The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

  “Bad dream?”

  “No,” I said. I could hear the rabbit in the dark behind us, thumping around in his cage.

  “He can’t sleep either,” my father said.

  “What’s that one called?” I said, pointing to the fly he had in the vise.

  My dad was looking at me. “This one?” he said. And he told me, then showed me how it was made, clipping four or five blue-gray spears for the tail, then selecting a single strand from a peacock feather for the body. I watched him secure it with a few loops of thread, then start to wind it toward the eye of the hook, the short dark hairs sparking green with every turn through the light … And that’s when I saw it, not just the thick, familiar chestnut fur of the cheeks and head and neck, but now, for the first time, the missing nose and ears, the symmetrical cavities of the eyes, even the name itself, reaching back to deepest childhood through the medium of my father’s voice saying, “Pass me the hare’s mask,” “Let’s take a little bit off the hare’s mask.”

  It was the next day that I took the hare’s mask and hid it in my room. When he asked me if I’d seen it I lied, and when he came back upstairs after going through everything in the dining room (as though that piece of fur could have jumped from the table and hidden itself behind his books), I swore I didn’t have it and even let myself get indignant over the fact that he wouldn’t believe me. Eventually, he left. “For Christ’s sake,” I heard him saying to my mother downstairs, “it didn’t just disappear,” and then, “That’s not the point and you know it.”

  I slept with it under my pillow. I’d keep it in my pocket and run my thumb over the thin edge of the eye socket and the soft bristly parts where my father had clipped it short. When no one was home I’d hold it up to the rabbit cage and, appalled at myself, thrilled and shaky, yell “Look, look, this was you” to the rabbit who would sometimes hop over and try to nibble at it through the wires. I pushed my nose into it, breathing in that indescribable deep fur smell.

  And that’s how he found me, holding the hare’s mask against my face, crying so hard I didn’t hear him come into the room, two days before my ninth birthday. Because he’d understood about dates, and how things that aren’t connected can seem to be, and that he’d been nine years old when it happened. And he held me for a long time, petting my hair in that slightly awkward, fatherly way, saying, “It’s okay, everything’s going to be okay, everything’s just fine.”

  It was some years later that I asked him and he told me how it went that night. How he’d opened the dirt-scraping door to the hutch and entered that too-familiar smell of alfalfa and steel and shit already sick with the knowledge that he couldn’t do what he absolutely had to do. How he lit the lamp and watched them hop over to him. How he stood there by the crate, sobbing, pulling first on Jenda’s ears, then Eliška’s, picking up one, then the other, pushing his nose into their fur, telling them how much he loved them … unaware of the time passing, unaware of anything, really—this is how miserable he was—until suddenly a man’s voice speaks from behind the wall and says, “You’re a good boy. Let me choose.” My father laughed—a strange laugh: “And I remember standing there with my hands in the wire and feeling this stillness come over me, and him saying, ‘Jenda. Take Jenda, he’s the weaker of the two. It’s not wrong. Do it quickly.’ ”

  Lauren Groff

  Eyewall

  IT BEGAN WITH the chickens. They were Rhode Island Reds and I’d raised them from chicks. Though I called until my voice gave out, they’d huddled in the darkness under the house, a dim mass faintly pulsing. Fine, you ungrateful turds! I’d yelled before abandoning them to the storm. I stood in the kitchen at the one window I’d left unboarded and watched the hurricane’s bruise spreading in the west. I felt the chickens’ fear rising through the floorboards to pass through me like prayers.

  We waited. The weatherman on the television mimicked the swirl of the hurricane with his body like a valiant but inept modern dancer. All the other creatures of the earth flattened themselves, dug in. I stood in my window watching, a captain at the wheel, as the first gust filled the oaks on the far side of the lake and raced across the water. It shivered my lawn, my garden, sent the unplucked zucchini swinging like church bells. And then the wind smacked the house with an open hand. Bring it on, I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is yet another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.

  • • •

  At first, though, little happened. The lake goosebumped; I might have been looking at the sensitive flesh of an enormous lizard. The swing in the oak made larger arcs over the water. The palmettos nodded, accepting the dance.

  The wine I had been drinking was very good. I opened another bottle. It had been left in a special cooler in the butler’s pantry that had been designed to replicate precisely the earthy damp of the caves under Bourgogne. One bottle cost a year of retirement, or an hour squinting down the barrel of a hurricane.

  My neighbor’s Jeep kicked up hillocks of pale dust on the road. He saw me in the window and skidded to a halt. He rolled down the window, shouting, his face squared into his neck, the warm hue of a brick. But the wind now was so loud that his voice was lost, and I felt a surge of affection for him as he leaned out the window, gesticulating. We’d had a moment a few years back at a Conservation Trust benefit just after my husband left, our fortyish bodies both stuffed into finery. There was the taste of whiskey and the weirdness of his mustache against my teeth. Now I toasted him with my glass, and he shouted so hard he turned purple, and his hunting dog stuck her head from the back window and began to howl. I raised two fingers and calmly gave him a pope’s blessing. He bulged, affronted, and rolled up the window. He made a gesture as if wadding up a hunk of paper and tossing it behind his shoulder and then he pulled away to join the last stragglers pushing north as fast as their engines could strain. The great hand of the storm would wipe them off the road like words from a chalkboard. I’d hear of the way my neighbor’s Jeep, going a hundred miles per hour, lovingly kissed the concrete riser of an overpass. His dog would land clear over the six lanes in the southbound culvert and dig herself down. When the night passed and the day dawned calm, she’d pull herself to the road and find herself the sole miraculous survivor of a mile-long flesh and metal sandwich.

  I began to sing to myself, songs from childhood, songs with lyrics I didn’t understand then and still don’t, folk songs and commercial jingles and the Hungarian lullaby my father sang during my many sleepless nights when I was small. I was a high-strung, beetle-browed girl, and the songs only made me want to stay awake longer, to outlast him until he fell asleep crookedly against my headboard and I could watch the way his dreams moved beneath his handsome face. Enervated and watchful in school the next day, I’d be unable to follow the teacher’s voice, the ropes of her sentences as she led us through history or English or math, and would fill my notebooks with drawings—a hundred different houses, floors and windows and doors. All day I’d furiously scribble. If I only drew the right place to hold me, I could escape from the killing hours of school and draw myself all the way safely home.

  The house sucked in a shuddery breath, and the plywood groaned as the windows drew inward. Darkness fell over the world outside. Rain unleashed itself. It was neither freight train nor jet engine nor cataract crashing around me, but, rather, everything. The roof roared with water, the window blurred. When the storm cleared, I saw a branch the size of a locomotive cracking off the heritage oak by the lake and falling languorously down, the wet moss floating outstretched like useless dark wings.

  I felt, rather than saw, the power go out. Time erased itself from the appliances and the lights winked shut. The house went sinister behind me, oppressive with its dark humidity. When I turned, I saw my husband in the far doorway.

  You’re drinking my wine, he said. I could hear him perfectly, despite the storm. He was a stumpy man, thirty years older than me. I could smell the mint sprigs he chewed and the skin ointmen
t for his psoriasis.

  I didn’t think you’d mind, I said. You don’t need it anymore.

  He put both hands over his chest and smiled. A week after he left me, his heart broke itself apart. He was in bed with his mistress. She was so preposterously young that I assumed they conversed in baby talk. He hadn’t wanted children until he ended up fucking one. I was glad that she was the one who’d had to be stuck under his moist and cooling body, the one to shout his name and have it go unanswered.

  He came closer and stood next to me in the window. I went very still, as I always did near him. We watched the world on its bender outside. My beautiful tomatoes had flattened and the metal cages minced away across the lawn, as if ghosts were wearing them as hoopskirts.

  You’re still here, of course, he said. Even though they told you to get out days ago.

  This house is old, I said. It has lived through other storms.

  You never listen to anyone, he said.

  Have some wine, I said. Stand with me. Watch the show. But for God’s sake, shut it.

  He looked at me deeply. He had huge brown eyes that were young no matter how alligatored his skin got. His eyes were what had made me fall for him. He was a very good poet. The night I met him I sat, spellbound, at a reading my friend had dragged me to, his words softening the ground of me so that when he looked up, those brown eyes could tunnel all the way through.

  He drank a swig of wine and moaned in appreciation. At its peak, he said. Perfection. Drink it now.

  I plan to, I said.

  He began to go vague on me. I knew his poems were no good when they began to go vague. How’s my reputation? he said, the fingers of his hands melding into mittens. I was his literary executor; he hadn’t had time to change that one last thing.

  I’m letting it languish, I said.

  Ah, he said. La belle dame sans merci.

  I don’t speak Italian, I said.

  French, he said.

  Oh, dear, I said. My ignorance must have been so maddening.

  Honey, he said, you don’t know the half of it.

  Well, I said. I do know my half.

  I didn’t say, I had never said: Lord, how I longed for a version of you I could hold, entire, in my arms.

  He winked at me, and the mint smell intensified, and there was a pressure on my mouth, then a lessening. And then it was only the storm and the house and me.

  The darkness redoubled, the sound intensified. There were pulsing navy veins within the clouds; I remembered a hunting trip with my husband once, the buck’s organs gutted onto the ground. The camphor and magnolia and crepe myrtles pressed their crowns to the earth, backbending, acrobats. My teak picnic table galumphed itself toward the road, chasing after the chairs that had already fled away.

  My best laying hen was scraped from under the house and slid in a horrifying diagonal across the window. For a moment, we were eye to lizardy eye. I took a breath. The glass fogged, and when it cleared, my hen had blown away. Then the top layer of the lake seemed to rise in one great sheet and crush itself against the house. When the wind swept the water into the road, my garden became a pit in which a gar twisted and a baby alligator dug furiously into the mud. From behind the flattened blueberries, a nightmare creature of mud stood and leaned against the wind. It showed itself to be a man only moments before the wind picked him up and slammed him into the door. I didn’t think before I ran and heaved it open so that the man tumbled in. I was blown off my feet, and had to clutch the doorknob to keep from flying. The wind seized a flowerpot and smashed it through the microwave. The man crawled and helped me push the door until at last it closed and the storm was banished, howling to find itself outside again.

  The man was mudstruck, naked, laughing. A gold curl emerged from the filth of his head, and I wiped his face with the hem of my dress until I saw that he was my college boyfriend. I sat down on the floor beside him, scrabbling the dirt from him with my fingernails until I could make him out in his entirety.

  Oh! he shouted when he could speak. He’d always been a jovial boy, garrulous and loving. He clutched my face between his hands and said, You’re old! You’re old! You should wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled.

  I don’t wear trousers, I said, and snatched my head away. There was still water in the pipes, and I washed him until he was clean. He fashioned a loincloth out of a kitchen towel. He kept his head turned from me, staring at me from the corners of his eyes until I took his chin in my fingers and turned it. There it was, the wet rose blossoming above his ear. He took a long swallow of wine and I watched a red ligament move over the bone.

  So you really did it, I said.

  A friend of a friend of a friend had told me something: Calgary, the worst motel he could find, the family’s antique dueling pistol. But I didn’t trust either the friend or the friend of the friend, certainly not the friend to the third power, and this act seemed so out of character for such a vivid soul that I decided it couldn’t possibly have been true.

  It’s so strange, I said. You were always the happiest person I knew. You were so happy I had to break up with you.

  He cocked his head and pulled me into his lap. Happy, eh? he said.

  I rested against his thin young chest. I thought of how I had been so tired after two years of him, how I couldn’t bear the three a.m. phone calls when he had to read me a passage from Benjamin, the Saturdays when I had to search for him in bars or find him in strangers’ living rooms, how, if I had to make one more goddamn egg sandwich to fill his mouth and quiet him and make him fall asleep at dawn, I would shatter into fragments myself. Our last month was in Spain. I had sold one of my ovaries to get us there, and lost him in Barcelona. For an hour I wept at the center of a knot of concerned Spaniards, until he came loping down the street toward me, some stranger’s stolen Afghan hound tugging at the leash in his hand. A peculiar light had been kindled in his eye; it blazed before him, a herald announcing his peculiar vibrancy. I looked up at him in the dim of the house, the hole in the side of his head.

  He smiled, expectant, brushing my knuckles with his lips. I said, Oh.

  Bygones, he said. He downed half of the bottle of wine as if it were a plastic cup of beer. A swarm of palmetto bugs burst up through the air-conditioning vent and paraded politely by in single file. I could feel the thinness of the dishcloth between his skin and my legs, the way this beautiful boy had always stirred me.

  My God, I loved you, I said. I had played it close to my chest then; I had thought not telling him was the source of my power over him.

  Also bygones, he said. Now tell me what you’re doing here.

  The rowboat skipped over the lake, waggling its oars like swimmers’ arms. It launched itself into the trunks of the oaks and pinned itself there. I saw the glass of the window beating, darkness so deep in it that I could see myself, gray at the temples, lined from nostril to lip. The house felt cavernous around me. I had thought it would be full by now: of husband, of small voices, at the very least of chickens.

  Do you remember our children? I asked.

  He beamed. Clothilde, he said. Rupert. Haricot and Abricot, the twins. Dodie. Australopithecus. And Dirk. All prodigies, with your brains and my looks.

  You forgot Cleanth, I said.

  My favorite! he said. How could I have forgotten? Maker of crossword puzzles, National Spelling Bee champion. Good old Cleanth.

  He lifted the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it. It’s too bad, he murmured.

  Before I could ask what was too bad, the window imploded, showering us with glass. The wind reached in and sucked him out. I clutched at the countertops and saw my beautiful boy swan-dive into the three-foot-deep pond that had been my yard. He turned on his back and did a few strokes. Then he imitated one of my dead chickens floating about in the water, her two wings cocked skyward in imprecation. Like synchronized swimmers, they swirled about each other, arms to the sky, and then, in a gulp, both sank.

  I tucked two bottles and a corkscrew into
my sleeves and pulled myself to the doorway against the tug of the wind. I could barely walk when I was through. The house heaved around me and the wind followed, overturning clocks and chairs, paging through the sheet music on the piano before snatching it up and carrying it away. It riffled through my books one by one as if searching for marginalia, then toppled the bookshelves. The water pushed upward from under the house, through the floor cracks, through the vents, turning my rugs into marshes. Rats scampered up the stairs to my bedroom. I trudged over the mess and crawled up, step by step, on my hands and knees. A terrapin passed me, then a raccoon with a baby clutched to its back, gazing at me with wide robbers’ eyes. Peekaboo, I said, and it hid its face in its mother’s ruff. In the light of a battery-powered alarm clock, I saw rats, a snake, a possum, a heap of bugs scattered across the room, as if gathered for a slumber party, all those gleaming eyes in the dark. The bathroom was the sole windowless place at the heart of the house, and when I was inside, I locked them all out.

  I sat in the bathtub, loving its cool embrace of my body. I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing. It was thick black in the bathroom, sealed tight. The house twisted and shook; above, the roof peeled itself slowly apart. The wind played the chimney until the whole place wheezed like a bagpipe. I savored each sip of wine and wondered what the end would be: the roof gone and the storm galloping in; the house tilting on its risers and rolling me out; a water moccasin crawling up the pipes and finding a warm place to nest between my legs.

  Above the scream of the storm, there came the hiss and sputter of a wet match. Then a weak flame licked brightly near the toilet and went out. There rose in its place the sweet smell of pipe smoke.

  Jesus Christ, I said.

  No. Your father, he said in his soft accent. He had a smile in his voice when he said, Watch your language, my love.

  I felt him near, sitting at the edge of the bathtub as if it were the side of a bed. I felt his hand brushing the wet hair out of my mouth. I lifted my own hand and caught his, feeling the sop of his flesh against the fragile bone. I was glad it was dark. He’d been eaten from the inside by cancer. My mother, after too many gin and tonics, always turned cruel. She had once described my father’s end to me. The last few days, she’d said, he was a sack of swollen flesh.