The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

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

  I watch them float the posts over and disappear into my neighbor’s house. I bolt the door. When they come back, they’ll have to knock. But then I think, no, it’s Gary. I draw the bolt back.

  —

  I stoke the fire all night and wait for the splash of someone crossing the moat. I deserve an explanation. I can’t sleep without him.

  Across the moat, in my neighbor’s house, lit by candlelight, I see a crowd gathered around Gary as he appears to give a speech. His gestures are humble. He is not throwing bottles and sulking. And when he begins to weep, the masses gently reach to comfort him, place hands on him. My neighbor steps through, the people break apart for him, and he and Gary embrace. Gary sobs into his neck.

  I crawl to the liquor cabinet. One bottle remains. I cough down half and then hurl the bottle at the great window. I check my food supplies. They don’t appear diminished beyond reason, but I suppose there is more food gone than there should be. Didn’t there used to be one more pallet by the bed? Had Gary started to eat? I couldn’t remember his ever sharing a meal with me, though he always kept me company while I dined. I could live off this food for a while longer, definitely till the end, which feels closer than ever before. But that’s not the point, I think, as I urinate into the fireplace. Smoke, thick like clouds, smothers my mouth. I double over, breathless. I wrench the window wide and gasp in the fumes from the putrid moat. The sun is breaking. A bloated cow drifts by, its hide rippling with bugs, its tail end chewed off by some animal, its belly intact but about to burst. That will be me. Pale, bloated, and raped in some feeding frenzy by what still lives.

  Why did he leave?

  Did I say he could leave?

  —

  The water in the moat has an eerie heft like it is about to become slush. I find firm ground near the corner of my neighbor’s house, and soon I emerge. Water sloshes out from under my clothes and from my pockets; salt and sand grit my mouth.

  I hear the noise of much life inside, hundreds and hundreds of people, but as I pass in front of a window the commotion stops. When I knock on the front door it’s like the whole world holds its breath. I press my ear to it. Nothing.

  “I know you’re in there,” I yell. “I can see you all from my house.”

  I hear a cough from inside and a quick rush to stifle it.

  “You stole my food.”

  Silence.

  From my pocket I pull a note card, kept dry in a plastic baggie. It’s an eloquent reminder for Gary of our comfortable life at home, and of the contract he signed. I find a crack at the top of the door, try to push the note through. Something stops it mid-slide and pushes it back out.

  Gary.

  I palm the door and press my cheek against it. It is slimy and cold. I feel painted onto it.

  “Gary!” I yell. “Let me in! I’m cold and wet.”

  The moon is full. The water is waiting for orders. I think it wants this house as much as I do.

  I could still make it home. But for what? People begin moving around again inside my neighbor’s house. I hear the piano, and the march of many feet up and down the staircase. They are carrying on. I notice for the first time that my neighbor’s house sits slightly lower on the hill than mine. We truly were at the height of land. It was not my imagination, or merely a boast. I’m awash in sadness.

  “Gary. We had it all.”

  I sit down on the stoop and the water rises to my knees. Small fish circle my legs like they are playing a game. Hawks circle high in the pinking sky. I don’t know much about birds but I imagine they need land somewhere nearby. If they are gulls, they can float on the water. I don’t think hawks can do that. Or buzzards circling a kill. If they were albatross they could fly the length of one giant ocean and never get tired. I’ve heard they keep ships company on an entire journey.

  I had never thought that somewhere beyond my sight the world might be continuing as normal. If those are hawks they’ll have to return to their treetops, high above houses full of sleeping families, husbands and wives, children lucky enough to have been born. Just beyond the curve of the earth, out of my view, skyscrapers could be creaking slightly in the newly blistering wind. Newscasts could be reporting about us, the ones who perished.

  I’m surprised how easy it was for me to believe I was one of the lucky few left. If people are watching this sunset all over the world then I wouldn’t be so lucky after all, sitting up to my chest in cold ocean water cluttered with debris and oily with human waste. What makes me so special? I had a house. I had Gary. It felt like enough for the end of days.

  Soon someone will need to open the door. They have flush buckets to fill. Cans, bottles, batteries to toss. Don’t they? I could wait.

  I try to imagine it: me in there. Pressing palms, talking about the lives we lived. Being nostalgic for what? Eating crumbs together? Of course, if they were to let me in, I’d be expected to give over my house and supplies. They’d paw my antiques. They’d mess all the beds’ bedding. I’d never again enjoy that morning echo of solitary me padding across the floors in my empty house.

  But if I go home, I’ll live longer. It is indisputable. I don’t know what more I could ask for.

  “Okay, Gary. Last chance. I’m leaving,” I call out. I wait a beat, listening for the door to creak, for curiosity to win out.

  Instead, I hear laughter behind my neighbor’s door.

  —

  I know that soon they will come. Gary will lead them. It could be any minute now. They’ll wade, swim, selectively drown their way across the moat and break through my great window. Eventually they’ll splinter open the locked front door. It’s a quality door. It won’t be easy.

  The water and weather will soon get in, eat the house from the inside. They’ll be left with nothing yet again. I could warn them, but do I have to think of everything?

  I wait in the widow’s walk, surrounded by soft down pillows, a tower of blankets. I have with me water, crackers, tinned meat, and my two biggest knives, but I hope it won’t come to that. I don’t think Gary will let it. True, I feel betrayed. He knows all my secrets, what I’m most afraid of, all the combinations, and where anything of worth is hidden. But I will still be his friend. If he’ll have me.

  The moon rises, dips, rises, dips. The tide rolls in and out. I wait for the end. The wind pries itself inside. Even shrouded in blankets, I’m folded over from shivering. I wait for them. Pieces of my neighbor’s house are letting go, dropping into the sea; some break windows as they fall. Is that a piano I hear tinkling, or glass shattering? Is that the sound of singing or of wood creaking to its breaking point? The whole house leans. The sea is knocking, but his door remains shut.

  Zebbie Watson

  A Single Deliberate Thing

  IT HAD BEEN A long, rainless July and before that, a dry June. The pastures were brown, the grass chewed to stubs and coated in dust. The horses stayed in all day and if I tried to turn them out before dark, they stood by the gate and sweated and stamped. Most farms got the corn planted early enough that it grew shoulder high and deep rooted, but the second cutting of hay would be late and small and the soy beans were doing poorly, their leaves chewed by the deer and withering on the stem. I was counting swallows and waiting for the letter from Kentucky that might let me know if you still loved me.

  There were more swallows that summer than I can ever remember seeing. In spring there had been the usual number of mud-daubed nests—one under the eaves in the front of the barn, one in Otter’s stall, and one on the side of the garage—but somehow, come July, the fields positively crackled with the glint of the sun off their blue-black backs. Most days I counted more than thirty of them. They would perch in a row on the telephone wire that ran up the drive, and when I passed under them, they’d peel off one by one in all directions, sleek and made of angles, to swoop across the fields and turn their wing tips vertical. Dad said it was because there was no mud for a second nest; there was nothing else for them to do.

  When you told me you
were enlisting, you said we should just break up then because you would probably be sent someplace out of state. That made sense, but then the night before you left, when you came over to say goodbye, you hugged me on the front porch and pressed a folded paper into my palm with your address at boot camp and left without coming inside. I wasn’t sure if that meant you wanted me to write or not, and if that was your way of letting me choose, I didn’t get it at the time.

  I wrote you mid-June. I think now that I shouldn’t have, but what can I say, it was habit to want to tell you things. When I saw fox kits playing in the field, when I counted thirty-seven swallows on the wire, when Grace jumped her first full course without refusing a fence, I wanted to tell you. I also wanted to apologize for saying you looked dumb with your head shaved, you know it would have grown on me. And then I added that I didn’t care if you were giving up college or if we would have to be apart a lot because I didn’t need that much from you anyway. And I didn’t get why you thought staying together would be hard when it had always been easy before. And finally I told you that I wouldn’t mind waiting most of the time, which, I realize now, is funny, because after a couple weeks the waiting started to drive me crazy. I knew the mail would be slow but the relentless heat made the days longer and they eventually began adding up and summer dragged on indefinitely.

  I should have kept busy riding but Mom and I were only riding in the late evening when the flies were more bearable. You know how grumpy the mares get in the heat, some days I didn’t even bother. One night I was riding Grace behind the house and she was already so annoyed to be out that when a horsefly landed on her rump she bucked once and launched me right over her head. She was good for the most part, but that night not so much. Maybe I’d have ridden more if you were home to come out with me, my mom never wanted to. She’s even less tolerant than the mares. I never told her I had written you but sometimes I swear she knew by the way she’d say why don’t you do something different with your hair, or you’ll meet so many cute boys in college. Other times it seemed like she’d forgotten, she didn’t ask, as if hearing from you was never on the table to begin with. Family dinners were spent mostly just complaining about the lack of rain and worrying about Notes.

  We took Notes in March from a friend of a friend. They told us he couldn’t be ridden due to his age and his heaves, but as soon as the summer humidity set in, it was obvious that his breathing was so bad he should have just been euthanized. We saw that and acknowledged that but still he was already so dear and familiar, and Otter, who in seventeen years had never bonded closely with the other horses, loved Notes instantly and fiercely. The two of them grazed nose to nose although Notes barely came up to Otter’s chest, and Otter would chase the two mares if they came close to his pony. Notes lost weight quickly when summer came; he wasn’t too thin when you saw him last, but by the end his ribs showed with every breath and his hollow neck tied into bony withers. My parents would talk about it every time the temperatures rose, watching in the late evening as Otter’s tall dark shape moved in protective circles around Notes’s small white one, and we were all guilty of too much hope. It became a pattern of maybe this summer won’t be too bad, and then we got him through the last heat wave, we can’t give up now the humidity’s broken a bit. But July dragged on and I was still waiting for your letter and drenching Notes with cold water every afternoon to keep him cool.

  I wish now that I could have just made a decision for him. That’s a lot of afternoons in the barn with sweat between my shoulder blades and nothing to do but listen to Notes’s wheezing and think about when your letter might come. I imagine that summer in Kentucky must have been even hotter than Virginia so I thought of you every time sweat soaked through the back of my shirt, knowing you were wearing combat boots and fatigues. I thought of how easily your nose and ears sunburned, and how dark your freckles would be. I thought that maybe it had taken a long time for you to get my letter, and that maybe you were too tired each night to write back. At some point I realized that I hadn’t even told you to write back, I was just leaving it up to you to decide, I was only ever asking you to decide. My parents must not have known or else they would have kept saying things like teenage love will die naturally anyway or you two would have eventually grown apart at college. They assumed my worry was about Notes, which makes sense because he was the one I sat next to as I waited.

  The day before he died, looking back, I think we knew. It was an unbearably heavy week, the air was so thick and the temperature barely dipped into the eighties at night. When Mom brought the horses in that morning, Notes ate his small handful of grain and lay down, already tired and heaving. I confess we were so used to his flaring nostrils that it didn’t seem much worse than usual, but I could tell she was worried when she left for work. She asked me to check on him in the afternoon, reminding me about his medication, as if I didn’t do it every day.

  I checked on him every day but that day I avoided it, waiting until after lunch when it would be time for his medicine. I remember that I went out on the porch to water the plants and saw a dozen or so of the swallows gathered in a low dip in the driveway that would become a puddle were there any rain. They moved so unnaturally, their bodies stooped and narrow, it was striking. I watched them, amazed that some deep instinct drove them to this low place—that they knew if there were mud to be found it would be there—and yet somehow was ashamed to see them that way. I loved the tiny sharpness of their hunched shapes when they perched, but on the ground they groveled, moved like bats in daylight, it made me feel so helpless. I took the watering can to soak the dust they were pecking and they scattered before me. It was a relief to watch them skim away across the pasture.

  I went out to the barn after lunch. The place where I’d poured water for the swallows was dry; I hadn’t seen them come back. The barn was dark and still, no air moving despite the open doors and windows. Notes was standing up eating his soaked hay, but I could hear the rapid pace of his breathing. Otter was napping with his head in the corner and a hind leg cocked, bits of straw in his tail from having lain down earlier. Grace and Sassy were sleeping too. Their flanks were already dark with sweat despite the box fans in every stall that were always on those days. I refilled the water buckets then crushed Notes’s albuterol pills and mixed them with his Ventipulmin in a syringe. Otter woke up at the sound of the feed room door so I grabbed mints from the bag and gave him one. Notes came to the front of his stall and nickered. His nicker was an unbearable choking noise. His eyes looked bright though, glinting out from his thick forelock, his small, sculpted ears alert. I fed him a mint and his lips were damp and green from the hay, leaving slime on my palms.

  He was used to the routine and allowed me to hold his head with an arm over his neck and squeeze the medicine into his mouth. I could feel the strain of his breathing through his whole body and he was drenched in sweat underneath his heavy mane. We’d clipped his coat twice already that summer, Mom did it in the spring and then I clipped him again in June since his hair was so thick, but he sweated and labored anyway. In that moment I felt suddenly desperate, as if all summer I’d been telling myself he was dying but didn’t see it until then. It wasn’t a decision, not really, I just grabbed scissors from the shelf and began to cut his mane off in chunks, twisting bunches of it in my fists and letting them fall to the ground. Otter watched us over his stall door and chewed his hay in tense, intermittent bites. Notes didn’t move, just stood with his head low, looking out from behind that long white forelock. I cut that too.

  I fetched the electric clippers from the cabinet, unwound the cord, and knelt down next to him, feeling the cool of the concrete spread up through my knees. I started between his ears and ran the clippers down the crest of his neck in one long stroke, watching the jagged tufts of hair pour off. I clipped more slowly down each side, evening out the edges meticulously, my free hand over his neck and pulling him closer to me as I shore off the remains of his forelock, carefully moving between his ears and following t
he swirl of a cowlick. When I was finished, Notes’s skin showed black and dusty through the stubble.

  I sat back on my heels. Notes turned and nosed my hand for a treat and I gave him another mint. The roached mane did not flatter his thin neck. You know, he was actually only about twenty, but he looked so old and sick. I don’t know what could have happened to make him that way. His gray coat was dingy and yellow from sweat and dust. I took him outside to the water pump, Otter watching us suspiciously, and washed him, spending a long time with my fingertips working suds into his coat and tail until he was clean. The swallows swooped and chattered in the sunlight as I worked. The medication had kicked in and Notes was breathing a little more freely when I put him back inside. I swept up the hair and threw it away.

  I didn’t even bother checking the mailbox that afternoon. I think my parents were used to me doing it because they asked me where the mail was but I just answered Notes is bad today and they forgot about the mail. I wish I’d added we should do it tomorrow, but I knew they’d realize that themselves. I heard them in the kitchen after dinner talking about him and they both came out to the barn that evening to help me feed and turn the horses out. They commented on how clean he was but didn’t mention the haircut. He was clean; he glowed in the dim late-evening light walking across the pasture with Otter shadowing his steps. As I washed my own hair that night, I thought that Otter should be with him when we put him down, and that you weren’t going to write back.

  Notes died sometime that night. We found him not far from the barn, in the spot where he and Otter always stood. His body looked very small. Otter was still next to him and wouldn’t come to the gate, but when I took him in on a lead he didn’t protest. Dad called a friend with a backhoe and they buried him on the edge of the field behind the house, by the woods, with two of Dad’s old foxhunters and my first pony. I stayed in the barn while they did, watching Otter chew hay and feeding him mints. I didn’t cry until Dad came back with a banded lock of Notes’s tail he’d saved, and I thought about the feel of his mane in my fists as I cut it. Otter was quiet all day but when he went back out at night, he whinnied once and looked back toward the barn as if waiting.