The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  She’s been waiting for it all autumn. Now the expectation is exhilarating. The calm of snow, its quiet, its cold stroke on her skin.

  At the window, she mouths the lines she’s going to say at her exit interview, but she is thinking about whether or not she’ll see the snowfall from the committee room. Next to that window, she should be able to see something, even if it’s just a slow white blur. As it falls it’ll bring a gathering silence to everything outside. Covering the gold, the red, the black, the gray. If she listens closely, she’ll hear it happen.

  DANIEL J. O’MALLEY

  Bridge

  FROM Alaska Quarterly Review

  HE SAW THE old couple twice, once when they stopped halfway across to pose for a picture, and again a year later when they came back, this time without a camera, and for a while all they did was stand there.

  Both times he watched from the window, which was not what he was supposed to be doing, he knew that, he knew well what he was supposed to be doing, which was studying. In the mornings, his mother would tell him things—he would follow her around the house while she did her inside work, then outside where she did her garden work and her chicken work—and he would listen and take notes in his notebook while she talked about the histories of their state and their country and their family—his mother’s family, plus his father’s family, and then their own family, the family they made when they made him—but also about the flood and locusts and frogs and other plagues that had happened before and could happen again, and he would take notes so that in the afternoon he could sit in his bedroom and study, and then in the evening, after the supper dishes were done, he could stand and recite for his father what all he’d learned from his mother in the morning.

  But his memory was strong. His mother’s words found a home in his mind the moment they left her mouth. So most days he passed his afternoon study time staring out the window and down at the bridge, which was the only thing he could see between the trees.

  On the other side of the bridge, he knew, was an enormous building built to look like a log cabin where people came to live for a few days at a time and eat fried fish. This was something people did, his father had told him, because they weren’t satisfied with the lives they’d made for themselves back home. And the fish, his father had said, did not come from the river beneath the bridge, they came from somewhere else. But he knew that part without his father saying, because almost always the water was low enough to see dirt and rocks at the river’s bottom. As for where the fish actually did come from, he wasn’t sure. Because once his father had said that they came from a farm in Arkansas, and he had believed his father, but then another time his father told him that the fish came not from Arkansas but from Asia, first by boat and then by train and then by truck, frozen.

  The bridge had been built for trains, but trains did not cross it anymore. People crossed it now, walking, and usually only halfway before they turned around and walked back. They would stop and stare sometimes, either over the edge or straight down between the boards. Sometimes they took pictures, balancing their cameras on the bridge’s side rail.

  He recognized the old couple because of their hats. They both wore straw hats with wide brims and red-and-yellow bands. The first time they came, they held hands and waited for their camera to flash, and then held hands again as they walked back. The second time, they wore the same hats, but they didn’t have a camera, they just stood there, not smiling, not holding hands, not even speaking, at least not that he could hear all the way up the hill.

  Minutes passed that way before the couple began untucking and unbuttoning their shirts, then stepping out of their sandals and unbuckling their belts and their pants and taking off those things, as well as the things underneath, and pushing the clothes all into a pile that the man picked up and dropped over the rail. They threw their hats too, and then they just stood there again, only now they were both naked and—he squinted—it looked like they were both bald. He blinked several times, then held his eyes closed, and when he opened his eyes the couple was still there, still naked. He glanced at his bedroom door, which was closed. He could hear his mother whistling, water splashing in the kitchen. When he turned back to the window, he pressed his nose to the screen and watched the old couple take a step closer and hold their faces together in a way that may have meant kissing. And then he watched as they turned and gripped the rail and eased themselves over one leg at a time, and even as they fell, they never made a sound.

  Remembering it, he had to remind himself that a whole year had passed between these sightings. Because in his mind they blurred together, and for moments he would wonder what happened to the camera that they’d balanced on the rail—was it still there? could it be his now?

  But then he would remember that there was no camera, not the second time. The second time it was just the man and the woman, and then they were gone, over the rail and down without a sound.

  His father told him it wasn’t possible, just not possible, that it happened that way. His father said that there must have been a sound, if not of voices then at least of impact, humans being as heavy as they are. And he wanted to believe his father, because he knew that what his father said was true. But at the same time, he also knew that what he himself had said was true, because he’d seen it, and, standing there in the living room after supper, as his mother folded towels and his father re-folded the newspaper, he struggled to see how everything could be true all at once.

  When his mother finally spoke, she agreed with his father. She agreed that it was not possible for her son to have seen what he said he’d seen, her reason being that for him to have seen what he said he’d seen, he would have had to have been standing and staring out the window and not studying that morning’s notes, as he knew he should have been, sitting at his desk, which was a good wooden desk, made by hand by his father and facing the wall all the way on the other side of the room.

  And so he said he agreed with his mother. He said he hadn’t seen anything at all, he must have imagined it. Or maybe it was a hallucination, an illusion, such as people experienced in the desert, though he had not been in a desert, he had been in his room, but maybe he needed to drink more water, he said, and his mother agreed, she said more water certainly couldn’t hurt.

  But what he saw on the bridge had not been an illusion, he knew that, and back in his room he tried to see the whole thing again. It was nighttime now and the house was quiet. He got out of his bed and crawled underneath. Under his bed he could pretend that he was in a cave, or that he was a turtle and the bed was his shell, and he found it easier to think this way, easier to concentrate. When he closed his eyes, he could see it—the bridge, the couple standing there in their hats, staring, holding hands then not holding hands, then undressing, now naked, over the rail and down. And then nothing. No, not nothing, he thought. It couldn’t be nothing. He kept thinking and thinking until finally he thought, Birds. The old couple were birds, or rather they had become birds. He closed his eyes and saw it all again—the couple, the undressing, everything as before, but this time before they hit the ground, their bodies shrank and their arms turned flat and wide, flapping. He saw it again and again, each time a little clearer. Their mouths became beaks. They sprouted feathers. Their eyes turned shiny and small and black, and their toes curled and sharpened like talons—they looked like hawks—and they dipped their talons down in the water, but there weren’t any fish there. So the old couple flew on, they circled back under the bridge and up into the woods where there were mice and worms and rabbits, because to a bird these things would taste good, and actually he himself had eaten a rabbit before, though he hadn’t realized this at the time. He didn’t know that what he’d eaten was a rabbit until afterward, when his father told him. He hadn’t been happy about that. But then his father told him that rabbits were meant for eating, and his mother had agreed, and he thought about it and decided that he wasn’t upset anymore. He’d felt bad because he’d known that rabbit since it was t
he size of a mouse, but he decided that his father was right, the rabbit was just doing its job, which was to feed their family, and then he felt fine. He did, mostly. But now, under his bed, thinking about the old couple and the bridge and about flying and birds, he did not feel fine. He couldn’t help wondering now what if the rabbit hadn’t really been a rabbit at all.

  KAREN RUSSELL

  The Prospectors

  FROM The New Yorker

  THE ENTIRE RIDE would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed.

  To be honest, I hadn’t expected to find the chairlift. Not through the maze of old-growth firs and not in the dwindling light. Not without our escort. A minute earlier, I’d been on the brink of suggesting that we give up and hike back to the logging road. But at the peak of our despondency we saw it: the lift, rising like a mirage out of the timber woods, its four dark cables striping the red sunset. Chairs were floating up the mountainside, forty feet above our heads. Empty chairs, upholstered in ice, swaying lightly in the wind. Sailing beside them, just as swiftly and serenely, a hundred chairs came down the mountain. As if a mirror were malfunctioning, each chair separating from a buckle-bright double. Nobody was manning the loading station; if we wanted to take the lift we’d have to do it alone. I squeezed Clara’s hand.

  A party awaited us at the peak. Or so we’d been told by Mr. No-Show, Mr. Nowhere, a French boy named Eugene de La Rochefoucauld.

  “I bet his real name is Burt,” Clara said angrily. We had never been stood up before. “I bet he’s actually from Tennessee.”

  Well, he had certainly seemed European, when we met him coming down the mountain road on horseback, one week ago this night. He’d had that hat! Such a convincingly stupid goatee! He’d pronounced his name as if he were coughing up a jewel. Eugene de La Rochefoucauld had proffered a nasally invitation: would we be his guests next Saturday night, at the gala opening of the Evergreen Lodge? We’d ride the new chairlift with him to the top of the mountain and be among the first visitors to the marvelous new ski resort. The president himself might be in attendance.

  Clara, unintimidated, had flirted back. “Two dates—is that not being a little greedy, Eugene?”

  “No less would be acceptable,” he’d said, smiling, “for a man of my stature.” (Eugene was five foot four; we’d assumed he meant education, wealth.) The party was to be held seven thousand feet above Lucerne, Oregon, the mountain town where we had marooned ourselves, at nineteen and twenty-two; still pretty (Clara was beautiful), still young enough to attract notice, but penniless, living week to week in a “historic” boarding house. “Historic” had turned out to be the landlady’s synonym for “haunted.” “Turn-of-the-century sash windows,” we’d discovered, meant “pneumonia holes.”

  We’d waited for Eugene for close to an hour, while Time went slinking around the forest, slyly rearranging its shadows; now a red glow clung to the huge branches of the Douglas firs. When I finally spoke, the bony snap in my voice startled us both.

  “We don’t need him, Clara.”

  “We don’t?”

  “No. We can get there on our own.”

  Clara turned to me with blue lips and flakes daggering her lashes. I felt a pang: I could see both that she was afraid of my proposal and that she could be persuaded. This is a terrible knowledge to possess about a friend. Nervously, I counted my silver and gold bracelets, meting out reasons for making the journey. If we did not make the trip, I would have to pawn them. I argued that it was riskier not to take this risk. (For me, at least; Clara had her wealthy parents waiting back in Florida. As much as we dared together, we never risked our friendship by bringing up that gulf.) I touched the fake red flower pinned to my black bun. What had we gone to all this effort for? We owed our landlady twelve dollars for January’s rent. Did Clara prefer to wait in the drifts for our prince, that fake frog, Eugene, to arrive?

  For months, all anybody in Lucerne had been able to talk about was this lodge, the centerpiece of a new ski resort on Mount Joy. Another New Deal miracle. In his Fireside Chats, Roosevelt had promised us that these construction projects would lift us out of the Depression. Sometimes I caught myself squinting hungrily at the peak, as if the government money might be visible, falling from the actual clouds. Out-of-work artisans had flocked to northern Oregon: carpenters, masons, weavers, engineers. The Evergreen Lodge, we’d heard, had original stonework, carved from five thousand pounds of native granite. Its doors were cathedral huge, made of hand-cut ponderosa pine. Murals had been commissioned from local artists: scenes of mountain wildflowers, rearing bears. Quilts covered the beds, hand-crocheted by the New Deal men. I loved to picture their callused black thumbs on the bridally white muslin. Architecturally, what was said to stun every visitor was the main hall: a huge hexagonal chamber, with a band platform and “acres for dancing, at the top of the world!”

  W.P.A. workers cut trails into the side of Mount Joy, assisted by the Civilian Conservation Corps boys from Camp Thistle and Camp Bountiful. I’d seen these young men around town, on leave from the woods, in their mud-caked boots and khaki shirts with the government logo. Their greasy faces clumped together like olives in a jar. They were the young mechanics who had wrenched the lift out of a snowy void and into skeletal, functioning existence. To raise bodies from the base of the mountain to the summit in eleven minutes! It sounded like one of Jules Verne’s visions.

  “See that platform?” I said to Clara. “Stand there, and fall back into the next chair. I’ll be right behind you.”

  At first, the climb was beautiful. An evergreen army held its position in the whipping winds. Soon the woods were replaced by fields of white. Icy outcroppings rose like fangs out of a pink-rimmed sky. We rose too, our voices swallowed by the cables’ groaning. Clara was singing something that I strained to hear and failed to comprehend.

  Clara and I called ourselves the Prospectors. Our fathers, two very different kinds of gambler, had been obsessed with the Gold Rush, and we grew up hearing stories about Yukon fever and the Klondike stampeders. We knew the legend of the farmer who had panned out $130,000, the clerk who dug up $85,000, the blacksmith who discovered a haul of the magic metal on Rabbit Creek and made himself a hundred grand richer in a single hour. This period of American history held a special appeal for Clara’s father, Mr. Finisterre, a bony-faced Portuguese immigrant to southwestern Florida who had wrung his modest fortune out of the sea-damp wallets of tourists. My own father had killed himself outside the dog track in the spring of 1931, and I’d been fortunate to find a job as a maid at the Hotel Finisterre.

  Clara Finisterre was the only other maid on staff—a summer job. Her parents were strict and oblivious people. Their thousand rules went unenforced. They were very busy with their guests. A sea serpent, it was rumored, haunted the coastline beside the hotel, and 90 percent of our tourism was serpent-driven. Amateur teratologists in Panama hats read the newspaper on the veranda, drinking orange juice and idly scanning the horizon for fins.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Finisterre whispered to me once, too sozzled to remember my name, “for keeping the secret that there is no secret.” The black Atlantic rippled emptily in his eyeglasses.

  Every night, Mrs. Finisterre hosted a cocktail hour: cubing green and orange melon, cranking songs out of the ivory gramophone, pouring bright malice into the fruit punch in the form of a mentally deranging Portuguese rum. She’d apprenticed her three beautiful daughters in the Light Arts, the Party Arts. Clara was her eldest. Together, the Finisterre women smoothed arguments and linens. They concocted banter, gab, palaver, patter—every sugary variety of small talk that dissolves into the night. I hated the cocktail hour, and whenever I could, I escaped to beat rugs and sweep leaves on the hotel roof. One Monday, however, I heard footsteps ringing on the ladder. It was Clara. She saw me and froze.

  Bruises were thickening all over her arms. They were that brilliant pansy-blue, the beautiful color that belies its origins. Automatically, I crossed
the roof to her. We clacked skeletons; to call it an “embrace” would misrepresent the violence of our first collision. To soothe her, I heard myself making stupid jokes, babbling inanities about the weather, asking in my vague and meandering way what could be done to help her; I could not bring myself to say, plainly, Who did this to you? Choking on my only real question, I offered her my cardigan—the way you’d hand a sick person a tissue. She put it on. She buttoned all the buttons. You couldn’t tell that anything was wrong now. This amazed me, that a covering so thin could erase her bruises. I’d half-expected them to bore holes through the wool.

  “Don’t worry, okay?” she said. “I promise, it’s nothing.”

  “I won’t tell,” I blurted out—although of course I had nothing to tell beyond what I’d glimpsed. Night fell, and I was shivering now, so Clara held me. Something subtle and real shifted inside our embrace—nothing detectable to an observer, but a change I registered in my bones. For the duration of our friendship, we’d trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld. We must have looked like some Janus-faced statue, our chins pointing east and west. An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends. Then I heard her say, staring over my shoulder at the darkening sea: “What would you be, Aubby, if you lived somewhere else?”

  “I’d be a prospector,” I told her, without batting an eye. “I’d be a prospector of the prospectors. I’d wait for luck to strike them, and then I’d take their gold.”

  Clara laughed and I joined in, amazed—until this moment, I hadn’t considered that my days at the hotel might be eclipsing other sorts of lives. Clara Finisterre was someone whom I thought of as having a fate to escape, but I wouldn’t have dignified my own prospects that way, by calling them “a fate.”