The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Mr. Gamrod struck his arm on the ground. Jurgen slid out from under him. He stood and helped Priscilla’s father to a wobbly crouch. Then Priscilla herself elbowed in through the circle of men and stood there, holding Mitts. She bent over, made sure her father was all right.

  “There’s a meatball hot dish still warm in the oven, Dad,” she said. “I’ll be home late. Get some sleep.” She took Jurgen’s arm, and they walked about fifty paces before confronting Nero.

  “Aw, not you,” Jurgen said to the dog.

  A length of rope dangled from Nero’s collar and he didn’t growl when Jurgen picked it up.

  “It’s time to let him loose in the shop anyway,” Jurgen said. He walked him into the store, tossed in a couple of dried-up wieners, and locked up. He and Priscilla left me there, too, in my grandparents’ house, and walked off to plan their new life.

  The next morning, Jurgen stared at the fence for a long time before leaving in the truck. He returned with a roll of wire and the equipment to attach it to the top of the fence. He tinkered around with the spot on the side of the house where the electrical current fed in from the power pole. He was on the ladder all the rest of the morning, carefully threading the wire. He wouldn’t let me near. Nero rested in the shadow of the pine tree.

  It was noon by the time Jurgen had finished and flipped the breaker. My grandparents closed up the shop for an hour and each had a beer as they watched from the kitchen windows. It took no time at all. Nero launched himself, scrambled up the fence exactly the way he’d puzzled out the day before. When the electrified wire touched him, he yelped like a puppy and fell, twisting. He lay still a moment, then rose and began to walk in wobbly, widening circles, until he reached the other side of the yard. He stood, panting, then suddenly gathered himself and bounded forward. Again Nero made his peculiar way up the fence, only this time when he reached the wire he snatched it between his teeth before he fell.

  Nero shorted out the lights in the house and in the display cases, the fridge, the freezers, and everything else that didn’t run off the generator. Then he lay on the ground with the dead cord beside him.

  My grandparents and uncle ran around madly trying to restore the power. I went to Nero. He was still breathing. I sat down next to him, and for the first time put my hands on him. I stroked his forehead and scratched behind his ears. When at last he could rise, he dragged himself to the corner of the yard and curled up in the rust-colored pine needles, his nose hidden in his tail. I watched over him for the rest of the afternoon. He was beautiful, like a white wolf in the forest.

  Mr. Gamrod could not stop talking about his trip to the other world. To Priscilla, to my grandparents, to the patrons of the bar, and to anyone else who would listen, he would describe how in the clutch of Jurgen’s limbs he had died and come to life again. He had not walked into the light. He had not seen Jesus. The only way he could explain it was to say that he had been suspended in a timeless present that held the key to … something. He’d felt his arm pound the earth just as he was about to grasp the meaning of it. A few days later, he realized he was no longer afraid. After death he would understand the answers to questions that in this life he couldn’t even put into words. Aside from this new assurance, Mr. Gamrod didn’t seem much changed.

  I didn’t get to see a change in Nero, either. He was still quietly recovering when I left, sleeping long days in the pine needles. I went home to my new baby brother.

  • • •

  Six months or so passed before we returned for a Christmas visit. It hadn’t snowed for weeks, and the ground was covered with what Midwesterners call “snirt.” Everything was gray and grainy, like a blurred old movie. Nero no longer lived in the backyard but in a cage constructed out of the chicken run. The wire had been replaced with a thicker grade and it even ran beneath the ground, Jurgen said. The chicken-wire roof, which had once foiled hawks, now kept Nero from jumping out.

  It was one thing to walk out the back door into the yard where Nero lived. It was another thing entirely to walk into his cage. He seemed more dangerous now. His coat had yellowed. He didn’t recognize me. Didn’t come forward for a gingersnap, didn’t even notice the cookies I threw onto the trampled shit-strewn dirt. He was obsessed with an old iron cauldron, which he flipped up and down with jerks of his massive head. He wrestled with it. Rolled it, bit at it. He was raw energy with just one focus.

  It was early summer the next time we visited. Nero was losing his winter coat, and clumps stuck out in filthy puffs. He was still rolling his cauldron around but now with only stubs of teeth—he’d broken them on the iron. Jurgen no longer took Nero out to guard the shop. He still worked there but was married to Priscilla now, living several blocks away. My grandparents had installed an electrical alarm system.

  One day, with no word to anyone, Jurgen went to the chicken run and shot Nero. I saw him hauling the dog to the back field, by his tail, like a scrap of rug. He carried a shovel. I grabbed another. Together we dug deep into the ground. We lowered Nero down as far as our arms could reach, and dropped him into the timeless present.

  Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

  A Golden Light

  AFTER HER FATHER DIED Sadie stopped moving.

  It started with her throat. The day her mother called and told her he was dead she opened her mouth to scream or cry or shout or something, and nothing came out. She pushed her throat muscles together and moved her tongue around until she felt ridiculous and then, at last, a bubble of sound slowly pushed its way out of her mouth. It was a tiny, tinny “no” quickly buried underneath the sobs, which flagged in and out from the receiver. She tried again to say something more, but this time she spoke only silence.

  Hello? her mother called over the receiver. Sadie, hello?

  I will never be able to talk again, Sadie thought mournfully, and she thoughtlessly placed the phone back in its cradle.

  But the loss of sound was only the beginning. It was soon followed by a loss of movement. Walking up and down a flight of stairs became an insurmountable effort; soon even walking on the flattest of flat sidewalks seemed an undertaking too painful to bear. She began to feel like she was struggling underwater each time she stood up on her own two feet. By the time of the funeral her hands and feet had become slow and dimwitted, clumsy and uneasy to maneuver.

  At the burial Sadie stood in the front row and, as they lowered the casket into the ground, she realized that she could no longer hear the morbid sounds of the coffin scratching along the dirt. She strained her head forward, listening for the sounds of tears and the unwholesome noise of noses being blown, but there was nothing except a strange humming void.

  I’ve misplaced my ears, she thought, and tried to remember if she had put them on that morning or had simply gone out without them.

  She looked around for her sister, or her mother or her brother-in-law; instead she caught the wandering eye of a middle-aged woman, some variant of cousin or family friend. She touched Sadie’s hand, her eyes watering in a fresh wave of tears. Be strong, she read off the woman’s lips. Sadie nodded vaguely and let her hand be clutched, let herself be dragged into the sea of black cloth that wept and reminisced on her shoulder. They all seemed so sad, but Sadie, dazed from the loss of her senses, kept forgetting what they were being sad for.

  After the burial, she fell under a wave of exhaustion. She couldn’t even make it out of the cemetery to the car; on the way out she simply sat down to rest on a little bench marked VINER and never got up. If it wasn’t for her brother-in-law, who noticed her absence in the car and came looking for her, she might have remained there forever, crouched on the bench like a small frightened creature. He found her sitting there, her fingers roaming desperately over her ears, as if to reassure herself she had not lost them. He had known Sadie since she was a little girl and when he saw her sitting there, looking for her lost ears, it was as if they had fallen through time and they were children again. He plucked her up from the bench and carried her to the car, where her mothe
r and sister were waiting. She fell asleep in his arms before he had even finished buckling her seat belt.

  The next thing she knew she was back in her parents’ house, surrounded by people she did not know who all seemed to know her. Her mother did not know what to do with her, so she was ensconced among the nearly dead, a group of forgotten wheezing elderly people who pinched her cheeks roughly with their papery fingers and patted their leaking eyes with wrinkled handkerchiefs. Sadie could tell from the force of their expirations on her cheeks that they were shouting their words into each other’s dim ears. She was grateful that she could no longer hear them and slid her eyes away to avoid reading their lips. And then, as she waited, hearing nothing and feeling nothing except the slow, mournful reverberations of many feet on the living room floor, she felt her limbs petrifying. Her eyelids began falling slowly down, then up, then back down again. Terrified, she somehow managed to excuse herself and stumbled away toward the stairs. She crawled up the steps to the warmth of her old bed, kicking off her shoes and curling, blissful-deep, under the covers. When she woke up it was dark outside and the warm, familiar body of her sister was curled catlike around her.

  Get out, she said, or tried to say. She found she could still at least turn over and so she did that and wedged her elbow cruelly into her sister’s side, wriggling deeper and deeper until she woke up. What? her sister queried in the raspy voice of the newly awoken, but Sadie was deaf to her pleas.

  In a quick minute the last of Sadie’s patience was lost, run off perhaps to join all the sounds which she could no longer hear or make. Rallying the last of her strength she planted her feet firmly into her sister’s back and pushed her off the bed.

  She could feel her sister’s tears as she got up off the floor and walked out of the room. She could feel the slam of the door even though she had gone deaf. When her sister had gone and she could not hear even a trace of angry feet stomping down the hallway she began to regret having pushed her out. She felt very small and alone in the dark of her room and for a while there was no difference between her opened eyes and her shut ones. She thought she had gone blind. She wanted to go and hug her sister and beg her forgiveness for her own selfishness and say, I’m sorry I can’t cry with you, I’m sorry I can’t give you what you need, I love you, but it was already too late for that. She had grown roots, she was immobile, and her vocal cords had died away, so rather than try to uproot herself she fell asleep instead.

  When she woke up again her mother was there. It was morning and she was smoking and staring out the window, smoking as if nothing had happened, as if she belonged there in Sadie’s room by her window, as if Sadie were a little girl again and her mother had come in to check on her daughter, the most natural thing in the world to check on your daughter, leaving her husband alone in their bedroom to sleep. She tried to think of the last time that they had been together in this room and she fell upon a memory of long ago. When she was little she had lost her sister’s hat and her sister had yelled at her and her father was gone, as usual. It had been her mother who had coaxed her into opening the locked door of her room, who had pulled her onto her lap and told her that there was no use crying over spilt milk or lost hats and kissed her until all the tears ran away.

  She willed her mother to come to her again as she had come to her before and run her hands through her hair and hold her as she cried. Instead she stood there smoking as if she hadn’t realized that Sadie had woken up and that she needed her. She was filled suddenly with an insensible hatred, a pulse of anger which coursed through her body making her flush with fatigue. Get out, she started to say, and fell asleep halfway through saying it.

  The psychiatrist that her mother lured up to Sadie’s room told her that this was normal. She wore a beautiful plum skirt suit and round-toed brown shoes, the same shoes that Sadie owned, the same shoes she had worn to the funeral and then kicked off her feet on her way to bed. Sadie thought their matching shoes were a sign, from God, the universe, or whoever, and so she stared at the shoes as the psychiatrist told her that there was no normal reaction to grief, which, conversely, meant that any reaction was normal. As she said this, Sadie realized that she could hear again. The suddenness of this abrupt return of sound and sense startled her so that she almost began to laugh. Instead the laugh turned into a yawn that went on for a century in which everything stayed exactly as it was. The psychiatrist blinked and the yawn was broken, the century over in a second. The psychiatrist asked Sadie all sorts of questions which Sadie might have answered had she been able to speak. I need to sleep, Sadie thought as her eyes closed and she drifted off. The psychiatrist seemed to understand.

  Sadie’s mother and sister and brother-in-law all took turns watching over Sadie. Our Sleeping Beauty, they called her as they watched the slow rise and fall of her sleep breath. They humored her for a few weeks. A sleeping girl, after all, requires nothing but a little food and a little worry, and the worry was a blessing, a reason to look in front of themselves, and not into their own hearts. They prodded her gently into wakefulness and tried to feed her the lightest of foods: juice and Jell-O, dried toast and soups. She nibbled at them in a daze then fell into sleep again and again. They tried to get her to talk or to move or to see, but it seemed she could no longer do any of these things very well at all. They brought in doctors, who sometimes said her soul was sick, or that she was a medical mystery, or that there was nothing wrong with her at all. The latter type of doctor they considered to be a complete quack and they would be sure to always smile and nod, being kinder and gentler than they would have with someone they considered sane. No matter their opinion of Sadie, no one knew how to fix her. Her family began to believe she was broken forever and adjusted themselves accordingly.

  And then a strange thing happened. Sadie woke up one evening to find her room lit up in gold. It was the magic hour, the last hour of sunlight in a day, when everything was bathed in golden light and the warmth of the fading sun made the colors of the sky glow ember bright. She wondered suddenly if she had read that in a book or if her father had told her that. And as she thought that word, the word father, a golden flicker burst into the golden room and danced across her legs and arms and face before settling gently on the wall beside her bed. She reached out and placed her hand upon the dancing flicker. Papa? she asked.

  It was the first word she had spoken in a year.

  In the morning she was a little better. She sat up in bed and said please and thank you to her mother’s shock and amazement. For a few minutes strung together she had a brief, quotidian conversation about breakfast foods with her sister. But her mind was elsewhere; she could think of nothing but the flicker of light, a beam of brightness in a field of gold.

  From then on, every night at the magic hour, the golden flicker danced into Sadie’s bedroom. She placed her hands on the light and let it thread through her fingers. She found that the flicker let her fall asleep with her heart at ease and wake up in the morning with the strength to last through the day. She could get up and get dressed and go downstairs and eat breakfast with her mother like a normal person. She could hear and speak and move her limbs, her flesh no longer cold as a statue. She could be good for her mother and strong for her sister, she could count on both hands over and over again the good things that she did every day. Yes, she was good. One morning they ran out of milk at breakfast and she volunteered to go to the corner store and buy more. When the cashier flirted with her she flirted back and gave him the first smile she had been able to give since her mother had called her that long, long time ago. She was happy, in a way.

  One night she went to her room at the hour only to find her sister already there. She was sitting there on Sadie’s bed with a book in her hands and when she heard her footsteps she looked up at her with a smile that reached out to Sadie’s heart. She opened her mouth to speak only to close it again and Sadie wondered wildly if her former disease was catching and her sister had gone suddenly mute as she once had.

  The sun w
as setting and the room had turned a brilliant gold.

  Look, her sister said suddenly.

  It was the magic hour and the flicker danced in a beam of light between them. Sadie’s sister reached out her hand and Sadie’s light, a glimmer of brilliance in a room of gold, played across her fingers. Suddenly Sadie felt happy; happy that her sister was in her room and that she had seen the light and that Sadie could explain everything to her. She felt sure quite suddenly that her sister would understand, that she was the only one who could understand and that even if she hadn’t stumbled into her room unexpectedly like this, she would have brought her here eventually in order to show her the flicker. Sadie reached out for her hand and saw suddenly that she wasn’t looking at the flicker at all anymore, but out, out through the window. She turned to see what her sister was looking at and saw her little next door neighbor, a child named Tanya, whose room was directly across from her own. She was playing with a little pocket mirror, flicking it lazily back and forth, now catching the light, now letting it go. It flashed across Sadie’s face and for a blissful second she was blind.

  Do you see that? her sister asked, pointing. Can you see?

  Chinelo Okparanta

  Fairness

  WE GATHER OUTSIDE THE classroom, in the break between morning and afternoon lectures, all of us girls not blessed with skin the color of ripe pawpaw. We stand there, on the concrete steps, chewing groundnuts and meat pies, all of us with the same dark skin, matching, like the uniforms we wear. All of us, excepting Onyechi of course, because her skin has now turned color, and we are eager to know how. It is the reason she stands with us, though she no longer belongs. She is now one of the others, one of the girls with fair skin.