Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

by Carmen Johnson

  It’s such moments as these—when she is apart from Roger—that Grace is happiest in their love. When she returns to the apartment, she sees the soft fuzz growing on his face—a fuzz that quickly grows denser, like the hair on the rest of his body. When she looks into his eyes, she finds his irises are larger, and their deep brown tone is shifting toward yellow. His pupils have become just slightly oblong.

  Roger’s behavior also changes. She comes home from work one day to find him meowing along with a recording of a cat. He rolls around on his back on the living room rug or, in the kitchen, sits on the floor and paws at the dish towels that hang from the oven handle. When she reaches out to him, he bats her hand away. “Sorry,” he says. “Just something I’m trying.”

  On Roger’s last excursion from the apartment, for which he shaves the fur from his face and wears dark glasses, the two of them head to the property manager’s Park Slope office to sign the lease over to Grace. She learns that she’s been paying only a small portion of the total rent, but she and Roger do not discuss this. Next, to the bank, where Roger transfers to her the contents of his savings account. Then Grace takes Roger’s hand and points out the sunny weather, suggesting an outing to a park or a walk down tree-lined streets. But Roger seems nervous and turns toward the apartment, from which he’ll never emerge again.

  Grace can’t halt Roger’s transformation, and soon his body has changed dramatically. His black fur becomes dense, covering his body. He’s noticeably smaller, about Grace’s height, and though he still walks on two legs, his posture becomes somewhat hunched, as though his arms want to reach for the floor. His nose flattens, begins to turn up, and his fingers become shorter and the nails sharpen, sometimes leaving scratches when he touches Grace’s skin. When they kiss, she must beware his teeth and rough tongue. These changes are off-putting, and when Roger tells Grace that their intimacy is a mental block in his process of transformation, there’s hardly a need to say it. They haven’t made love for several weeks.

  Still, the finality of the statement crushes Grace, and even more so Roger’s request that she watch over him once he’s a cat. With the lease and bank account in her name, she has gathered that Roger expects this, but now the idea becomes real and terrifying. “It will only be the length of a cat’s life,” he says, consoling her. “Not a human’s.” The effect on her emotions is quite the opposite of Roger’s intent.

  The next morning, Grace again pulls her accordion from its case, again plays a sweet and mournful tune, but this time, Roger is not silent when he joins her in the living room. He sings along in chilling, groaning meows.

  “Don’t,” she says, but Roger meows again.

  The accordion returns to its case and does not come out. Grace plays music less and starts reading more—long and intricate nineteenth-century novels in which everything goes wrong, but all ends well for the romantic protagonists.

  In June, Roger decides to give up human food, and Grace goes to the pet store. She picks up stainless steel bowls for food and water, and then selects the most expensive cat food, cans with pleasing graphic designs. They claim to be filled with ethical seafood and quality meat from free-range animals. At the register the cashier holds up the bowls and asks, “New kitty?” Grace fiddles with her credit card to avoid meeting the woman’s eyes. That night, Grace fills Roger’s bowls and sets them on the table, but he says, “No, you should feed me on the floor.” He crouches over his food bowl, awkwardly because he is not yet quadrupedal. As he eats the food, he forces a smile and says, “Delicious.”

  Roger speaks less and less, limiting communication to the necessary. He stops wearing clothing, as it no longer fits his changing form. He becomes smaller and smaller, and when he is three feet tall, he begins to walk on all fours. At first this is awkward, but as time passes, his limbs even out, and soon he can’t walk on two legs at all. His ears grow to points and creep up the side of his head. Grotesque alterations in his face make Grace shriek when she comes upon him unprepared.

  Realizing she can’t recall the last time she heard him speak, she says, “Roger?” He stares but doesn’t respond. “Can you speak, Roger?”

  He answers back a nearly silent meow.

  Roger starts to avoid her, slinking around rooms and dashing under beds, then suddenly showering her with affection. He rubs his strange body against her legs.

  One day, the doorbell rings and Grace answers it, believing Roger to be hidden away in another room. But as the deliveryman hands her a package, she feels a soft movement around her ankles. Her heart stops. Roger slinks in front of her, whisking his tail and sniffing at the man’s boots. The man reaches down and pats Roger’s head. “Now that,” he says, “is a friendly cat. My girlfriend’s cat looks just like him, but that thing—” He makes a quick movement with his hands, miming a cat that is dashing away.

  When the door shuts, Grace picks Roger up by the midsection and stares into his face. He blinks. Holding him in front of her, she examines him all over, looking for some sign of the former Roger. He wriggles and claws her arm, drawing a small amount of blood. She sets him down, and he walks away, tail in the air and proudly swishing.

  Spring comes again. Grace does all she can to make Roger happy, buying him jingling toys and catnip and a towering cat condo that overwhelms the living room. He seems content, but it’s hard to tell. He spends most of his time on the windowsill, looking out with what could be satisfied fascination but that Grace worries might be tinged with longing. She considers looking among Roger’s old things for the key to the rolltop desk. She could train herself to read his transformation book. There might be a way to change him back. But Grace doesn’t try. To watch him go through another transformation—that would be too difficult, even if it would make him human again. It’s easy to live with him, now he’s a cat. She reminds herself that he’s gotten what he wanted.

  Much is going well in Grace’s life: She’s been promoted again at work, and she has started an amusing and flirtatious email correspondence with a college friend who recently moved to the city. One night, she meets this man for drinks, and then she takes him home with her. When they enter the apartment, Roger is sitting in front of the door, as if he has been waiting. “Oh,” says the man, “is this your cat?” He reaches out a hand, but Roger springs away, disappearing somewhere behind the cat condo.

  Grace sits on the sofa with the man. He kisses her. As his hands run over her body, Grace finds herself distracted, thinking about how Roger is hiding somewhere in the room. She stands and pulls the man into her bedroom, where they lie on the bed and quickly undress each other down to their underwear. Then he moves on top of her and kisses her cheeks, her neck, pulls down her bra straps, but Grace feels wrong and it’s hard for her to breathe with him lying on top of her. She tries to shift out from under him, and though he readjusts, she still feels trapped until he sits up to remove her underwear. Once they’re fucking, it’s not so bad. Grace even feels a bit of pleasure.

  In the morning, after the man leaves, Grace cries. She finds Roger in the living room. He rubs his body against her legs, then hops to her lap, and Grace stops crying. Her life is so much better than it used to be. She remembers a time before she knew Roger, when she had just moved to New York. She was in a small park standing next to a planter where people had discarded the stubs of their cigarettes. She had looked down into the planter and noticed that a few of these cigarettes were not fully smoked, not even half-smoked, and she had wondered who these people were, who cared so little about money that they discarded cigarettes after so little smoking. She had waited until no one was looking, reached into the planter, and taken one.

  Yes, Grace thinks, she’s better off now than at that distant moment. She doesn’t even smoke anymore. Her job, the comfortable apartment—but none of that seems to matter. Her accordion remains locked away, she’s not the person she’d wanted to be, and most of all, she can’t stop missing Roger—Roger as he once was. A quote from her recent reading comes to mind, something
about women loving longest after all hope is gone. But then, Grace tells herself, the writer was thinking of different circumstances; it’s ridiculous to apply such an idea to her situation. Remembering again the cigarette planter, Grace decides she’s happy. She must be. She strokes Roger’s head, the softness of his fur. He stretches his paws out over her lap and purrs.

  About the Author

  HEATHER MONLEY’S fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review (as the winner of the 2013 Short Fiction Contest), Crazyhorse, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Dartmouth College, and she lives in Mountain View, California.

  MINOR SAINTS

  * * *

  MARY-KIM ARNOLD

  1.

  I dreamed you

  at my sink in your socks,

  you were slicing an apple

  then eating it

  our mothers both gone now

  idle ghosts

  knocking at radiator pipes

  at a register only dogs

  can hear

  2.

  we tried for years

  we walked the grove of trees

  they say is haunted

  built a temple of stones

  with our hands

  cradled the hot damp bodies

  of dying animals to our chests

  while all around us apples ripened

  and fell

  we prayed

  we lit candles in the names

  of saints we knew

  and those we wished for:

  Marguerite, saint of small

  and common birds

  Horatio, steeping tea

  St. Ida reciting novenas

  in the night weeping while

  her children slept

  3.

  at the checkout, a woman coughs

  into her open palm

  her twin daughters behind her

  laughing

  their hair in braids

  at night, I dream them

  these cheerful braided daughters

  linking arms and growing large

  as they lumber through the streets

  tall as mailboxes

  then as lampposts

  then as houses

  I shout at them in greeting

  to ask about their mother

  but I don’t think they can hear me

  at this distance

  About the Author

  MARY-KIM ARNOLD’S short fiction has appeared in Tin House (online), Wigleaf, Swarm Quarterly, and the Pinch. Her poems have been published in burntdistrict, Two Serious Ladies, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. She has also written for HTMLGIANT, The Lit Pub, and The Rumpus, where she is Essays Editor. She received her MFA in fiction from Brown University and is studying poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She plays bass in the band WORKING and lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.

  Forsyth Harmon © 2014

  SANDWICHES FOR STEVE

  * * *

  SEAN ADAMS

  The ground shakes so much in the morning that our supervisor, Dic, turns off the conveyer belt and calls a meeting. He tells us that in light of the recent seismic activity, we should take extra care to keep our feet planted. In fact, he escalates having our feet planted from being Always a Good Idea to a Strong Suggestion, which is serious, considering that a Strong Suggestion is just one step away from Official Policy.

  Official Policy means there are forms to sign, and printing forms costs money, and the factory hates spending money, so they do just about anything to avoid making stuff Official Policy. But in this case, it turns out to be necessary because, around lunchtime, there’s a full-blown earthquake, which opens up a giant chasm across the floor, tears the conveyer belt in half, and swallows up Steve. Had it been anyone else, maybe they could’ve just said, “Accidents happen,” and moved on. Not Steve, though. Not when he had so openly mocked the Strong Suggestion to Keep Our Feet Planted by doing a crude song and dance in which he rhymed feet with skeet.

  And when I hear that it was Steve who got swallowed up, all I can think is, Close call! Because even though I couldn’t come up with any lyrics of my own and even though I couldn’t really see the moves he was doing (it looked to be equal parts pelvic thrusting and tap dancing through the blur of the eyedrops), there was definitely a part of me that thought maybe I should join in just for the sake of doing something spontaneous, given how lacking my life has been in that department, especially since Tiffany left.

  But I didn’t dance and I didn’t sing and Steve did. Now, Steve is somewhere deep in the chasm that’s torn the factory in half, and I’m up here, back in the meeting room, sitting with everyone else while Dic and his secretary, Sandy, pass out forms on the new Official Feet-Planted Policy, and I wouldn’t trade places with Steve for all the dancing in the world.

  When everyone has a form, Dic says, “Feel free to take these home and read them later when you can actually make out the words.” But none of us do. We all just sign them where we think the signature line is and leave the room. “Work for the rest of the day is canceled,” Dic tells us as we file out, “on account of bad weather, or whatever the hell you call an earthquake.”

  Outside the meeting room, we hang around until one of the security guys makes us leave. Nobody likes going home early, since going home early means having to do the whole commute before the eyedrops wear off.

  Here’s the deal with the eyedrops: The factory makes a secret product. So secret that we, the people who put it together, aren’t allowed to know what it is. Every morning, after the security guys search our lunch boxes for cameras, men in lab coats administer eyedrops that blur out all but the broad outlines of things. These eyedrops last just over eight hours and wear off all at once. Everything looks blurry one second, then you blink, and everything clears up. I call that blink, “the Essential Blink.” It’s great when it happens, but it makes for a lot of stressful blinks leading up to it. You can’t help yourself from thinking, Could this be it? Could this possibly be the Essential Blink? And then when it’s not, it makes you that much more anxious for the next blink.

  I imagine this to be a universal feeling, but that’s likely not the case. The rest of these people probably go through their days without ever worrying what the next blink will bring. They probably don’t ever even wonder about what the factory makes. Me? I can’t stop wondering about it.

  I’m just so damn curious.

  I spend every minute at the conveyer belt coming up with theories, and I spend every coffee break discussing these theories with Donald. Donald is one of the guys I share a coffee station with. The other guys are Francis and, formerly, Steve. They keep us to four per coffee station so that we can’t organize.

  The next morning, we get some exciting news, or at least it’s exciting for me: the conveyer belt is still off-line, so we’ll have to pass the parts along by hand. “Be sure to move as quickly as you can,” Dic says. “That means no pausing, no chatting, and absolutely no feeling up the product.” Then he says, “Webster, you want to stand up?” A giant blur of a man rises from his seat at the conference table. Webster, Dic explains, is a shot-putter. When the product gets to the chasm, Webster will shot-put it over. “Webster almost went to the Olympics,” Dic tells us.

  Someone raises a hand and asks, “How come ‘almost’?”

  Webster remains quiet for a moment, and then, in a voice as deep as the chasm itself, says, “There was this one time that I didn’t throw it far enough.”

  And his voice turns out to be only half as alarming as the grunt he makes every time he shot-puts a product, which is just about every twenty seconds all day long, each grunt followed by a “Product secured,” from whoever’s catching on the other side. I don’t let it bother me, though; instead I concentrate deeply and tune out all the noise around me so I can really focus on feeling up the product and drawing conclusions.

  When it’s handed to me, the product is just a Cylindrical Thing. I t
ake a Rod Thing out of the box behind me, insert it into the top of the Cylindrical Thing, and turn it three times until it clicks into place. Today, I turn nice and slow with one hand so that the other gets a few extra seconds to grope around for something—a texture, a button, a hole, anything that might give some hint as to what I’m holding—but nothing presents itself.

  “I didn’t find anything,” I tell Donald at our first break. Our coffee station sits right next to the chasm, and we keep peering over our backs to make sure it hasn’t gained any ground. Not that we’d really be able to tell.

  “Nothing for me either,” says Donald. For a while, with the eyedrops, I thought Donald wore a beret every day, but over time I’ve come to realize he just has beret-shaped hair. “There was a solid five minutes where I convinced myself it was a birdfeeder, and I got really excited,” he adds, “but then I thought about it more, and the truth is, birdfeeders vary so wildly in design that they lack any universal characteristics, so saying something feels like a birdfeeder is pretty much like saying it could be anything. And besides, why make a birdfeeder in secret?”

  “Maybe it’s for a secret kind of bird,” I say. “Like a bird that the government made in a science experiment, to use during wartime instead of planes.”

  “Hmm,” says Donald like he’s considering the possibility, but we both know it’s a stupid idea that doesn’t warrant further discussion, so we use the rest of our coffee break doing our other favorite thing: telling jokes about Dic’s dick.