The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.

  I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.

  But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light-years away?

  It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

  When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

  I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.

  There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.

  Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them.

  Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they’re speaking the language used by angels in Heaven.

  Brahmin Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they’re strengthening the building blocks of reality.

  Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that.

  According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “Om.” It’s a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.

  When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.

  Astronomers call that the “cosmic microwave background.” It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.

  But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “Om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.

  When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.

  We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.

  Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we’re gone.

  So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.

  Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.

  And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species that can build such a thing must have greatness within it.

  My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.

  The message is this:

  You be good. I love you.

  LOUISE ERDRICH

  The Flower

  FROM The New Yorker

  OUTSIDE AN ISOLATED Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their eleven-year-old daughter huddled with her now, under the same greasy blanket, trying to hide. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound, fastening the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote in an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper.

  Wolfred had left his home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business—a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He was just seventeen. He missed her, and he missed the books. He had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s Anabasis and Memorabilia, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions.

  Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous.

  Don’t go out there. I forbid you, Mackinnon said. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble.

  The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness.

  Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well.

  That rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, Mackinnon said.

  Mink’s voice was horrid—intimate with filth—as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. He went down to the hole he kept open in the icy river, crossing himself as he walked past Mink. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, crouching in the corner underneath a new blanket, her head down, still as death.

  I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said.

  Wolfred stared at the blanketed lump of girl. Mackinnon had always been honest, for a trader. Fair, for a trader, and showed no signs of moral corruption beyond the usual—selling rum to Indians was outlawed. Wolfred could not take in what had happened, so again he went fishing. When he came back with another stringer of whitefish, his mind was clear. Mackinnon was a rescuer, he decided. He had saved the girl from Mink, and from a slave’s fate elsewhere. Wolfred chopped some kindling and built a small cooking fire beside the post. He roasted the fish whole, and Mackinnon ate them with last week’s tough bread. Tomorrow Wolfred would bake. When he went back into the cabin, the girl was exactly where she’d been before. She hadn’t moved a hair. Which also meant that Mackinnon hadn’t touched her.

  Wolfred put a plate of bread and fish on the dirt floor where she could reach it. She devoured both and gasped for breath. He set a tankard of water near her. She gulped it all down, her throat clucking like a baby’s as she drained the cup.

  After Mackinnon had eaten, he crawled into his slat-and-bearskin bed, where it was his habit to drink himself to sleep. Wolfred cleaned up the cabin. Then he heated a pail of water and crouched near the girl. He wet a rag and dabbed at her face. As the caked dirt came off, he discovered her features, one by one, and saw that they were very fine. Her lips were small and full. Her eyes hauntingly sweet. Her eyebrows perfectly flared. When her face was uncovered, he stared at her in dismay. She was exquisite. Did Mackinnon know?

  Gimiikwaadiz, Wolfred whispered. He knew the word fo
r how she looked.

  Carefully, reaching into the corner of the cabin for what he needed, he mixed mud. He held her chin and spread the muck back onto her face, blotting over the startling line of her brows, the perfect symmetry of her eyes and nose, the devastating curve of her lips.

  Mackinnon spoke to the girl in her language, and she hid her muddy face.

  All I did was ask her name, he said, throwing up his hands. She refuses to tell me her name. Give her some work to do, Roberts. I can’t stand that lump in the corner.

  Wolfred made her help him chop wood. But her movements displayed the fluid grace of her limbs. He showed her how to bake bread. But the fire lit up her face and the heat melted away some of the mud. He reapplied it. When Mackinnon was out, he tried to teach her to write. She learned the alphabet easily. But writing displayed her hand, marvelously formed. Finally—at her suggestion—she went off to set snares and a trapline. She made herself well enough understood. She planned to buy herself back from Mackinnon by selling the furs. He hadn’t paid that much for her. It would not take long, she implied.

  All this time, because she knew exactly why Wolfred had replaced the grime on her face, she slouched and grimaced, tousled her hair, and smeared her features.

  She picked up another written letter every day, then words, phrases. She began to sprinkle them in her talk. For a wild savage, she was certainly intelligent, Wolfred thought. Pretty soon she’s going to take my job. Ha-ha. There was nobody to joke with but himself.

  The daughter of Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and my blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs.

  The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles seemed only to give the drooling dog strength, and he knew exactly how to pin her, how to make her helpless.

  The birds were silent. She had scrubbed her body red with snow. She threw off everything and lay naked in the snow asking to be dead. She tried not to move, but the cold was bitter and she began to suffer intensely. A person from the other world came. The being was pale blue, without definite form. It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makizinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens, and you shall live.

  Wolfred hacked off a piece of weasel-gnawed moose. He carried it into the cabin and put it in a pot heaped with snow. He built up the fire just right and hung the pot to boil. He had learned from the girl to harvest red-gold berries, withered a bit in winter, which gave the meat a slightly skunky but pleasant flavor. She had taught him how to make tea from leathery swamp leaves. She had shown him rock lichen, edible but bland. The day was half gone.

  Mashkiig, the girl’s father, walked in, lean and fearsome, with two slinking minions. He glanced at the girl, then looked away. He traded his furs for rum and guns. Mackinnon told him to get drunk far from the trading post. The day he’d killed the girl’s uncles, Mashkiig had also stabbed everyone else in the vicinity. He’d slit Mink’s nose and ears. Now he tried to claim the girl, then to buy her, but Mackinnon wouldn’t take back any of the guns.

  After Mashkiig left, Mackinnon and Wolfred each took a piss, hauled some wood in, then locked the inside shutters and loaded their guns. About a week later, they heard that he’d killed Mink. The girl put her head down and wept.

  Wolfred was a clerk of greater value than he knew. He cooked well and could make bread from practically nothing. He’d kept his father’s yeast going halfway across North America, and he was always seeking new sources of provender. He was using up the milled flour that Mackinnon had brought to trade. The Indians hadn’t got a taste for it yet. Wolfred had ground wild rice to powder and added it to the stuff they had. Last summer, he had mounded up clay and hollowed it out into an earthen oven. That was where he baked his weekly loaves. As the loaves were browning, Mackinnon came outside. The scent of the bread so moved him, there in the dark of winter, that he opened a keg of wine. They’d had six kegs and were down to five. Mackinnon had packed the good wine in himself, over innumerable portages. Ordinarily, he partook of the trader’s rum that the voyageurs humped in to supply and resupply the Indians. Now he and Wolfred drank together, sitting on two stumps by the heated oven and a leaping fire.

  Outside the circle of warmth, the snow squeaked and the stars pulsed in the impenetrable heavens. The girl sat between them, not drinking. She thought her own burdensome thoughts. From time to time, both of the men glanced at her profile in the firelight. Her dirty face was brushed with raw gold. When the wine was drunk, the bread was baked. Reverently, they removed the loaves and put them, hot, inside their coats. The girl opened her blanket to accept a loaf from Wolfred. As he gave it to her, he realized that her dress was torn down the middle. He looked into her eyes and her eyes slid to Mackinnon. Then she ducked her head and held the dress together with her elbow while she bit into the loaf.

  Inside, they sat on small stumps, around a bigger stump, to eat. The cabin had been built around the large stump so that it could serve as a table.

  Wolfred looked so searchingly at Mackinnon that the trader finally said, What?

  Mackinnon had a flaccid bladder belly, crab legs, a snoose-stained beard, pig-mad red eyes, red sprouts of dandered hair, wormish lips, pitchy teeth, breath that knocked you sideways, and nose hairs that dripped snot on and spoiled Wolfred’s perfectly inked numbers. Mackinnon was also a dead shot, and hell with his claw hammer. Wolfred had seen him use it on one of the very minions who’d shadowed Mashkiig that day. He was dangerous. Yet. Wolfred chewed and stared. He was seized with sharp emotion. For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable.

  Wolfred sorted through the options: They could run away, but Mackinnon would not only pursue them but pay Mashkiig to get to them first. They could stick together at all times so that Wolfred could watch over her, but that would make it obvious that Wolfred knew and they would lose the element of surprise. Xenophon had lain awake in the night, asking himself this question: What age am I waiting for to come to myself? This age, Wolfred thought. Because they had to kill Mackinnon, of course. Really, it was the first thing Wolfred had thought of doing, and the only way. To feel better about it, however, he had examined all the options.

  How to do it?

  Shooting him was out. There might be justice. Killing him by ax, hatchet, knife, or rock, or tying him up and stuffing him under the ice were also risky that way. As he lay in the faltering dark imagining each scenario, Wolfred remembered how he’d walked the woods with her. She knew everything there was to eat in the woods. She probably knew everything not to eat as well. She probably knew poisons.

  Alone with her the next day, he saw that she’d managed to sew her dress together with a length of sinew. He pointed to the dress, pointed in the general direction of Mackinnon, then proceeded to mime out picking something, cooking it, Mackinnon eating it, holding his belly, and pitching over dead. It made her laugh behind her hand. He convinced her that it was not a joke, and she began to wash her hands in the air, biting her lip, darting glances all around, as though even the needles on the pines knew what they were planning. Then she signaled him to follow.

  She searched the woods until she found a stand of oaks, then put a cloth on her hand and plunged it into the snow near a cracked-off stump, rotted down to almost nothing. From beneath the snow she pulled out some dark-gray strands that might once have been mushrooms.

  That night Wolfred used the breast meat of six partridges, the tenders of three rabbits, wild onions, a shriveled blue potato, and the girl’s offering to make a highly salted and strongly flavored stew. He unplugged a keg of high wine and made sure that Mackinnon drained it half down before he ate. The stew did
not seem to affect him. They all went to their corners, and Mackinnon kept on drinking the way he usually did until the fire burned out.

  In the middle of the night, his thrashing, grunting, and high squeals of pain woke them. Wolfred lit a lantern. Mackinnon’s entire head had turned purple and had swollen to a grotesque size. His eyes had vanished in the bloated flesh. His tongue, a mottled fish, bulged from what must have been his mouth. He seemed to be trying to throw himself out of his body. He cast himself violently at the log walls, into the fireplace, upon the mounds of furs and blankets, rattling guns off their wooden hooks. Ammunition, ribbons, and hawksbells rained off the shelves. His belly popped from his vest, round and hard as a boulder. His hands and feet filled like bladders. Wolfred had never witnessed anything remotely as terrifying, but he had the presence of mind not to club Mackinnon or in any way molest his monstrous presence. As for the girl, she seemed pleased at his condition, though she did not smile.

  Trying to disregard the chaotic death occurring to his left, now to his right, now underfoot, Wolfred prepared to leave. He grabbed snowshoes and two packs, moving clumsily. In the packs he put two fire steels, ammunition, bannocks he had made in advance. He doubled up two blankets and another to cut for leggings, and outfitted himself and the girl with four knives apiece. He took two guns, wadding, and a large flask of gunpowder. He took salt, tobacco, Mackinnon’s precious coffee, and one of the remaining kegs of wine. He did not take overmuch coin, though he knew which hollowed log hid the trader’s tiny stash.

  Mackinnon’s puffed mitts of hands fretted at his clothing and the threads burst. As Wolfred and the girl slipped out, they could hear him fighting the poison, his breath coming in sonorous gasps. He could barely draw air past his swelled tongue into his gigantic purpled head. Yet he managed to call feebly out to them, My children! Why are you leaving me?