The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

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  —

  Once, in physics class, Joan had seen footage of a bridge with a fatal design error: when it was stressed, the bridge began bouncing, then rippling and then undulating, flinging off tiny horses and wagons and canvas-topped Model Ts, until it literally came loose from one shore and began flapping, like a sheet on a line. She had never forgotten that film, the darkened classroom awash in boredom, the teacher’s voice intoning, the jumpy scarred footage, and then the sudden electric shock of seeing something so interesting and bizarre. In school, of all places.

  In retrospect, it may not have come loose from the shore, she isn’t sure. But the undulation, the rippling forces hurling the carriages and cars, that part she didn’t dream and she didn’t embellish for herself. When Joan was growing up back in Waverly, Iowa, she once had the opportunity to attend the Miss Waverly pageant, when her mother’s friend’s son’s girlfriend was a contestant. It was the most sophisticated thing Joan had done up to that point—the pageant was held in the high school auditorium, a velvet-curtained venue that nobody from Joan’s elementary school ever had occasion to visit. The contestant, Connie something, was freckled and dazzling, with an ineffable quality Joan had never seen before, and it was fitting that she be up for Miss Waverly. She wore her hair ratted high and folded into a French twist for the gown competition, and with teased bangs and a shining false braid that draped across her shoulder for the swimsuit. There wasn’t a lot of talent coming out of Waverly—one girl in fact mixed a cake onstage, wearing a gingham apron and reading the recipe in a loud, theatrical voice—but Connie’s mother had rigged Connie up in a black leotard and given her a long white chiffon scarf. Like, really long. All the lights were turned off in the auditorium and Connie ran out from the wings flinging the scarf before her, followed by a black light. You could see glimpses of her eyes occasionally as she ran back and forth, and sometimes a purple grimace from her teeth as she exerted herself, but mostly all that was visible was the rippling scarf as she flung it and ran after it, and flung it again. The place was speechless afterward, and then erupted into wild clapping.

  For weeks after that Joan and her sister would put on swimsuits and race around the backyard with long scarves made from a ruined bedsheet, until they ended up sweaty and defeated, the strips of stained sheets growing lighter and lighter while their arms grew heavier and heavier.

  * * *

  —

  Other things could be used to tie someone up, but what? Meaning had begun to swirl along with time. Looped over one of the kitchen chairs was a plaid copperhead, its face a silver clasp. It was like a scene in a book she had once read, where a dog was bitten and ran home over a terrible distance with the snake, huge and black, dragging like a leash. In the same book the rising river overcame a cage full of lion cubs, a man tried to asphyxiate himself, another man was trapped under a log and drowned as the tide rose, another man listened to criminally hip jazz, and another man lashed his severed forearm to a boat. Men, men, men.

  That’s what she’d been reading about when he barged into her study, the strange notions of the surrealists, with their unmoored minds and their brutal depictions of women. Limbs severed into doll parts and rearranged, high heels turned upside down and presented on a platter like a roasted bird, paper frills on their stilettos. Little girls with hair like kudzu staggering down a dark corridor, a reclining woman heaped with food and men posed with utensils, eating her abdomen and breasts. A tangle of women arranged by the artist—his mustaches sharpened into the kind of antennae catfish use to feel their way through the muck at the bottom of the pond—so their naked bodies created the impression of a skull. In Voluptate Mors. From pleasure into death.

  Joan’s family had fished for sport, sitting on banks, pulling worms apart like licorice and pushing them onto hooks, hauling out catfish and bass, discarding the junk fish by tossing them backward into the weeds to suffocate. Joan was forbidden to put them back into the water and would just crouch there, willing them to die. Sometimes, a long time later, one that she had told herself was dead would flop, just once.

  In the distance, crows were screaming about something. They were trying to tell her to get out of there. Forget the rope. Go! Go! Go!

  The women artists of that long-ago era were ferociously steel eyed, their limber bodies occasionally bent in the service of one photographer or another, but rarely did they smile, even at picnics.

  No, no, no.

  Time swirled in its paint bucket, and she saw her own family at play, her father in an undershirt and her mother in a billed cap, both of them grinning. In the background were bluegills, hanging from a stringer, each the size of a baby’s hand.

  * * *

  —

  Next to the front porch, under the arborvitae, Pilgrim pulled himself forward, through the bramble to the flagstone. There were knives in him that stabbed each time he moved and he growled at them.

  The birds and the squirrels and the chipmunks had a certain feel to them, so did the toads, but sometimes other things would move through—a fox, a skunk, the black snake, un-shy and curious, probing its nose along the stone foundation of the house and then coiling into the depression next to the willow stump, inanimate, like something that might have fallen off the wheelbarrow. Spock was made nervous by the black snake and would whine under his breath until it moved on. To Pilgrim, the snake was nobody’s business but its own, though he didn’t feel that way about everything. For instance, the groundhog, or the man in the kitchen.

  * * *

  —

  He had left his chair now and was moving through the darkened house, looking for something. The TV flickered in the corner like an aquarium. Whatever he was looking for, a tool or something, or a weapon he could use as a tool, was eluding him. Gliding under the chassis, tighten, tighten, gliding back out. Something Kyle said once, now that he’s remembering Kyle: if he ever had a daughter he would name her Chassis, because it was pretty. They were talking cars, all of them, and everyone had turned around and stared at Kyle.

  Once you understood basic physics, you could use things as tools that weren’t necessarily tools. A screw turned just so into a block of wood would lift the cap off a beer bottle more efficiently than a church key, a strand of dental floss would slice a cheesecake more cleanly than the sharpest knife. Et cetera. He would never use the right tool if he could use a better wrong one. Unlike the old man, who would demand his Polish problem solver (i.e., the hammer), and then whale on whatever it was until it broke free or just broke. Which is how one of the boys got three of his fingers cut off at age eleven, during an episode with a tree branch caught in the mower blade.

  Gimme muh problem solver, the old man had said. And then Lift the gawdam thing. And then whack, whack, whack, until the blade sprang free and finished its revolution.

  It wudden spose to do that was what the old man said to the sheriff, who drove out to look around after the hospital reported that a boy was brought in minus his fingers. Afterward, the old man cut up about what had happened, to regain his authority. I thought he was a bawling like that cuz he dropped his posies, he said in a mincing voice. They were meant to laugh and they probably did.

  Not much was asked of those kinds of men back then; all day surrounded by manure and recalcitrant machinery, they just simmered in their meanness. The women too—every egg his grandmother cracked had shit and feathers stuck to it, every shirt she scrubbed with her own knuckles and ran through the wringer came out of the wash still smelling like the old man. She knew how to improvise a tool too, maybe that’s where he learned it. Everything from a wooden spatula grabbed off the back of the stove to an extension cord to the old wire rug beater, which the boys called the Doug Beater, after a particular incident that got it retired permanently.

  His head sloshed, making him feel seasick. He was looking for—what, again? A tool? Something he could use to pry something else open.
They used to try telling the younger boys they were going to dig the coffins back up and make them look, but it never really scared them. They knew better. It was just flat-out too much work.

  Doug had almost got retired along with the wire rug beater. He looked like he’d gone through a threshing machine, and all for bringing a tree toad into her kitchen, which the older boys had told him to do. They tiptoed around for days, staying out of her way as she tended to the wet rags and what all else that she had to keep putting on him. Age seven.

  The TV people were swimming behind their glass but he couldn’t make out who they were. Or where this was exactly; it had the feeling of home but he couldn’t really see that well, so it might be someplace else. He was used to being wrong in the head, but not wrong like this, where he was just wandering around in the dark. He moved closer to the TV and in its flickering light he saw scattered across the rug those long-ago posies, pink and red, with their grime-rimmed nails and their gaggous stub ends, as real and unreal as anything in a Halloween haunted house.

  Suddenly, he remembered: stepping on her hand as he strode from the room, and how it moved under his boot like a snake.

  * * *

  —

  When Joan was a little girl, her sister used to torment her by pretending to be dead, slumped in a corner of the living room sofa, mouth slack, eyes fixed and staring, Wally Gator on TV, their mother banging around in the kitchen.

  “I know you’re not,” Joan would say at first, sitting down in an armchair with her snack; watching television, keeping peripheral tabs on the eerily still body across the room, getting more and more certain that her sister was alive but also more and more uncertain at the same time. “I’m telling,” she would try.

  Nothing but a clanging stillness from the corner of the couch, until eventually Joan couldn’t take it anymore, the utter lack of sister where there used to be a sister, panic rising like a tide, lifting her out of her chair and floating her across the room, where her sister would inevitably frighten her so badly that a long piercing shriek would leap out of Joan, unfurling into the domestic air of the household.

  “If I hear it again, I don’t care who did what. You’ll both get the yardstick,” her mother would say, standing in the doorway with a spatula in her hand. She liked a yardstick because it had an efficient and democratic feel to it—both offenders could be attended to with a single whistling swat. It didn’t hurt, although Joan nevertheless became frantic and had to be chased down and dragged back, pleading for mercy like she was being taken to the gallows. Her sister would bend stoically over the sofa and just before the moment of impact move forward so that the yardstick hit the other person first. She told this tidbit to Joan when they were in their thirties.

  Let the yardstick work for you.

  She touched him again with the shovel. Nothing.

  * * *

  —

  A credit card as a door key, a hollow pen as a tracheotomy tube, a self-locking trash tie as a handcuff. Or using an already employed tool in an off-use way—a fence post as a sundial, a flag as a weather vane, a drinking fountain as a urinal. Or even better, turning a regular tool into a metatool—a crowbar to kill a crow, for instance.

  Oh! Oh! Oh!

  He’d never hurried along a bird, but he could see how somebody might. His head felt different now, huge and hollow, like a fragile eggshell that all the yolk has been blown out of, forced through a tiny pinhole, turning his head into a big white dome with an echo. In school once a teacher had used a pencil to lift a human skull, inserting it into the eye socket and then turning it while pointing out its various features. The front, the side, the back, and all the while the skull nodding slightly, balanced on the pink-eraser end of a no. 2. He had felt an illicit jolt right at the moment the pencil disappeared into the eyehole; the deep, almost shuddering pleasure of it. In Voluptate Mors. Maybe three or four times it had happened over the years, his disreputable life appearing unexpectedly in the middle of his reputable one, like a harlot coming forward to slip her arm through the parson’s.

  He was wedged somewhere, one shoulder wrenched up under him, the big hollow dome of his head resting against something hard. Wherever this was, it felt like he was filling the space completely, as oversized and momentous as Paul Bunyan. All he needed was his ax.

  * * *

  —

  Joan and her best friend, age fifteen, standing alongside a hot blacktop road in bikinis and sandals, hitchhiking home from Linden Lake, a GTO pulling over and picking them up, the two guys leaning forward obligingly to let them into the backseat.

  Joan was shy, but her friend had folded her knees into the space between the bucket seats and thanked the driver and his friend. “It was a heat wave out there,” her friend said fervently. She had large green eyes, expressive high-arched bony feet, and hair the color and texture of straw. The passenger-side guy was shirtless, his arm resting on the open window. Joan, directly behind him, was getting a faceful of BO. She gathered up her long tangled hair and pressed it against her nose.

  They turned off the main highway and down a labyrinth of country roads, winding slowly and talking between themselves as though the two girls weren’t present.

  “Should we rape them?”

  “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “How about if I rape one and you can rape the other one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Which one do you want?”

  “Both.”

  “Me, too.”

  Even though Joan thought there was a good chance they were kidding, she was overcome with regret, there in the backseat listening. At her own stupidity, at how she hadn’t understood what it meant to be not supposed to hitchhike but now understood it completely. Her mother in a blue pantsuit with a pocketbook hanging from her arm, saying, “Boy, I better never hear of that.”

  As her friend shrank backward, shy Joan moved forward, leaning between their seats and grinning.

  “Let’s get some beer,” she said.

  They didn’t even glance at her. The car slowed and turned onto a dirt lane that widened into a dirt road and then went over a stream.

  “We need beer, you guys! Is there a place around here?”

  Nothing. And then the driver glanced back at her. “It’ll be more fun,” she said, “and we’ve got money.”

  The other guy turned around in his seat and looked at them pointedly, up and down. They were wearing nothing but bikinis the size of eye patches and damp T-shirts.

  He snorted.

  Just at that moment, her friend braced herself and began kicking the driver in the head, over and over, using her leather-soled sandals like paddles against his ears and the back of his skull. He hollered and swerved, and she began on the other guy, her legs churning between the seats, attacking his shoulders and head. He swung at her, she placed her feet against the back of the driver’s seat and pushed with all her might, screaming and yanking at the guy’s hair, until he ran the car into the gravel and opened his door. He was pinned against the steering wheel, struggling, as Joan’s friend clawed at his head.

  “We were kidding,” the driver bawled. “Kidding!”

  The other guy stumbled onto the ground and let Joan out. The friend pushed her way past the driver, grabbing his ear and screaming, “You fucker, I’ll kill you!” as she clambered out.

  They peeled away in a swirl of dirt, honking and extending their middle fingers. Total country silence as the dust settled and the heat resumed. Joan and her friend realigned their eye patches, walked a mile or so back to the hard road, and because there was nothing else to do, stuck their thumbs out.

  * * *

  —

  The dogs could work in tandem when the situation called for it. From the flagstones, Pilgrim lifted his nose and sniffed Spock sniffing him. High in the oak tre
e the feral cat watched them. Tandem required teamwork and stealth, one of which Spock was good at and the other of which he was definitely not. He circled Pilgrim now, a white blob in the dusk, his stick dropped somewhere and forgotten.

  * * *

  —

  He’d always thought about it later, what he wanted to tell Kyle that time everyone was talking about cars: that he himself liked Chamois as a girl’s name.

  The thing he never could get over was that Kyle ended up keeping cats. Two of them that he always made like he was torturing in his free time, Sinker and Pet Sematary, but they hadn’t read the memo and continued to climb up onto his lap and onto the back of his chair, meow in his face for food, et cetera.

  Cats can swim. They don’t necessarily want to, but they can. Kyle could swim, too, but when push came to shove, he didn’t.

  People will surprise you. Like this dead woman, who didn’t seem all that dead, in that she was poking him in the shoulder with something.

  * * *

  —

  Joan knew for a fact that human beings were sturdier than they looked. She had watched her mother struggling, sinking and waxy, the aperture of her world growing smaller and smaller until she was staring at her family through a pinhole. Then the pinhole closed and there was nothing but the grip of her long graceful hands. Inhalations and exhalations, long sighing moans that seemed to be words, or parts of words.