The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  “But Mama,” I said. “Can’t survive without a ride and a weapon, not with these hellion boys.”

  “Stay inside, then. Read one of those books Miss Edna lent you.”

  I pictured myself shut up in the air-conditioning, sealed off from summer in this twilight house of whispers and swallowed words.

  “Go ahead and take my Daisy,” I said.

  Then Mama’s eyes went wide.

  “What’s that on your hand?” she said.

  I looked down, saw that my Band-Aid hadn’t survived Miss Edna’s scouring, that my wound was puckered purple, but at least the Neosporin had kept off the pus.

  “Tore it on a catbrier thorn,” I said. “But I cleaned it and put on antibiotic. It’s not oozing nothing.”

  “Elizabeth Ann.” Mama shot across the room, picked up my hand, and turned it in the lamplight. “It’s not infected, but it could’ve been. You ought’ve got stitches and an oral antibiotic. Tell me right now how you got this thing.”

  “Dragon nipped me.”

  I couldn’t think of a reasonable fib. If I said dog bite, they might make me get twenty-one rabies shots in the belly, like Kenny Dennis suffered when that field rat bit him.

  “But it was an accident. I had my hand too close to his dinner.”

  Mama gnawed her lip, doing math in her head. She’d forgot all about Dragon, and now she imagined how much he’d grown.

  “God damn it,” she hissed. A tremble worked its way through her.

  I bowed my head, waiting for the tornado of her fury to bluster over me.

  “I slave all day at the hospital, and you drown your worthlessness in drink,” she screamed at Daddy. “The least you could do is keep an eye on things around here. How the hell you let that gator get so big?”

  “What do you know?” squalled Daddy. “You’re never here. And when you are, you’re like a vampire sleeping, with us on pins and needles.”

  And then they went at it, screeching accusations, excuses, and insults, dragging up ancient shit from the deep latrine of their marriage, circling the room like professional wrestlers who’d never take the leap to strangle each other.

  I sat on the couch and let their words lapse into noise, until Daddy went stone-cold silent. He stomped to his gun case, unlocked it, and grabbed his .22. I thought for sure he’d shoot Mama, that I’d be haunted for life by the sight of her spattered brains. But then, crook-backed and grabbing at the waistline of his pitiful too-big shorts, Daddy stomped out the back door.

  “Don’t you worry, Miss Dracula,” he yelled. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I followed him out into the afternoon glare, where hellions filled the air with thunder, go-carts and dirt bikes kicking up dust. When they saw Daddy bumbling like the Swamp Ape, mad-eyed with his gun, they idled after him. Trying to catch up, I sprinted under the high summer sun, my nose running with the snot of grief.

  “Don’t do it,” I cried, but nobody heard me. A half-dozen engines revved.

  Daddy stooped over Dragon’s cage, unclamped the chicken wire, and flung the cover away. The hellions cut their motors and inched up for a better look. As cicadas chanted in the mystic heat, Dragon crawled out onto the grass and stretched to his full length, nearly three feet long, his spiked back slicked with water. The glorious prehistoric creature opened his mouth in a fanged grin.

  “Please Daddy,” I said gently. “Just let him run off. He’ll smell swamp and head right for it.”

  “He might come back for food and bite somebody. Never should’ve let you keep him in the first place.”

  Still, Daddy seemed to consider my wish. Sat there thinking and cradling his gun.

  “Shoot him,” yelled Dinky Watts. “He looks big enough to eat a baby.”

  “Fools,” I snapped. “None of your damn business.”

  “Call somebody a fool,” Mitch and Butch chanted, “you in danger of hell’s fire.”

  Daddy shook his head as though rousing from a dream, took aim, and fired, catching Dragon in the flank. The gator let out a gurgling hiss and rolled onto his side. The boys cheered. Daddy fired again at a closer range, kicked the poor beast onto his back, and blasted another bullet into his pale belly.

  Daddy picked up the limp reptile by the tail, swung his gory trophy in the air, and staggered around the shed toward Mama.

  “You happy now, Miss Dracula?” he shrieked.

  Mama stood on the back stoop, fists clenched, her skin so white she glowed.

  “Idgets all,” I hissed, and ran off into the woods.

  It was almost dusk, light tipping toward pink. I was in the swamp, bawling my miseries to the throb of frogs—my baby gator dead, Alex shamed and switched on my account, my house a tomb of silent wrath, vampire and ogre cramming it roof to cellar with what Miss Ruby called bad vibes. I was a hellion, for sure, who deserved to slip back into the swamp from which the first land creatures crawled: those fish with legs, skinks or whatever, primitive pining things. I had four hundred and thirty-six dollars in my savings account. Weren’t enough lizards in Davis Station to shoot for college tuition. Plus, Miss Edna had banished me from her porch. Hellions like me never got scholarships, so why bother striving in school?

  I was lost, doomed to attend Central Carolina Tech, master some bleak medical procedure, and turn into a vampire like my mama. I’d prick human bodies a hundred times a day at Clarendon Memorial, fill those little feedbags with sugar water, or worse: wash diseased feet, rub salve on bedsores, drain abscesses as big as tennis balls. I saw myself, pale and moving in a dream through a hive of the sick and dying, a one-week vacation the only thing to look forward to. Alex had said he wanted to build rockets, and I pictured him zipping off into the twinkling black of space, leaving the likes of me to rot on our ruined planet. I imagined humans crammed cheek to jowl, mutated by nukes, resorting to cannibalism after they’d devoured every last animal alive. I saw plant life stamped out by solid blacktop, the globe turned to a ball of tar.

  Alex, fated to zoom through universes unknown, was right to keep his distance from both me and planet Earth, a thought that made me bawl the harder. When I finally stopped crying, the bellowing went on, as though the spirit of my grief had haunted the forest. But it was the Swamp Ape, I realized, roaring along with me. Now he, too, stilled his song. We’d twined our grief together, which had drained the poison from me. I was grateful to the man-beast for that.

  Exhausted, I leaned against a cypress, watching lightning bugs sway out from whatever holes they slept in during the day.

  I noticed a circle of light spotting the trees—the Plat Eye, I thought, sniffing my weakness, come out of his demonic dimension to hound me until I lost my marbles. But it was only a flashlight, my daddy come to fetch me, no doubt.

  “Butter,” said a voice high and boyish, not yet croaky from change.

  Alex sat down beside me.

  “Where you been?” I asked.

  “Meemaw kept me locked in all day. But as soon as she dozed off, I put a fake person in my bed, towels and blankets, and slipped out the window to find you.”

  “You’re not mad at me about the switching?”

  “Not your fault. Got a will of my own and so do you.”

  “I guess we all do,” I said, thinking it over. “Though some people got more room to move than others.”

  “Sorry about Dragon,” he whispered, slipping his hand into mine. “Butch told me all about it.”

  “Daddy might’ve been right,” I said. “That gator would’ve probably come back for food and bit somebody.”

  We sat there, sweaty hands fastened in a funny position.

  “Little Matthew’s coming home next week,” said Alex.

  They’d cut the oxygen in his brother’s tank, and though the baby had struggled, he’d gotten the hang of breathing. I tried to think of something to say. I was happy for Alex but also sad: summer would suck when he was gone, the dog days coming on, me left with nobody to play with but hellion boys.

  “Good,”
I said. “When do they come get you?”

  “A week or so. We could be pen pals, you know.”

  I pictured myself trying to write a decent letter, struggling to impress, straining for the right words. I pictured Alex sniggering every time I misspelled something or got carried away with Miss Edna’s thesaurus. And what would I have to tell him? About my vampire mama and drunken daddy? About go-cart races and BB-gun fights? About the King Arthur novels Miss Edna lent me? Or the Swamp Ape’s preference for Slim Jims over beef jerky?

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never been one to write letters.”

  We sat in silence for a spell, listening to night music—insect, amphibian, and bird. The Swamp Ape started up again, gentle and wistful, more soft-grunted song than howl. When Alex flicked on his flashlight to catch him in action, the creature lurched off into deeper swamp.

  “What the hell?” said Alex.

  Now big-eyed creatures glided through his circle of light—two, three, four—their limbs splayed, furry membranes stretched wide.

  “Fairies,” I whispered, though I knew they were only flying squirrels, come to feed on pawpaw fruit.

  They landed on a branch and shimmied down to the heavy clusters, the fruit bruised and rotten-looking on the outside. But inside was soft yellow pulp like banana custard.

  “Fairies,” Alex repeated, as though to hypnotize himself into believing, and I strained hard to believe too, pictured the creatures twittering real language and working magic spells.

  I could see the future of summer. Ravaged cornfields and soybean chaff. Cicadas buzzing like broken toys in parched grass. Muscadines past ripeness, fermenting on the ground, the woods smelling like wine. School would be here in a blink, and then I’d be in prison for a solid nine months.

  But now, summer was at its height, offering its sweetest fruits, full of furry fairies and glowing bugs. Alex leaned against me, humming with warm blood, his brain like a different universe.

  JEFFREY EUGENIDES

  Bronze

  from The New Yorker

  The college freshman, being high, was also a little paranoid. Therefore, as he boarded the Amtrak Colonial he had the impression that people could tell. Why was everyone staring? Some smiling, some raising eyebrows, a few shaking their heads. Do I reek? Eugene thought. I used Binaca.

  Then he remembered what he was wearing. The white fur coat. The pink sunglasses. The striped collegiate scarf knotted at his neck. Sort of a new look for him, part glam, part New Wave.

  Eugene’s little secret? He wanted to be beautiful. If that didn’t work, noticeable would do.

  He unzipped his coat and fanned himself, hot from running down the platform.

  It was a late-November afternoon, in the confusing year of 1978, and Eugene was headed back to school after a wild weekend exploring the demimonde. Eugene knew that was a French word associated with women of dubious morals, but in his mind it included the teen runaways at that chicken-hawk bar Stigwood had taken him to, Saturday night; plus Stigwood himself, who was rich and debauched. The main thing about the demimonde was that nobody back at the dorm had a clue about it. Only Eugene.

  As he started down the aisle, he watched passengers’ reactions through his sunglasses. One lady poked her husband, as if to say, Only in New York! An old guy with a mean red face and a Teamster’s haircut scowled and said something that sounded like “Fruitcake.” That was fine. Scandalizing the sensibilities of the masses was part of the vocation. Better get used to it, Eugene told himself.

  He was so caught up in the act of scandalizing sensibilities that it took him a while to notice something. The train was packed. Should have got here earlier.

  Raphael had made him late. They were up in Stigwood’s bedroom, Eugene packing his duffel, when Raphael said, “Want to play a game with me? Please. It’s fun.”

  Raphael was Stigwood’s boyfriend from Venezuela. He was lying across the bed, dressed in tight salmon flares, a Qiana shirt, and platform shoes, his black hair cut in a wedge, like Dorothy Hamill’s. Raphael was about Eugene’s age, but he didn’t go to college; he worked at a hair salon, sweeping up hair. The rest of the time he lounged around the town house.

  Eugene felt sorry for Raphael. He hadn’t known there were male concubines. Also, Raphael had just lit a joint. So Eugene said, “OK, I’ll play for a minute.”

  Raphael passed the doobie and picked up a deck of cards. “Everybody has a word map,” he explained. “Your word map is how you feel, inside, as a person. Here. I show you.”

  Raphael laid three cards on the bedspread. Each bore a word.

  Sensitivity. Ardor. Celebration.

  “Pick a card,” Raphael said. “How you feel, inside.”

  Eugene took a hit and thought about it. His mom always called him sensitive. But not in a way he liked. You had to be sensitive to be a poet, of course, but Eugene’s mom meant more like that time at swimming lessons, when he’d refused to get into the pool.

  You do something once and your family never stops talking about it.

  So: no to Sensitivity.

  Ardor was like armpit plus odor.

  Celebration, on the other hand, had appeal. First of all, it was Latinate, and Eugene had been taking Latin since seventh grade. Celebration was also a Broadway musical by the creators of The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical in the history of Off-Broadway theater. Eugene’s high school had staged Celebration his sophomore year, and Mr. Baxter, the drama teacher, had cast Eugene as Orphan, one of the leads.

  Plus, Eugene did like to party.

  “Celebration,” he told Raphael. “Definitely.”

  Raphael was dealing more cards when Stigwood burst in. Stigwood was a friend of Mr. Baxter’s, from his New York acting days. Having been alerted by Eugene that he was coming East for college, Stigwood had invited him to stay if he were ever in New York, so that was what Eugene had been doing. This was his third visit. Stigwood had a girlfriend, too. Her name was Sally. Eugene wasn’t sure if she knew about Raphael. Probably not. “Gay, straight,” Stigwood said, “it’s all a bunch of bullshit.” Right now, Stigwood had his Caligula face on, eyes dead, tongue lolling. That didn’t usually happen until later at night. Ignoring Eugene’s presence, he crossed the bedroom and tackled Raphael from behind. Then mounted him and sucked on his face. Raphael didn’t resist at first. But when Stigwood stuck his hand down Raphael’s pants he shoved him onto the floor. “You know what, Jerry? You treat me like a slut,” he shouted. “Well, let me tell you something. I am not your slut!”

  While this was going on, Eugene had retreated to the corner of the room. Seemed only polite. Plus, if he remained inconspicuous he could watch what happened next. But then he remembered his train. “See you guys! Thanks for everything, Mr. Stigwood!” he said, and booked. Got to Penn Station with two minutes to spare.

  Which was why, now, no seats.

  He kept going down the aisle, searching. This train was in better condition than the subways, at least. They were totally trashed. All weekend, Eugene had had “Shattered” stuck in his head, Mick singing, Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up / To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!

  Hold on. Did he just sing that out loud? Now people were really staring.

  Stigwood always had the strongest dope!

  New York was dying. But that was OK. It was in dying empires that the greatest poets appeared. Virgil in Rome. Dante in Florence. Baudelaire in Paris. Decadence. Eugene liked that word. It was like “decay” and “hence.” Things falling apart over time. A sweet smell like that of rotten bananas, or of bodies ripe from iniquitous exertion, could pervade an entire age, at which point someone came along to give voice to how messed up things were and, in so doing, made them beautiful again.

  That was what Eugene wanted to do. First, though, he had to learn prosody.

  Up ahead, he spotted an empty seat. Headed for it only to find an overnight bag there, its owner hiding behind a newspaper. Two rows
later, same thing, only this time the seat-hogger was pretending to nap. People were such fakers.

  Take the ballerina, for instance. Hadn’t she promised to meet Eugene at the movies last week? And when he’d suggested bringing granola bars, so they wouldn’t have to pay for candy, hadn’t she said, “Good idea! Can you bring some for me?” But then he’d waited under the marquee, with a whole box of Oats ’n Honey, and she never showed up, and later he heard she’d been in the common room, drinking Asti with Rob, the RA with the beard.

  Now he reached the end of the train car. On the door a blue button said PRESS. “See this button?” Eugene said to himself. “This is Rob’s face,” and he punched it, hard. To his surprise, the doors opened with a whoosh, like an airlock on a spaceship. Wow. Cool. Now he was between cars. Daredevil-like. He looked down, expecting to see tracks below—the train had started moving—but the area was an enclosed, accordion-like sleeve that bent gracefully as the train pulled out of the station.

  Peering into the next car, Eugene saw more faces. It was like that poem from his imagism seminar. “In a Station of the Metro,” by Ezra Pound. Since no one could hear him in this little space, Eugene recited the poem. It wasn’t long, just this:

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

  Petals on a wet black bough.

  Eugene’s friend Mike always made fun of him when he read out loud. He said Eugene had a “poetry voice.” But what could he do? He didn’t like his regular voice. Too nasal.

  Anyway, the reciting helped. He felt better already. To enter the next car, Eugene just pressed the button gently.

  Same story, though. Totally packed. He wasn’t going to have to stand the whole way to Providence, was he? He had homework to do!

  He went into the next car. And the next. Each one stuffier and more crowded. As he was entering yet another car, he caught sight of his reflection and turned back to study it after the door closed. The curly Lou Reed hair, the Warhol sunglasses. Those were new. He’d seen the frames in an optometrist’s window and gone straight in and bought them. Then decided to tint the lenses, and had picked dark rose, which maybe had been a bit much.