS, descendants of thirty-six feet of long lean Saskatchewan woman: six Tocker sisters, six foot tall, exemplary ax-women all, so says our mom. At the kitchen table this morning we are mixing our Nesquik and Mom is quoting from Taking Our Time: A History of Tockers. As she cites each Tocker triumph she stabs the book with her file, showering its curling cover with fingernail dust. Tocker Trucking! Compass Sawmill! TT’s Laundromat! Stab! Stab! Stab! Mom plants the file in an old baby corn can crammed with white pencil crayons and shards of rulers and driedout pens. She rubs her eyes until mascara moons arise underneath. Our spoons clack inside our plastic cups.

  What was I saying? She sighs. Point being, summer’s coming and no Tocker ever chopped a tree indoors. Get outside and play! Tocker girls brown up good. Just godsakes don’t get a farmer tan.

  That right there’s offensive to farmers, Dad says behind his cigarette smoke.

  I’m going down for a nap, says Mom. She puts her Kool-Aid glass in the sink.

  Dad lifts his chin to the nip marks on our legs.

  What’s this? He bends, grabs our pup by the snout for a one-on-one: You’re supposed to scare them feral beasts off.

  Mom says, If these girls can’t handle a couple of strays, how will they learn to handle a man?

  Dad’s not worried about that. Because! he says. Because I got a feeling this one’s going to shape up to be a good guard dog.

  Mom snorts, says, I like my animals wild and in my tummy.

  The dog is a freebie from Swap ’N’ Shop. He’s a weird-looking guy, kind of a fluffy coyote. Dad claims his name is Chopper but we’re not convinced.

  Don’t fail me now, he warns the pup. Can’t watch my girls every minute. More like any minute. Dad spends his days under the Chev Suburban he’s liberating from our driveway. He’s getting itchy. Threatening to head north this time.

  He follows Mom down the hall to her bedroom. Go play, he says.

  Teenage girls don’t play. So we walk. We walk Airport Road until there’s the hum of an approaching plane. Checking over our shoulders, we break into a run. The airplane descends from the south, twin propellers whirring over great squares of green spring prairie, silver circles of grain bins and farmhouse roofs streaked rusty with wood-smoke. It lands short of the darkness of white spruce and jack pine gathered on the horizon. We are close enough that we can see the white blobs of strange faces in the dark windows as the plane shoots by us, blowing past the warning signs. CAUTION! STRAY DOGS ON THE RUNWAY!

  American bear hunters in khaki and camo step onto the tarmac. There is only one dog in sight and he belongs to us: four stringy teenage girls in ribbed tank tops and basketball shorts pressed against the chain-link fence. The hunters are too far away to see our winter-pale legs knotted with mosquito bites, our gnawed fingernails, our silver-filled molars, our greasy hair Mom chopped short as punishment for, as she puts it, not learning to work a shampoo bottle.

  The hunters laugh at something we can’t hear, which is the pilot saying, Welcome to the North, where the men are men and the women are too.

  The ditch is dry and we follow it along Highway 4. The pup leaps and runs in circles and stops to sniff a squashed porcupine. Foxtails grow along the road and we tear them from the ground and brush the silk across our lips. We hurdle over fully loaded baby diapers and broken beer bottles as we go north to Bart’s Gas.

  The Gladue girls have the picnic table. They are cracking and firing off dill pickle Spitz shells to the dirt below. These chicks are Cree and they glow. They’ve got that sunny maple-syrup skin that we can’t get no matter how many hours Mom forces us out in the sun. The Gladue girls are named for old movie stars.

  Too much grease in that hair, moonyasses, says Whoopi, scratching our pup’s tawny fur. Your bangs look like string cheese.

  The boys say your panties smell like muskeg.

  Puckamahow, says Daryl. Then she puts up two fists and laughs at our chickenshit eyes.

  Let’s go, then.

  As if.

  Too dumb you are. Look in the mirror.

  Bored, we leave. There is nowhere new to walk. Tocker Town has no surprises, no hidden staircases, no haunted conservatories, no secret garden. We know this place like the inside of our parents’ underwear drawers. Today is Saturday. No school. No money. No jobs yet but summer is coming. Work will claim us. Crappy jobs come like power poles on the highway.

  Before we die we’ll slick your Teen Burgers with Teen Sauce, make
chicken salad on a cheese bun and keep your kids from drowning in the public pool and we are jolly bun fillers of submarine sandwiches and we ring up your Trojans and Lysol and scented candles, and we shovel your snow and push your babies on the swing set, pare your grandpa’s toenails, harvest your honey, detail your urinals, hold the papery hands of your dying, nestle newspapers in the rungs of your mailbox and ladle gravy on your French fries and we push logs through your sawmill, bring you size-ten Sorels, then size eleven, then size ten and a half, and climb onto our mattresses at night with gasoline on our hands and dog bites on our ankles, chicken fingers on our breath, cigarette smoke in our hair, ringing in our ears and our men’s hands snaking up our thighs.

  With nowhere to go we walk home, which is the most mysterious place of all. We take turns carrying the pup because the stray dog pack starts shadowing us when we cut through the Video Express parking lot.

  At home Mom is up from her nap and planting the garden, tanning off her wrinkles in a slack Value Village bikini. There’s dirt on her knees, goose bumps on the loose flesh of her thighs.

  She says, I’m standing in the graveyard of my summer.

  Mom tells us we aren’t allowed inside unless we plan to shower, because we look like we’ve dipped our heads in an outhouse hole.

  From underneath the Suburban, Dad says, I’ve known your mom to camp in the bush for a week and come out smelling fresher than the day she went in.

  He lays it on superthick with Mom when he’s itching. Might very well be up and gone soon as the Suburban is humming. He used to say he couldn’t bear his women for more than a season but he’s been here all year.