The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  —

  “Of course Mara was the one to find it,” Sam said. “Your sense of smell hits its peak when you turn eight and declines when you hit your twenties.” How Sam loved to make perfect sense out of everything strange and mysterious in the world. He looked at Mara, who, in the wake of my sister’s rebuke, stood quietly and lip-tremblingly to the side. He put a hand on her shoulder and said, “The first step is to clean what we can reach from up here.” He held the laundry chute open and peered inside. “Sheila,” he said, “do you have a sponge?”

  I went down to the kitchen and got the dish sponge from next to the sink, then returned and handed it to Sam.

  “Sam, let her do it herself,” Priya said. “For fuck’s sake. Mara, stay back.”

  “Oh, let me try,” Sam said, and he gave Priya a look that was compassionate and trite. Your sister is in trouble—we have to put aside our disgust and try to help. Scrubbing with the dish sponge, he loosened and cleaned the crust around the top edges of the chute, and the fish smell tangled with the lavender scent of the detergent. But the vomit had dripped deep into the chute. Sam couldn’t reach far enough to get all of it.

  “I’ll try,” Priya said, avoiding my eyes. She took the sponge from Sam and stuck her arm into the chute, twisting at the waist to reach as far as she could. Her shirt lifted as she stretched, and I could see the light down of hair at the small of her back. Sam touched the small of Priya’s back. How bourgeois, I thought, for a husband to still be attracted to his wife. “I can’t get it,” Priya said.

  “My turn,” I said. But I couldn’t reach either.

  The problem was that the space was too small for us; we were stymied at the shoulder. Priya had the idea to go downstairs to the laundry room and try to reach the vomit from below, and she took Sam with her to investigate while I stayed upstairs. Soon I heard my sister’s voice bellowing up through the chute: All they could see were some drops of puke atop my towels in the laundry basket. “It’s too far,” Priya called. “It’s all up there.”

  From the top of the chute I could see her poke a broomstick around. It made a hollow rattle. Mara crept closer, her eyes aglint. Was she thinking what I was thinking? I bent to her and waited for her to say it.

  She did. “I could try,” she whispered.

  “You want to?” I whispered.

  “I can?” she whispered. She touched her mouth.

  “Shush,” I whispered, “they’ll hear. Let’s get you in there.” I handed the dish sponge to her. “Go at it, sweet pea.”

  What I did was, I hoisted her up by the waist and let her shimmy into the chute. Then I was holding her by the thighs, then by the ankles. Only then—when I had her by the ankles, all of her weight in my hands—did I realize how heavy she was. A full-grown child. I felt it in my forearms. I felt it in my back. “Gross,” Mara said in a voice that seemed echoey and overlarge.

  “Mara?” Priya sang out from the laundry room—two trembling notes, rising low to high. She could probably see Mara from down there. I don’t know why she said it as if it was a question. Mara didn’t respond. She only grunted like a mechanic.

  “Sheil?” Priya shrilled. Her voice rose. “Mara, you in there? Sheil?”

  Then came Priya surging up the stairs with Sam on her heels. You want hysterical? Here was hysterical. “For God’s sake, pull her up, Sheila!” she cried. I hoisted Mara out by her ankles and deposited her on the carpet. Priya swooped in and picked Mara up in her arms.

  “Mom, I’m fine,” Mara said, and squirmed out of Priya’s grip. “Gosh,” she said. Standing, she smoothed her hair and scanned the faces of the adults.

  The scent of lavender swelled in the hallway, and for a moment, it was all we could smell.

  “Done,” Mara said. She sniffed and smiled. “Actually, I love vomit,” she said.

  “Good girl,” I told her.

  —

  Back downstairs, we washed our hands in turn. We didn’t speak. We didn’t make eye contact. We sat on the couch. I suddenly felt worn out and dirty. I felt vomit on my palms; I smelled it in the air. It turned my throat sweet.

  The Donners ate each other, I thought.

  “Priya, I want to make you a martini,” I said.

  “I’m wasted,” Priya said.

  “You’re sleeping here!” I said. “Who cares?”

  “I’ll have one,” Sam said.

  “Sam,” Priya said.

  I felt impatient. I went to the kitchen. I made the martinis and brought them back on a tray. Sam took one. Priya hesitated. Then she took one and I took one. I felt great as soon as the gin touched my lip. It was like swimming in a long, deep pool and finally getting to the end of the lane. You come up for air and feel great before you’ve even taken a breath, because you’re anticipating all the breathing you’re about to do. That’s how I felt.

  “Sam, you have mine,” Priya said softly. “I actually don’t want it.”

  “Aw, babe, I don’t think I can,” he protested. “Don’t drink it, then.”

  She glared at him. I knew what she was doing. What she was doing was straight out of some textbook. Some idiot’s guide. But I felt great and would not be made to feel less great. “I’ll have it,” I said, and I took the glass right out of her hand, and I had it. Right there, on the spot, I had it, and then I finished my own, and I felt, for the first time in months, a kind of triumph.

  I sat back into the couch and watched Mara. She was building a fort. She had pulled the cushion from the easy chair and taken it to the wide space near the fireplace, where she dropped it. Now she went to the dining room table and got a heavy, tall-backed chair, which she carried, struggling, to the living room. Then she went back and got another, then another. All these she arranged into a tight enclosure. Finally she came and squeezed onto the couch between me and my sister and regarded her creation.

  “Nice fort, kiddo,” I said, reaching down to take a swipe at Mara’s ear.

  “Hey. It’s a cave.”

  This struck me as a great thing for a child to say, smart and original. “It’s a cave.” I wondered what other thoughts were whirling around in my niece’s head. I thought about all that I was led to believe in my childhood: Olives are bad for you; if you don’t brush your teeth at night, they will rot and fall out; blowing one’s nose in a towel will leave a dark stain that can never be removed; children have two stomachs, one of which is reserved for dessert; and so on. But Mara could not be deceived! This was not a fort! “It’s a cave,” Mara had said. “I love vomit,” she’d said. I was struck hard by the force of my love for this child. Every other love of my life seemed small compared to this love. I grabbed Mara by her arm and pulled her to me. “You’re perfect,” I said.

  “My arm,” Mara said. “Stop.”

  “Sam,” Priya said. She seemed tired and sad.

  I let go. “Don’t ever grow up,” I said.

  “Okay,” Mara said, and she scampered across the room and ducked into the cave.

  “Remember how we used to do that?” I asked my sister. “We used to make a fort and pretend to be wild animals living in there?”

  “I wanted to be the lioness,” Priya told Sam. She was doing this thing where she wouldn’t talk to me.

  “No. You liked being the boar. I did your hair.”

  “This one time,” Priya told Sam, “she did my hair in a braid and then she took the gum out of her mouth and wrapped it around the bottom of the braid instead of using a hair tie, and our mom had to cut it out.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “It wasn’t tragic,” I told Sam.

  Mara came crawling out from her cave. She surveyed the room, plucked a knitted blanket off the armchair, and put it over the front opening of the cave to make a door. Then she disappeared again.

  “She has an artist’s mind,” I said. “I was thinking tomorrow we could take her to Golden Gate Park.”

  “Can’t,” Priya said to Sam. “The audition.”

  “After the audition?” I asked.


  “Maybe?” Sam said to Priya.

  Priya squirmed. “There’s something under here.” We all stood, and Priya lifted the couch cushion. There, among the lint and the hair, was a brown apple core. Frankly, I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten an apple. Yet there it was.

  “Oh, God, Sheila,” Priya cried out. Her face contracted, and I was afraid she would start sobbing.

  “Don’t be a baby,” I said. “It’s just an apple core.”

  Priya put her hand to her mouth. She was really crying. She really was. I hadn’t seen her cry, I realized, since we were small. I looked to Sam, who put his hands on her shoulders. “Shh,” he told her. “She’s okay,” he told her.

  I actually thought for a moment they were talking about me. I felt touched. I felt, for a moment, that all was not lost.

  “She could have fallen,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

  Sam glanced up at me, then down at his hands. “Let’s get some fresh air,” he said. “I’ll have a cigarette.”

  Priya looked at the cave, at me, at him. Her gaze made a triangle. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and wrapped her arms around herself as if she was cold. “Okay,” she said in a small voice.

  I swear to you, the sound of her voice. It reached into me. It passed through some kind of barrier and got inside. I wanted to say something to her. But I didn’t know what to say. What do you say? I love you? How insufficient. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even look at her. I don’t even know what she looked like in that moment. But I felt so close to her. I don’t know if she felt it. I guess she didn’t. They stood. They put on their shoes. They went out the door. They shut it. All was quiet.

  I stood. I sat. I stood again, stumbled, and fell to the floor. Water, I thought, and I went crawling to the kitchen. This was a good way to get from one place to another. I’d forgotten how good. I hadn’t crawled in a long time. When I got to the sink I stood, steadied myself, and poured myself a glass of water. I drank. The water tasted healthful and mineral, as if I were sipping from the palm of God himself. The palm of truth. Your palm. I drank. I poured another glass. I drank and drank. I felt desperate. I remembered that I had shed my clothes earlier in the day and stood in the pile of shed clothes and sung. Now I mourned that moment and all the others that had died. I placed my glass on the counter and knelt on the floor, and once I was there, it seemed impossible that I could stand again. So I didn’t. I got on my hands and knees. I padded across the kitchen and into the living room. My shoulders pumped. I felt nothing but the knowledge that I was to go to the cave. And when I arrived there and pulled back the blanket and peered inside, I found what I had known, on some level, I would find. There emanated from inside the cave—in the person of the child inside, may you bless her and keep her ever safe—the hot radiance of truth.

  —

  The cave was warm and dark and smelled of corn chips. The child lay curled on her side, her arms tucked at her chest, her cheek pressed to the floor. Her mouth hung open as she breathed, and a thin thread of drool dangled from the corner. Her bowed mouth was of the reddest red. I moved carefully into the cave, not touching the walls, and remained on my hands and knees before the sleeping child.

  But I shouldn’t say I.

  I wasn’t there.

  The buffalo gazed upon the child and felt a deep sense of peace. The child’s eyelids fluttered, and her mouth made little movements, and the buffalo held her breath and stayed still. Then the buffalo let herself fall down at the child’s side and rolled so their bodies were close. She wanted to be closer still. She pressed her chest to the wings of the child’s back, and she cupped in her paw the round of the child’s belly, and she pushed her forehead to the child’s soft neck, and she wept. For she had been alone for so long. And now this child with her warmth and goodness and her smell of childhood. Oh, God. Did she hold the child too close? Did she make some sounds that a child might find frightening? From outside the cave came the distant sound of a door opening and closing. The sound of a person calling the child’s name.

  What can I tell you?

  An instant later, all would be lost—the walls of the cave torn asunder so that all the goodness and warmth dissipated; the child’s mother flying in, pulling the child out from the buffalo’s grasp. Then I lay alone. What more can I tell you? Good God, I would tell you if I were the buffalo, let it be. Enough with all these words. Enough with the endless questions and endless answers. It’s cold out here in the kingdom of man. But it seemed, for a moment, that this one child’s heat might warm a creature amid the dying of her species.

  Elizabeth McCracken

  Birdsong from the Radio

  “LONG AGO,” LEONORA TOLD her children, and the telling was long ago, too, “I was just ordinary.” Of course they didn’t believe her. She was taller than other mothers, with a mouthful of nibbling, nuzzling teeth and an affectionate chin she used as a lever. Her hair was roan, her eyes taurine. Later the children would look at the few photographs of their mother from the time, all blurred and ill-lit, as though even the camera were uncertain who she was, and they would try to remember the gobbling slide of her bite along their necks, her mouth loose and toothy. She was voracious. They could not stop laughing. No! No! Again!

  Children long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.

  Those were the days before the buses came in. The children could hear from their bedroom windows the screech of the trolleys up the hill. Their father ran his family’s radio manufacturers, and there were radios in every room of the house, pocket and tabletop, historic cathedrals. His name was Alan. “Poor Alan,” Leonora called him, and they both understood why: He was in thrall to his wife. He was a very bus of a man, practical and mobile, and he left the children to Leonora, who had a talent for love, as he had a talent for business.

  Winters she took the children tobogganing. Summers they piloted paddleboats across the city pond. She never dressed for the weather. No gloves, no sunhats, no shorts, no scarves—she was always blowing on her fingers or fanning her shirt. Sunburn, windburn, soaking wet with rain. The children, too. Other mothers sent them home with hand-me-down mittens and umbrellas.

  Not surprising, said those mothers later, she never took care of her little ones.

  Rosa, Marco, Dolly: Leonora brought them to see the trolleys the last day they ran. She wore a green suede coat, the same color as the cars, in solidarity. It closed with black loops that Leonora assured her children were called frogs.

  “It’s raining,” said Leonora. “The frogs will be happy.”

  “Those aren’t frogs,” said Marco. He was five, the age of taxonomy.

  “They are,” said Leonora. “I promise. And my shoes are alligator.”

  “Why are we watching the trolleys?” he asked.

  “There’s no beauty in buses,” Leonora said. “A bus can go anywhere it likes. Trolleys are beautiful.”

  “Oh yes,” said Rosa, who was seven, “I can see.”

  Leonora was as melancholy as if the streetcars had been hunted into extinction. They were lovely captives who could not get away, and they left only their tracks behind.

  Her coat fastened with frogs, her shoes were alligator. Perhaps she was already turning into an animal.

  —

  The children grew bigger, and bony. Leonora grew worse about love: She demanded it. She kissed too hard. She grabbed the children by the arms to pull them close. “You seized me,” said Dolly, age six. “Why did you seize me so?”

  “I was looking for a place to nibble,” said Leonora. But Dolly was a skinny girl.

  Leonora bit. She really did now. Moments later, contrite, writhing, she would say, “The problem is I love you so. I do. Can I be near you? Do you mind?”

  What had happened to Leonora? Perhaps it was the sad story that ran through her family—a great-grandfather had lived three decades in an asylum, an aunt had killed herself. Perhaps she had a fall in the bathroom and it broke all the vials that contained her essence; the chemicals of
her body mixed inside her and foamed and smoked and ran over. Perhaps she missed her children, who were growing up.

  The doctors prescribed pills that she refused to take.

  She still tried to eat the children, but they were afraid of her. She had to sneak. The weight of her as she sat on the edge of their beds in the middle of the night was raptorial: ominous yet indistinct. At any moment she might spread her arms and pull the children from the sheets, through the ceiling, and into the sky, the better to harm them elsewhere. The children took to sleeping in the same bed. Rosa, Marco, Dolly. Too old to sleep together, but they had to. They chose a different bed every night, and lay still as they heard her go from pillow to pillow, the unfurling flump of the bedclothes like the beat of the wings they thought they could see on her back.

  “Come back to sleep,” said Poor Alan from the hallway in a terrified voice. “Come listen to the radio and fall asleep.” The top of his head was bald. The light from the bathroom pooled in a little dent in his scalp, just below his summit.

  The children had radios in their room, too, of course. He snapped one on, to the classical station, to calm them down. “You never need be lonely with a radio!” he always said, but they knew it wasn’t so. A radio station was another way grown-ups could talk to children without ever having to listen.

  —

  It was Rosa who told Poor Alan they had to go. She was fifteen. “We’re leaving,” she said. “You can come if you want to, but Marco and Dolly and I are going.” Then, seeing his face, “We’d like you to come.”

  “She needs help,” he said.

  “She won’t get it.”

  He nodded. “How will we manage?”

  “We’re not managing now,” said Rosa. “In a year I’ll get my license. I’ll drive the little kids to school.” The little kids. She was only two years older than Marco, who was three years older than Dolly.

  “What will happen to your mother?” said Poor Alan, wringing his hands.