The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  From the other side of the door they could hear his legs drumming on the packed earth floor. They could hear his fat paws wildly pattering for water on the empty wooden bucket.

  On snowshoes of ash wood and sinew, Wolfred and the girl made their way south. They would be easy to follow. Wolfred’s story was that they’d decided to travel toward Grand Portage for help. They had left Mackinnon ill in the cabin with plenty of supplies. If they got lost, wandered, found themselves even farther south, chances were nobody would know or care who Mackinnon was. And so they trekked, making good time, and set up their camp at night. The girl tested the currents of the air with her face and hands, then showed Wolfred where to build a lean-to, how to place it just so, how to find dry wood in snow, snapping dead branches out of trees, and where to pile it so that they could easily keep the fire going all night and direct its heat their way. They slept peacefully, curled in their separate blankets, and woke to the wintertime scolding of chickadees. The girl tuned up the fire, they ate, and were back on their way south when suddenly they heard the awful gasping voice of Mackinnon behind them. They could hear him blundering toward them, cracking twigs, calling out to them, Wait, my children, wait a moment, do not abandon me!

  They started forward in terror. Soon a dog drew near them, one of the trading post’s pathetic curs; it ran alongside them, bounding effortfully through the snow. At first they thought that Mackinnon had sent it to find them, but then the girl stopped and looked hard at the dog. It whined to her. She nodded and pointed the way through the trees to a frozen river, where they would move more quickly. On the river ice they slid along with a dreamlike velocity. The girl gave the dog a piece of bannock from her pocket, and that night, when they made camp, she set her snares out all around them. She built their fire and the lean-to so that they had to pass through a narrow space between two trees. Here too she set a snare. Its loop was large enough for a man’s head, even a horribly swollen one. They fed themselves and the dog, and slept with their knives out, packs and snowshoes close by.

  Near morning, when the fire was down to coals, Wolfred woke. He heard Mackinnon’s rasping breath very close. The dog barked. The girl got up and signaled that Wolfred should fasten on his snowshoes and gather their packs and blankets. As the light came up, Wolfred saw that the sinew snare set for Mackinnon was jigging, pulled tight. The dog worried and tore at some invisible shape. The girl showed Wolfred how to climb over the lean-to another way, and made him understand that he should check the snares she’d set, retrieve anything they’d caught, and not forget to remove the sinews so that she could reset them at their next camp.

  Mackinnon’s breathing resounded through the clearing around the fire. As Wolfred left, he saw that the girl was preparing a stick with pine pitch and birch bark. He saw her thrust it at the air again and again. There were muffled grunts of pain. Wolfred was so frightened that he had trouble finding all the snares, and he had to cut the sinew that had choked a frozen rabbit. Eventually, the girl joined him and they slid back down to the river with the dog. Behind them, unearthly caterwauls began. To Wolfred’s relief, the girl smiled and skimmed forward, calm, full of confidence. Though she was still a child.

  Wolfred asked the girl to tell him her name. He asked in words, he asked in signs, but she wouldn’t speak. Each time they stopped, he asked. But though she smiled at him, and understood exactly what he wanted, she wouldn’t answer. She looked into the distance.

  The next morning, after they had slept soundly, she knelt near the fire to blow it back to life. All of a sudden, she went still and stared into the trees. She jutted her chin forward, then pulled back her hair and narrowed her eyes. Wolfred followed her gaze and saw it too. Mackinnon’s head, rolling laboriously over the snow, its hair on fire, flames cheerfully flickering. Sometimes it banged into a tree and whimpered. Sometimes it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of neck, or its comically paddling ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its awkward, interminable progress.

  Fighting, outwitting, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog traveled. They wore out their snowshoes, and the girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and lined them with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.

  The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, as if over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible, even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw that the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare to open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, lifting his head only to sip the water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.

  He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.

  All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl heating the blade of the ax red hot and gripping the handle with rags. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside again. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke, and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.

  It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life.

  He must have heard wrong, or misunderstood. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose their intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition. The drum corrected some interior rhythm, a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.

  Again, that night, he heard the battle outside, anguished, desperate. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, when she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woolen turban. That night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned.

  You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing.

  Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body he was not afraid to lift off the ground alongside her. They traveled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast that no cold could reach them. Below them, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body that he would not leave again until he had completed half a century of bone-breaking work.

  Two days later, they left the deep wilderness and entered a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the lakeshore. On a street of beaten snow, several wooden houses were neatly rooted in an
incongruous row. They were so like the houses that Wolfred had left behind out east that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He knocked at the door of the largest house. Not until he had introduced himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a white man.

  She and her husband, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him.

  When you grow up, he said.

  She smiled and nodded.

  Again, he asked her name.

  She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower.

  The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school, in Michigan, that was for Indians only, and he offered to send the girl there too, if she wanted to become educated. She agreed to do it.

  At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her again. But there was no answer. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But that was all of herself. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now—Indian. As in, Do not speak Indian, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening.

  The other children smelled like old people. Soon she did too. Her woolen dress and corset pinched, and the woolen underwear made her itch like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she had to eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else.

  She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things—forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world.

  She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, and told her that she would live.

  Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held her foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll.

  YALITZA FERRERAS

  The Letician Age

  FROM Colorado Review

  LETICIA’S MOTHER SPOTTED the glint in between the cobblestones, near the statue of Christopher Columbus in Parque Colón, across the edge of her stomach like a tiny sun on the horizon. She bent down sideways, careful not to fold on the fetus that would soon be her baby girl. The ring was tiny, sized for a rich child’s finger. A pronged crown nestling a ruby intercepted the gold band.

  I hope it’s a girl.

  Once home, she led her husband to the backyard, past her sister crouched down cooking on coals, over to the avocado tree that would shield them from family and neighbors, and unfurled her hand under a sliver of sunlight, the ruby instantly peacocking its brilliant red facets.

  “For the baby.”

  He reached for it, but Leticia’s mother enclosed the ring in a fist. As he shook his head and moved his two fingers in unison with it, she pictured Leticia wearing the ring, her hair in ribboned, tubular ringlets, clad in a satiny tiered dress, inexplicably atop a prize goat, in a velvet-draped, gilded room. She wedged the fist in the deep triangle formed by the intersection of her engorged breasts and the top of her stomach.

  The appraiser in Zona Colonial, not far from where she found the ring, affirmed its authenticity, the thing that Leticia’s mother had felt in her heart. It had been a few years since she found the ring, and the lure of where that statue of Columbus pointed to (new horizons, the North) was pulling heavily on her family. Turned out that a child’s trinket could buy only so much, but shady loans were secured, and decisions about who would stay and who would go were made.

  Off to the New World.

  Leticia’s mother bought her a tiny fish tank with a tiny fish in it, which she named Pedro. They stared at the fish together and talked about his iridescence, litheness, ease of movement, and the impossibility of his breathing underwater. At the bottom of the tank was a small treasure chest like the ones that were sunken off the coast of Boca Chica, the ones her father had told her about as they sat in the sand, waves washing over their legs. He had told her there were jewels in the treasure chest like the one in the ring she’d once had, and that those jewels came from the earth and were excavated to give to good girls like her. She liked to be reminded of home. Leticia hoped that Pedro’s sort of beauty and wonder would be present in their lives, even though she had experienced only cold, filth, and restrictions since arriving in New York. Back home she had played and run around with her cousins and neighbors in the dirt surrounding their houses. She wanted her father to make up fantastic stories about shiny things born out of the earth, but he never had any time to dream with her anymore.

  She imagined Pedro was from an island too, and that he had many feelings and needs just like her own. She placed little rocks she picked up on her way home from school in his tank and fed him potato chips from her lunch because that was the only part of her lunch she liked to eat and thought Pedro would think the same. When he died, she stared as the white, gooey substance began appearing on him, and on the rocks after he started decomposing. He returned her stare with his marbled, milky eyes as he undulated in the current of the tank filter, the white wisps growing off his body, longer each day, billowing like ship sails. She had made her own foraminiferan—a sediment builder made out of fossilized fish, which drop to the ocean floor to become foraminiferan ooze. It took her mother two weeks to notice that Pedro was dead. She was too busy sweating at a sweatshop, coming home to not one but two babies, and Leticia. Her mother wouldn’t let her touch the ooze before she flushed Pedro down the toilet.

  Louis Agassiz (1807–1873, Swiss) became one of the best-known scientists in the world (several animal species, lakes, mountains, and a crater on Mars were named after him) for his study and classification of fossil fish, and was the first to propose that the earth had been subject to a great “Ice Age.” His Etudes sur les glaciers discussed the movements of the glaciers and their influenc
e in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they traveled and in producing striations that would shape the surface of the earth for millennia.

  When she was eight years old, she began her rock collection in shoeboxes in a crowded Washington Heights apartment shared with her aunt, uncle, and their four children. A few more family members lived two floors down from them; her family formed conglomerates—accumulations in shallow coastal waters—and their housing project was stacked up too, overflowing with people from everywhere, plus Mrs. Nussbaum, the lone white holdout.

  All the children slept in bunk beds, two bunk beds to a room and one or two kids to a bunk. She slept on a top bunk by herself (all the top bunkers slept by themselves for safety), and Gabriel and Adriana, the twins, slept on a bottom bunk together with pillows on the floor beside them in case they fell out. Her parents slept on the sofa bed in the living room.

  And out of her entire extended family, it was the twins who held everyone’s attention. They were a creamy, caramel color that was a perfect mixture of their father’s dark and their mother’s lighter skin, topped with undulating curls that were somewhere in between her father’s coarse Afro and her mother’s soft waves. Leticia was one hundred percent her father’s daughter—dark skin, kinky hair, and although it was too early to tell, it seemed as if she would also have a boyish figure instead of her mother’s show-stopping curves. Everyone was amazed by the similarity of the twins’ features and synchronization of their gestures. Leticia gave them a wide berth, imagining they would devise a silent signal, suddenly look up from their toys, and connect together like living, breathing puzzle things to cause the world’s destruction.