The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  The gun drops from the window, and the boy does not hesitate. He is up. He opens the door and slips through it, his body filled with the certainty of it, with a wish fulfilled, his father, and as he turns the gun is ready for him. It is inches from him. Dad, the boy thinks, even as he realizes that the man is not tall enough to be his father, is not tall enough to be a father at all. In life, the boy has been fearless—he trusts the dark, trusts the slimmest branch, trusts that he alone can fly—but he looks at the gun and his mind goes cold and cavernous.

  “Where’s your class?” the man says, his voice muffled by a ski mask.

  The boy hesitates for a moment—he does not think of protecting his class, of protecting the girl who is his favorite, who is under the parachute, trying to remember the prayer that her grandmother mumbles in Polish each night—for a moment he hesitates because he cannot speak. Then that moment is over, and he is still alive, and he says, “Outside.”

  “Outside,” the gym teacher hears, and he thinks that this might save them, but the silence grows long and he does not know what it means. He is listening for sirens, wishing for sirens in the fervent way that children wish, as though his chest is opening to dispatch some part of him that will find the sirens and usher them here. Behind him, the children know that for the first time they are hiding without wanting to be found.

  The boy raises his eyes and looks up the long line of the gun to the medal. It is his father’s gun. The boy can see it here, and he can see it locked in the case in the hall between the door to his room and the door to his brother’s room, where it glows in the way things precious and forbidden glow—the grandfather clock with the damp brass gears and the ostrich egg with foreign letters inked on its curves and the tiny crystal bottle on his mother’s dresser—and the constellation of these things is as sacred and eternal as anything up in the sky, and the boy cannot believe that the gun is here and that its case is empty.

  “Let’s go,” the man says, and his voice is muffled, but there is something strained in it that the boy recognizes. The boy looks up, past the medal, to the mask, which is a ski hat with holes cut for the mouth and nose and eyes, and over the eyeholes are glasses that could be anyone’s, except that they are his brother’s. They are across the table from him every morning, slanted toward a book whose pages are dusted with the crumbs of the toast his mother makes. They were across the table from him this morning.

  The boy reaches out and puts a finger to the nose of the gun, and it is warm. He has never touched the gun before, and his brother yanks it away, and the medal jingles, this tiny silver noise, and his brother grabs his hand.

  Under the desk, the gym teacher listens to them walk away and he begins to cry. He has always thought that you could know, that right and wrong were like bones beneath the skin—hidden but there, waiting to be laid bare—and his hands are empty and he cannot weigh the one against the seventeen. The girl who is counting hits a hundred and starts over again at one, and the boy’s brother pulls him toward the emergency exit, and the boy has dreamed of this, in certain stretches of homeroom, when he is filling a sheet with cursive Ls, he has dreamed of his brother taking him out of class and letting him sit on the back of his bike as they coast down the hill into the town to the store with the miniature models of helicopters and tanks and dragons that are all the color of flour, waiting to be painted with brushes whose bristles are thin as eyelashes, but even as he has dreamed this, he has known it will not happen because his brother prefers to be alone, likes to have space, though their mother says that as a baby his brother was the one who liked to be held.

  They are at the door, and his brother pushes it open with a hip so that he can keep one hand on the gun. The gym teacher watches a wedge of light stretch across the locker room, the benches, the book bags, and he is waiting for a child to speak, to cough—it is that season, when their noses run and their lips chap—but they are silent, and the light recedes, and he tells the children to stay quiet and that he will be back.

  —

  Outside, the air is cool and sweet. The light is too bright—it makes the boy think of Sundays, when their mother takes them to the movies, and the boy loves the movies, cannot sit close enough to the screen, and when the movie is over and they step out of the theater, the fact of the world outside is a shock to him, an insult. The boy’s brother lets go of his hand, and the bell rings, blaring from loudspeakers in the corridors and classrooms, from speakers mounted on the corners of the ESL trailer. It is time for lunch, but no one comes out of the trailer, and the school is still. There is the soccer field. The grass arches away from the wind, and they cross the parking lot to the field, and the boy looks back over his shoulder and sees a girl lying on the sidewalk next to the ESL trailer. She has fallen with one ear against the pavement, and the boy recognizes the girl. She is two grades above him, with dark hair and a red birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a cloud. Her face has gone so pale that even the birthmark is drained of color, and beyond her, on the steps of the trailer, there is a woman and from the way she is lying the boy can tell that her face will look the same.

  Under the parachute, the girl who thought of lightning is thinking of her grandfather, who is the only person she knows to have died—his heart had been good but turned bad—and her own chest hurts, and she wonders if it is her heart turning inside her. A boy begins to shake. His teeth are chattering and he puts a finger between them because the teacher said not to make a sound. He has never thought of himself as truly separate from his mother, and yet he is sure that at her desk in the office in the city she does not know what is happening to him and cannot feel his fear. In the years to come, he will think of this over and over, of how she did not know.

  The boy’s brother is breathing fast behind the mask, and the boy knows that he shot the girl and the woman. The tip of the gun was warm, but the boy cannot make sense of it or of why he is following his brother, crossing the field at the same angle he does every afternoon. From the door to the locker room, the gym teacher watches the two boys—they are both boys, he can see that now—as they walk up the hill toward the woods. There is a dead girl on the pavement and on the steps of the trailer a woman moans, and when the boys are far enough away the gym teacher runs to the woman. It is the ESL teacher, and he puts his fingers to her neck and says, Please, please, please. Under the parachute the girl counts, her lips careful with the numbers: eighty-eight, eighty-nine. The silk is so hot that it begins to stick to them, to foreheads and noses and knees.

  At the top of the hill, where there is the tree with the peeling bark and where the path to the boy’s home begins, there is a cross stuck in the ground. It is two pieces of a yardstick that the boy recognizes because his mother used it to stir a can of paint—one end is the blue of their kitchen—and now it has been broken in two and nailed together. The boy’s brother stops at the cross and says, “They’ll ask you why.” Every word comes out like a splinter, like he is in pain, and the boy says, “Are you crying?”

  The gym teacher hears sirens, faint as wind chimes, as he puts his mouth to the woman’s and exhales.

  “Listen to me,” the boy’s brother says, and he gets down on his knees. “They’re going to ask you why.”

  His brother’s glasses are fogged. The ski hat is their mother’s. It is the one she wears when she shovels snow and it smells of a dog, though they’ve never had one, and he does not know how to square these ordinary things with the way his brother is shaking—not gently, but wildly—as he pulls the gun over his shoulder and points it at him.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” the boy says.

  The girl counting reaches one hundred and stops, because her fear has dissolved, is a memory now. The gym teacher puts his fingers to the woman’s neck again, and this time there is nothing. Another girl hears the sirens and thinks of her dog and the way he howls with his throat arched whenever he hears a siren and of how he will be howling now, in her house, which is nearby, pacing the halls and filling the empty room
s with that sound.

  The boy begins to cry. Not because he is afraid of being shot—he cannot think what that might feel like, though he has seen it in games and on TV, though he has seen the holes burned through the paper targets at the range—but because he is afraid that his brother hates him, has always hated him. That must have been why, one time, his brother held his palm open and ran the blade of a knife across it.

  The gym teacher looks up the hill and he sees that the boys are the same height—the boy with the gun is kneeling—and he sees where the gun is pointed, and he gets up and begins to run across the soccer field. The seventeen are safe, under the parachute, but already he knows that it won’t matter against this one, that that is not how the scales work.

  “I’m not going to shoot you,” the boy’s brother says, “because I’m not crazy. You tell them that. That I’m not crazy.”

  The boy nods, but he will not tell anyone what his brother said, not his mother, not his father, not ever. He will insist that his brother was silent, that his brother was crazy, and he will dream of the girl with the cloud-shaped birthmark. With the gun, the boy’s brother motions for him to turn toward the tree with the peeling bark, and the boy turns. He is facing the path that leads home and he has timed himself on this path, too. In two minutes and seven seconds he can be home, where his mother is pulling clothes from the drier. She straightens, hearing the sirens, and it takes her a moment to unravel the sound, to register how many and how close, and she thinks there must be a fire—it has been a dry summer, a dry fall—and she goes to the window and looks toward the school. The boy can’t tell if the sirens are getting closer. They seem to be carried on the wind, like they are coming from the trees, and even though he knows this isn’t so, he looks up at the leaves that are red and brown and thrashing.

  The gym teacher is halfway across the soccer field, and in two months, when the school reopens, his wife will walk from goal to goal for hours, eyes on the grass, looking for the gleam of a bullet in the dirt. Under the parachute, the children think of lightning and tunnels. They think of the gym teacher who said he’d come back and of mothers and fathers and of the sound of the man’s voice when he said, “Let’s go,” and how you are never supposed to go. Later, when the policeman finds them, when he pulls up the parachute, and tells them they are safe, he will not be able to forget it: how still the children were, how silent, how they didn’t move a muscle.

  The boy looks from the trees to the school. The gym teacher is running across the field, and he is old and slow, and from this high on the hill it seems like he is barely moving. The gym teacher’s heart is battering at his lungs, his chest is burning, and the boy only watches him for a second, but it is too long—his brother turns toward the field. The sirens are everywhere now. His brother is breathing in the way that means you’re hurt. The gym teacher is across the field, and he is afraid, but with his next breath his fear goes, and he does not know why, because the gun is aimed at him now, but he thinks of a morning years ago, when his son got a shoelace caught in the mower, and the gym teacher cut the lace with a pocket knife and watched the panic roll out of his son’s eyes, and an hour later, in the hospital, he will die, whispering to his wife about a knife through cotton.

  The boy hears the shot. He begins to run, and the leaves slide under his sneakers and he keeps his eyes on the path because there is a root up ahead that tripped him once, walking home, and his knee had bled, and his brother had looked at him and kissed his knee and said, “What’s the point in crying?” The boy leaps over the root. He is running fast enough that the trees blur around him, and the gym teacher feels the hot rip of the bullet, and up on the hill there is another shot.

  Diane Cook

  Bounty

  A DEAD MAN TWISTS AROUND one of my Doric columns. I chose these columns for their plainness, their strength. I liked imagining people looking up at my home, its smoky leaded windows reflecting their city back at them, the classical Greek proportions held up by simple, democratic design. Tasteful. No frills. The dead man’s arm trembles oddly in the water, out of rhythm with the rest of his body. It’s most likely dislocated at the shoulder. Perhaps more than dislocated, but I won’t investigate. A brown gull does a number on his eye.

  The man doesn’t look familiar, so I don’t believe him to be one I’ve turned away.

  When the world first flooded, the men who came to my door asking for handouts calmly went away when I said no. They’d survived once before and would do it again. There were other options still. Colonies remained above water with homes to take refuge in. They speckled the rising sea. Now those colonies are underwater, most of their inhabitants drowned.

  The other day a man in what looked to have once been a pretty fine suit knocked on my door. The suit, now, was in ruins, the arms shredded like party streamers from his shoulders. Sea salt ghosted his face. Some sand, or maybe a barnacle, clung to his neck. A blue crab scuttled under his pick-stitched lapel. But I mostly noticed his loosened tie because it was definitely designer—it was a kind of damask rose pattern, but nontraditional. Of course, only designers change designs. It’s why we used to pay so much for them. We paid for innovation.

  This man in the nice suit asked for food and water, then tried to strangle me, choked back tears, apologized, asked to be let in, and, when I refused, tried to strangle me again. When I managed to close the door on him he sat on my veranda and cried.

  I’ve gotten used to these interruptions. I don’t blame these men. If I’d been one of the unprepared, I’d be desperate, too. They come to my door, see that I am clean, are dazzled by the generator-fed lights. They sense I have rooms full of provisions, that my maid’s quarters are filled with bottled water, cords of wood are in the exercise annex, and gas is in the garage. They ogle my well-fed gut. I am dry. They are embarrassed, filthy, smell of fish. They get back on their driftwood, or whatever they use to keep their heads above water, and paddle next door to my neighbor’s. If I were them, I would overtake someone standing dry in the doorway of a fine home. I wouldn’t give up so easily. But these men are not me. For starters, they’re awfully weak from not eating. But still. I don’t like the change. I miss the old days when, though they happened to be begging, they were gentlemen who understood that hard work was their ticket to success. I’ll need to carry a knife to the door next time.

  —

  It was happening just like they said it would. Things never happen like they say they will. That I was living to see it felt kind of special, truth be told. Like a headline. HISTORY IN THE MAKING!

  My neighbor’s house still stands, and across a new tiny sea in turmoil from trapped fish and unprepared people, one additional cluster of houses remains, perhaps four in all. Day and night, people hang out the windows waving white bedsheets and shouting. What kind of message is that? Surrender? To whom? I’ll bet they have no food or water. My neighbor’s house shakes from the extra people crammed inside. Each of the ten bedrooms probably holds a small village of newly homeless vagrants he’s rescued. I told him to prepare. I know this sounds crazy, I said. We haven’t always gotten along, but I decided it was the neighborly thing to do. You’d think he’d have been grateful. But instead he just crowds our last parcel of heavenly land with bums. If I open the windows I will smell the house, its burdened toilets and piss-soaked corners. The shallow but rising sea moat between our homes is rank with sewage. The tide takes it away, but more always comes.

  In the old days, I would have left a letter in his mailbox about this or that neighborhood issue. The mail carrier once warned that it was illegal for non–mail carriers to put things into mailboxes. She held it out for me to take back. It’s just a note, I snarled. See how overgrown his hedges are? She stared unbudgeably hard, held the letter steady between us. Why can’t you just leave it there for him? I fumed. I slammed the door in her face and the next morning I found it stuffed in with my own mail, in my own mailbox. On it she had scrawled petulantly, Only I can put this in the mailbox, and I won’t d
o it!

  Through my great-room window, I can see that his grand staircase, with those audacious carved-pineapple finials, is littered with men, women, and children. The way they lie about, it looks as though there’s one whole family to a stair. A boy dangles from a dusty crystal chandelier. I watch an old woman topple over a railing while maneuvering through the immense spiral shantytown. What a shame. But you can’t let everyone in. There would be no end to it.

  I run a finger over the great room’s mantel. Dead skin, infiltrated ash. Too bad the housekeeper has most likely perished.

  —

  Someone knocks on my door—insistent and angry rather than timid and begging. I grab that kitchen knife.

  On my veranda stands a man holding himself up by the door knocker, his muscles about to tense themselves off his bones. His face is unshaven, neglected. He has the skinny corpse and fat face of a drunk, and when I pull the door open he attempts to keep hold of the knocker and falls in, face-plants on my entryway Oriental.

  “Whiskey,” he groans, reaching for an imaginary tumbler.

  I think about swiping his open palm with my blade, but there is something about him that I like. His request is original. At least he’s trying.

  Where my driveway used to break into a grand circular turnaround, the waves are mincing: they hiss, churn up crud and fish parts. But the ones farther out, nudged upward by some bar—probably the submerged cul-de-sac lower on the hill, the one I drove through on my way home every day—are large and smooth. They roll long like bedsheets drying in the wind, and I can feel their break.