PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018

by Jodi Angel

  Bruna Dantas Lobato, fiction editor

  Washington Square Review

  CANDIDATES

  Megan Tucker

  THE TELEVISION IS on but no one is watching. The end of the day at the end of October and our mother closes the door to the den and tells us what she has done: “I’ve switched it on so the man who is coming will think your father is home.”

  We try to imagine our father as someone who watches television behind a closed door at six o’clock in the evening. Light shines around the door in thin lines. The noise comes through in full. Together we watch the door to the room where our father might be.

  The voice coming from the television that no one is watching is Dukakis. We know it is sad to be for Dukakis, as we must. We know who will win: Bush will win. Even here in California. It will be a landslide.

  When the doorbell rings, we scatter to the brown-tiled kitchen where our mother has abandoned a skinned pineapple, angular and wet, cupped pores left behind in the yellow meat. The pineapple sits up on a chopping board on the counter with an old serrated paring knife, the pale plastic handle pocked from turns in the disposal. Later, we will try to eat all of the pineapple, even the core.

  Our mother answers the door and on the porch is more than a man. Three people walk down the hall toward our bedroom, where our bunk beds are stacked. One person is our mother. One is the man. One is a very pregnant lady. She asks to use our toilet.

  One minute for the vice president.

  I think the foremost . . . Can we start the clock over? I held off for the applause.

  Bush.

  In our bedroom, the rails on the disused crib are badly bitten. “Look at what you did, Nicola,” our mother had said in lighthearted disbelief that afternoon. “No, Claire was not a baby in America,” she insisted. “It would only have been you.”

  Earlier that day she had arranged a time for the man who responded to her classified ad to come to our house.

  We see what our mother cannot: us looking at each other through those bars, wanting to come out, wanting to get in. Alone in our room, we had both chewed the railings, toward each other.

  Our mother wants $50 for both pieces—crib and matching dresser—and the man on the phone agreed, but now that he sees the extent of the damage and our mother sees the extent of the pregnancy, neither is sure that the arrangement will hold.

  We two add up this way: one sister is six and one sister is twelve. Together, that is an eighteen-year-old. Together, we could leave home; go to war. Our brother was never born; he gets zero. Our mother’s bothersome belly has already receded. She says the sale is less about the money and more about someone being able to put the furniture to good use.

  We look back and forth between the bathroom door and the den door and the open door to our bedroom where the man is standing on our oval braided rug. He does not seem concerned that his wife has been in our only bathroom a very long time.

  The room where people are is quiet and the room that is empty is loud with voices; our mother had created an illusion.

  There was a time when we were allowed to watch shows. Alone with the Americans on the television, we saw lives that were like ours, but with more music. Roller skates. Kind puppets. A pastor. Meals. Spanish.

  “Do you have a newspaper in your house?” the man on the television had asked. “Can you go get it? I’ll wait for you.”

  We ran. The man was already folding paper hats when we returned. Real sailor hats with a point and a brim. We spread our papers out, eyes moving wildly between our own hands and the good hands of the man on the television. Finished, the hats opened on to our heads widely, but held. But then there was our mother. She snatched the hats away, crumpled them angrily. She walked out to the street bin, the pages gathered against her waist. She turned over our hands and showed us the black smudges of newsprint coating our skin. All that mess: where had we touched? Where had we left marks? She turned off the television for good. Not just that afternoon, but for years.

  The man says $35 is all he can pay.

  Our mother replies, “Fifty is firm.”

  Our mother is not a U.S. citizen, so she is not eligible to vote. If we were one person, we would equal our father’s vote. That would be one more vote for Dukakis!

  The pregnant lady comes out of the bathroom looking clammy. Still, our mother won’t budge. The man tugs on the drawers. “OK,” he says.

  The man goes out to his van, gets the cash and two thick blankets. One blanket is yellow wool. One is a sleeping bag unzipped the whole way around. We are relieved when he hands over the cash. Our mother was right to hold out for her price.

  Bush. Dukakis. Bush. Dukakis.

  It has to be the woman, in the exercise of her own conscience and religious beliefs, that makes that decision.

  Back in our bedroom, the man tilts the dresser, measuring the weight for the first time. He’s going to do it, we think: He’s going to take these pieces away. But the man tilts his chin toward the sound of the candidates.

  “Could your husband give me a hand?”

  We are caught. We will all burst into the den now.

  “No,” our mother snaps.

  The buyers have an accent that we cannot place. We all do. We all have terrible accents.

  The man raises his palms at hip height, a low surrender. The pregnant lady and the man rock the dresser on to one of the blankets and they begin to bring the dresser down the hallway as if on a sled. Our mother does not help; the pregnant lady is pushing from the back, guiding the piece with force. We do not watch as the lady squats to lift the dresser out the door, to carry it down the walkway. The crib goes next.

  Our mother puts the $50 away, turns the debate off, butchers the pineapple. Chopped yellow pieces cover the board like collapsed bricks. We eat ferociously until what’s left is a small amount that we absolutely cannot eat.

  Later, the telephone rings: “Sorry, it has been sold.”

  Another ring: they’ve come and gone.

  In the night, there is a soft sound in our room. Like we are trying to make something.

  In the morning, I see the wood I have worn away with my teeth, as if I tried to whittle from the top bunk down to where my sister sleeps separately. My jaw aches, but I don’t have splinters in my tongue or cheeks. The damage done I have swallowed. I wonder if I have weakened the structure, if it is necessary to sleep now in fear of collapse.

  Megan Tucker is the associate fiction editor of The Common, and a graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Michigan.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  “Videoteca Fin del Mundo” won the 2016 Black Warrior Review fiction contest judged by Sofia Samatar, who wrote: “Reading this story, I was swept up by the fierce and restless language, the quick changes from confession to reportage, and the tension created as the narrator walks the border between seeing and not seeing, between guilt and action, between social systems and the nervous system of the body.”

  We fiercely believe that Tomasula y Garcia’s story not only represents the best of literary fiction today, but also explores the possibilities within the genre, and interrogates the misalignment between our language and our realities. This story asks us to resist “tolerance toward the intolerable.” And calls upon the reader to take action: don’t wait for the world to change—do something.

  Cat Ingrid Leeches, editor

  Jackson Saul, assistant editor

  Black Warrior Review

  VIDEOTECA FIN DEL MUNDO

  Ava Tomasula y Garcia

  THIS IS GOING to be a story about the end of the world. It won’t seem like it, but only because I’m telling it. Told by me, nothing will seem different, because the way things are today is supposed to be forever. This is how it’s supposed to work; this is what keeps me comfortable—in a state of numbing if not smiling acquiescence. I’ve heard people call it the dissonance of the everyday: not knowing if you should scream or just keep going. Look around to
see if it really is a big deal or if you can be persuaded about the virtues of tolerance toward the intolerable too.

  It is supposed to be impossible to imagine the end of borders, the end of maquiladoras, the end of hieleras y perreras, the end of robo de salarios.

  Or, when it is imagined, it always means the fall of everything. Dramatic disaster movies, dreams of the end of time. I could do that too, I guess. The end of the world: batteries burst open like boils. Fiber optic cables split and fry away; canned food rots in its aluminum armor and lipstick tastes like pig’s blood. Border walls sink into soft mud like a shoe’s brand name, barbed wire melts into landslides, and all the things that make up my life slowly wheeze to a stop . . . But I don’t like dreams that aren’t any different from when you’re awake. It messes up even the smallest things. Like, Did I brush my teeth or just dream I did? Is the heater still running? Is La Bestia still running? Waking up just to check . . .

  What I’m trying to say is that yo estaba viviendo bien until I realized I wasn’t. My hot water, my clean air, my right of free movement, my microwave, my strawberry jam on bread this morning. This is how I am alive, or, rather, how I am not. I don’t mean anything supernatural, but just that it is possible to die in an everyday kind of way. Life transfigured into something else in the ordinary course of events. I feel smudged out—not really dead but some state that makes you ask if this is life, after all. Like a title that stays on the screen for so long that when you close your eyes you can still see it, vibrating on the underside of your lids. I walk around earth, taking in the end that won’t end. Just watch:

  Here is Pájaro Valley, home to three million acres of strawberry fields and fourteen million pounds of pesticides a year. People who are sin papeles spray the crops with chloropicrin, a gas used to kill people during World War I. There is Ajena Verdeja, emerging out of a poisonous cloud with a bandana over her mouth and nose, like in the movies when the aliens touch down and the UFO opens up with a tsssssssssssssssssss and a high-powered fog machine. Euro settlers hundreds of years ago, moving in clouds of smoke, burning down the crops that were already there and replacing them so they could eat their own bread and see their own animals. Their own little paraíso. When I go to the grocery store I see rows and rows of stacked berries in bright plastic packages printed with a picture of a red barn and a rising sun and maybe even photos of the blond Evans family—Strawberry Farmers for Three Generations—with grins ear to ear. All the particulars are stripped away, replaced by the same great big smile. This is how meaning is made; this is how money and markets abstract value into existence. Rattle it off like a drug ad: “may cause neurological deterioration, reproductive health problems, developmental disabilities, cancer, metabolic disorders, sexual assault on job site, wage theft, deportation.”1 Now you can say things like product and equivalent. Pronounced universality and occluded relationality that allows “fair labor” to emerge out of nowhere and strawberries to taste so good. Ajena goes back inside her cloud, invisible.

  These are facts you live with and learn to let fade to the background, if you can. Background like the mid-length drone of the man on TV spitting up fear into living rooms across the country, like a bird pulling food out of her own throat and cramming it into her chicks’. Hunger strikes in Hutto Detention Center for Women since October, and an ICE representative explains what happens: “After seventy-two hours, detainees are referred to the medical department for ‘evaluation and possible treatment.’ They are also ‘isolated for close supervision, observation, and monitoring’ and encouraged to end the strike or accept treatment.”2 Acceptance implies choice. That’s one of the tricks the strawberry packages use too. Choose healthier. Choose Evans. Choose a smile. If you repeat it to yourself enough times, it becomes better than real.

  I go wading through hydroponic strawberry fields, running across state lines as fast as a slur can slip from between lips. Another scene. In one shelf in her living room, Gloriana Rodriguez keeps her Videoteca Fin del Mundo. It’s every disaster movie you can think of, copied to rows and rows of unlicensed tapes, and I’ve seen them all. Super tornadoes, tsunamis, diseases, alien invasion. But it’s funny how none of them actually end. There’s always a Planet B, where the güeros launch off to and set up another white picket fence neighborhood, secure communities all over again. Or they pan back from the main actor all alone in the middle of the ruins and smoke, but he’s still alive and clutching a vial of the antidote or whatever so you’re supposed to have hope for humanity. Big words like that: humanity. The human race. The movies taught her English—even though they also taught that hope for humanity was hope for that one güero at the end of the movie. But Gloriana still has a soft spot for them because they were what promised a better life; their end was her beginning.

  SCENE. The underground bunker. People sit huddled in groups, while A. and R. stand to the side, talking.

  A: They’re not like us. They may look human but we don’t know what they want. I’m scared.

  A. walks to the far side of the bunker and looks over at a woman cradling her baby in a way that shows she knows what is coming. Rapid zoom-out to the whole globe from space.

  It’s only when the world’s crashing down that they start using phrases like that.

  Most of the time human is just an empty word, or only meant for some people. It’s kind of like a ghost, something that hovers over a whole list it’s meant to stand for but that somehow is outside of it at the same time. Race, gender, immigration status, class. A Citizen of Planet Earth, or like they say in Last Days, “Earthizen.” That’s the future the T-shirts hope for too, ones with Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal printed on back and front. But you become humano by fitting the profile; the character that gets abstracted into existence from the list. Do you fit the metaphor? Can you play the character they are looking for at your Credible Fear interview? Years ago Gloriana had to audition for the part of Refugee for a court and two lawyers.

  SCENE. G. sits at a small table with two men behind it. The lawyers have clipboards out and are running down the checklist. They take turns asking questions without looking up.

  L1: Why did you leave your home country?

  L2: Any particular moment or a series of events?

  L1: DV issues: Gang threats: Other:

  L2: Could you return?

  L1: Why/not?

  L2: Are you afraid of anybody in your home country?

  L1: Who is the persecutor?

  L2: Why did this person/group particularly target you?

  L1: Did you seek protection of authorities? (police/military)?3

  Change the story slightly to fit the questions. This is the only time your humanness will be based on your dehumanization, so barter for it and say only what they want to hear.

  Perfect victim. I walk across highways and under bridges. I am in the grocery store parking lot and everyone is looking. An old lady comes up to me like they do to pregnant women and tells me, Oh my, it has been so long since she’s seen a dead person, may she touch my hand? I am polite and courteous; si claro, go right ahead, I put it out to her like a bishop waiting for his ring to be kissed; I am actually enjoying being the freak show everyone defines themselves against. Little humanos and their daddies come up and ask me “what’s it like,” and I am so glad you’ve asked, I answer so well and say exactly what they expect because I’ve seen that movie too. They go away happy and impressed by themselves for guessing right. All of them thinking that dying gives one authority, or at least a different perspective, although I doubt a different perspective is what they’re after. What they want is to see themselves. Así es como funciona la simpatía—why the little girls in human rights ads are white and why individual stories work better than pointing out political patterns.

  Pero vamos a hablar de otra cosa. I’m trying to see things differently but keep repeating the same thing over and over—maybe that’s why it’s so horrible, because it’s hard to see it any other way. But, like any story abou
t the end of the world, I’m not making any of it up. I have papers—footnotes—documentation. Captive imagination: the image of a Citizen holds itself up in front of Aracely Garcia Ahuatzi, ready to slip through her fingers at any moment. Billboards whisper how to get there: Buy a microondas. Only $25 a month. Ignore the protests and work hard instead. Then maybe one day you can speak out loud and not be afraid, with the dim roar of her appliances to back you up. I know she is dreaming of buying larger and larger TVs so heavy they fall off the wall, cracking the plaster. The magazine ads promise that one day Aracely can look down on her neighbors the way they do to her now, and whisper about if she is illegal or not; say they once had a cousin who looked that way and he was no good. The job cleaning and scrubbing pays just enough to dream of owning more but not enough for health care: You make $0.58 to the Citizen’s dollar and a fourth of that is pocketed by Mr. Ryan because this is his dream too. The furniture, the lavaplatos, the house start talking in American accents as in a children’s cartoon: “The promise of inclusion through citizenship and rights cannot resolve the material inequalities of racialized exploitation.”4 They sound ridiculous, no chair should know that much. Belonging—¿cuanto cuesta? I wanted a refrigerator with a hielera but couldn’t say the word because that’s what they call the migrant holding rooms—hieleras and perreras. Freezers and doghouses. Looking for the truth as if it were a barcode on the back of a bottle of crema blanqueadora. Suddenly the makeshift reality you asked to stand in for life drops away and you call yourself afraid.