The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  It is too much, Auntie, said Say. He backed away and slid out of the room.

  You remember how your wife is in this house, I yelled after him.

  Bee stood by the door, wanting to follow his younger brother. I need something to cover my nose and mouth, he said.

  Mr. Cha pointed at his son walking away. My luck, he said.

  Bee returned with his younger brother, both masked with T-shirts up to their eyes. I told the brothers to hold their father while I stripped off his pants. The two halves of his buttocks were caked brown as though he had sat on muddy ground, a ground already claiming his body. I rolled up the soiled pants, then the shirt over it, and used the bundle to wipe what I could from the back of Mr. Cha’s thighs. I took an empty rice sack from the pile hanging from a hook screwed into the pillar of the house, and tossed in the dirty bundle.

  Father, Say said. This is too disgusting.

  Too disgusting? I said. Would you give up your wife? The wives were watching us from the door to the bedroom. Say’s wife looked at him, and when he remained quiet, she told me the water was ready. Would you? I said to Say. You talk, but I want you to think if you can be the man your father is. Think if you can do what he did. My words made me wonder if they knew how their father had earned his money, paid off their wives. Did they even care?

  The water flooded over the rim when Mr. Cha was placed into the tub, darkening the hard ground. I left them there to wash him. In Mr. Cha’s bedroom, the wives and I took off the sheets, covers, and pillowcases; Say’s wife took these outside to soak. I set Mr. Cha’s opium kit on a high ledge, where he kept pictures of his dead wife next to three canisters of coffee. I opened the window in his room and put his fan on a chair near the doorway.

  Mr. Cha sat shivering on a stool by the woodstove when I was finished with his room. His skin was rippled and starting to blue. I could not tell if he needed his opium or if he was cold. I added firewood to the stove and took a stool across the fire from him. A towel covered his shoulders, but his legs were closed.

  I have observed and come to a conclusion, he said. You want to know? It is about the world. Bee’s wife poured him a cup of tea.

  I had my own thoughts about the world, but I wanted him to talk. If he could keep his head clear and talk, maybe he would not need his pipe. What? I said. The fire grew larger and started to pop.

  He shifted, crossing his legs at the ankles, and the towel slipped from his shoulder, and I looked up. The sight struck me. Earlier, because of the smell, it did not cross my mind that I had not seen a man’s private since before my husband left to find his parents. The sight disgusted me. I felt a tightening in my stomach, some muscle pushing back, rejecting, the motions of throwing up. This world has changed, he said. This isn’t what we fought for.

  No, I said, knowing the country we fought for was just the grounds that held our dead. But we are the brave ones. We’re the ones left behind. Thinking about days long ago when, once, we were moved to fight for a ground to live on made me feel like an old woman meeting an old man after many years.

  This world has made it so that just because you have life does not mean you have a right to live. He took a sip of his tea and shook his head. We were stupid not to leave. Stealing and begging—and just for food? Mr. Cha’s shivers calmed as he spoke, and I started rocking on my stool. Every day a chance to sell our souls. If there is such a thing. He was staring at the open door of the woodstove. And with its many forked tongues, the fire lapped at the air, feeding on it, warming the space between us. You still think that is true, no? I wondered if he still was speaking to me—what was true? That life was only time to bargain with our souls? You still think I am a man? he said, looking up. Without his hair, he looked childish, though his face was dark and wrinkled, even powerless, no resemblance to the man who had stared down a tiger.

  Yes, I said. That was not a lie: by providing for his sons, their brides, he had fulfilled his duty as a father; he had seen to it they had families of their own, that whatever happened going forward they would not go alone.

  I don’t feel like it, he said. Across the fire, his eyes glistened. My own sons don’t see me as a man in my own house.

  When they become fathers, they’ll see, I said.

  I wish I were a woman. It would have been so much easier, least I could do it and still show my face. Only a woman, he said, shaking his head.

  No, I said. It is not so easy, not even for a woman.

  He looked up at me. Hnuhlee, is she about to graduate?

  I told him yes. I told him I had no idea how I would find the money to send her to vocational school to complete the training needed to become an interpreter. Still, we were sending cassettes to America, but no more was there much hope in it. The yell-to-teach voices had gone silent. Soon, Hnuhlee was to be eighteen, and people believed too old she was already for marriage. Mr. Cha nodded as I talked, but I was not sure if he agreed or understood. Say brought Mr. Cha a T-shirt and shorts, but he waved him away, sipping his tea without looking at his son. Say dropped the clothes by his father’s feet.

  The air inside the house felt less heavy, some steam let through the opened windows. From where the sons and daughters-in-law were huddled came muffled talking. Finally, Mr. Cha said, I want to show you something. He stood, his private hanging from the bottom of his stomach like the purple tongue of a goat. He made no move to cover himself. Here, I thought, was a person who no longer felt shame: he was naked, but there was no more the sense of a man there, and without that, a sense of something to take pride in, to remain modest about, there was nothing to protect, to cover, to clothe. He went into his room and returned with cash. He handed the money to Bee and told the sons to take their wives to buy something for dinner and a Western suit. Tie and pocket square, he said. Find one that will look nice on me. Make sure it’s pressed nice, sharp lines. I am beginning to feel like a new man.

  After they left, he brought from his room two coffee canisters. He removed three tins of opium from the top, then deeper into the canisters he reached. All I have left, he said, showing me six rolls of cash held with blue rubber bands. Is half enough?

  Enough for what? I said.

  He told me for Hnuhlee’s schooling. Ten thousand here, he said.

  Half would buy us a new life, I said. I thought to tell him Hnuhlee’s complete schooling would cost only $750, but he had started to count the money. He rolled up five thousand dollars and bound it with two rubber bands.

  Can you—, he said, allow me to feel like a man? Once more. He grabbed my hand and placed in it the money rolled tight like a cylinder of metal, and it was heavy, a grenade.

  I latched the front door shut. I walked Mr. Cha away from his bedroom. I was afraid I would throw up from the smell that lingered there, and he would see I was disgusted with him, with what we were about to do. I untied my sarong and laid it on the ground before the fire. My skin became gooseflesh; I watched myself shivering. My thighs were white and thin. Still my nipples were tiny nubs, having fed only one baby. The wrinkles on my stomach from carrying Hnuhlee had smoothed away years before. You still have the figure of a young girl, Maiker. Mr. Cha grinned, perhaps to disarm me, to reassure me. I was shy but determined to go through with it, same as the first time with my husband. I told him to put on a rubber. Then I lay down on my sarong, gritted my teeth, and tried not to recoil from his touch, forcing my body to accommodate his, forgiving, as only flesh and skin can be.

  All was over by the time Mr. Cha’s sons returned home with a new black suit, and a roast duck and sticky rice for dinner. I excused myself, told them I needed to get home, because it was late, because still I needed to cross the river before getting there, because I knew, when Mr. Cha had finished and pulled himself from inside my body, he was a man again, and I was, again, only a woman.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Cha’s death, it was not a surprise
, a few days later. He, dressed in the new suit, then smoked opium until he passed out, his head hanging a foot off the ground next to the pillar in the center of the house. On the floor of his house that day, when we were done, Mr. Cha had made me promise I would make sure his sons gave him a proper burial. So I dressed in a new sarong and saw to my duties: instructed his sons on what to do, the proper way to do it; watched over his body during the funeral so no one would deface it out of envy or hatred, out of long-held grudges or the feeling that he, as a man, had betrayed us all by becoming the whites’ woman. Your hair, I could have told Mr. Cha that day after we were done on the floor, will grow back, this hard heart of mine, though I do not know what my words would have meant to him.

  You say widows and widowers are lucky, that only with a dead spouse are we able to justify the things we do to stay alive, and as such, it is easier to live in a broken country because we have no one to answer to. But that is not true. Every war happens half at home, and the battles there are the longest lasting. War is not a luck-giving thing. Like some big animal, all it does is decide for the world who lives on and who dies. And it is those who live on that are left with the questions of how to live, what to live for, how long to live. Questions that take a lifetime to get over. And maybe that is why I did it, because as a living-on person, finally, I settled on some answers, as I had before I led my daughter into the jungle to say good-bye to her father. I did it so only I would hear the voices, so, still, I could hope, if not know for certain, my daughter will never know how it feels to be an orchid farmer and stand on the corner and sell her flowers for America.

  And you? Does it matter if your baby is a boy or a girl? Always, Hnuhlee and I appeal our disagreements to my son-in-law, and he, knowing I, in my own modern way, had let him marry Hnuhlee without asking for a bride price, as always, agrees with me.

  I did see my old friend Houa again, four months since the last, on Rue Lab. When our eyes met, she turned away from me. Yellow Squash. Green Squash. But I have learned, when people turn their backs to you, sometimes it is an invitation for you to follow, so I hurried to catch up to her, to close the space, to share with her my luck, my hand reaching to grab her arm, this friend of my youth, the words forming on my lips—Squash Blossom Orchid, for you the flower Asian!—for her to wait.

  Alexander MacLeod

  Lagomorph

  SOME NIGHTS, when the rabbit and I are both down on the floor playing tug-of-war with his toy carrot, he will suddenly freeze in one position and stop everything, as if a great breakthrough has finally arrived. He’ll look over at me and there will be a shift, his quick glance steadying into a hard stare. I can’t escape when he does this and I have to look back. He has these albino eyes that go from a washed-out bloody pink ring on the outside through a middle layer of slushy gray before they dump you down into this dark, dark red center. I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.

  Our rabbit—my rabbit now, I guess—he and I are wrapped up in something I don’t completely understand. Even when I imagine that I am reading him correctly, I know that he is reading me at the same time—and doing a better job of it—picking up on all my subconscious cues and even the faintest signals I do not realize I am sending out. It’s complicated, this back-and-forth. Maybe we have been spending a little too much time together lately. Maybe I have been spending a little too much time thinking about rabbits.

  As a species, let me tell you, they are fickle, stubborn creatures, obsessive and moody, quick to anger, utterly unpredictable and mysterious. Unnervingly silent, too. But they make interesting company. You just have to be patient and pay close attention and try hard to find the significance in what very well could be their most insignificant movements. Sometimes it’s obvious. If a rabbit loves you or if they think you are the scum of the Earth, you will catch that right away, but there is a lot between those extremes—everything else is in between—and you can never be sure where you stand relative to a rabbit. You could be down there looking at an animal in grave distress, a fellow being in pain, or, almost as easily, you might be sharing your life with just another bored thing in the universe, a completely comfortable bunny who would simply prefer if you left the room.

  Most of the time, none of this matters. We carry on our separate days and our only regular conversations are little grooming sessions during which I give him a good scratch between the ears, deep into that spot he cannot reach by himself, and in return, he licks my fingers or the back of my hand or the salt from my face.

  But today is different. Today we have crossed over into new, more perilous territory and, for maybe just the next five minutes, we need a better, more reliable connection. For that to happen, he will have to do something he has never done before, move against his own nature and produce at least one clear sound with one clear purpose behind it. I need this rabbit to find words, or whatever might stand in for words. I need him to speak, right now, and tell me exactly what the hell is happening.

  * * *

  —

  It is important to establish, before this begins, that I never thought of myself as an animal person. And since I do not come from a pet family, I never thought the family we were raising needed any more life running through it. Especially not a scurrying kind of life, with its claws tap-tap-tapping on the hardwood floors.

  The thing you need to understand—I guess it was the deciding factor in the end—is that my wife, Sarah, is dramatically allergic to cats. Or at least she used to be. By this I mean only that she used to be my wife and then, later on, my partner. Like everybody else, we changed with the times and when the new word came in—probably a decade after we’d been married in a real church wedding—we were glad to have it. We felt like a “partnership” described our situation better, more accurately, and, to be honest, we’d never really known how anybody was supposed to go around being a wife or a husband all the time.

  But I’m not sure what terminology you could use to describe what we are now. “Amicably separated” maybe, or “taking a break,” but not divorced, not there yet. The legal system has not been called in. Sarah and I are not ex-partners. We still talk on the phone almost every day and we try to keep up with the news of everybody else, but it has already been more than a year, and I have never been to her new place in Toronto, the condo on the thirty-fourth floor.

  I can imagine her there though, going through the regular Saturday morning. It is probably pretty much the same as it used to be. I see her walking from one room to the next and she has a magazine or her phone in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She looks out a high window, maybe she contemplates traffic. I don’t know. Really, she could be doing anything with anybody. Every possibility is available to her, just as it is for me, and only a few things are nonnegotiable anymore. Like the allergy. Unless there has been a medical procedure I don’t know about, then wherever she is and whatever she’s doing, Sarah remains, almost certainly, allergic to cats.

  Her condition is medically significant, EpiPen serious, so the cat option was never there for us. And even the thought of a dog, a dog with its everyday outside demands—the walks and the ball-throwing and the fur and the drool and the poop bags in the park—that was always going to be too much, too public, for me.

  If we had stayed like we were at the start, if it had been just the two of us all the way through, I think we might have been able to carry on forever and nothing would have happened. The problem was our children, three of them, all clustered in there between the ages of seven and thirteen. They were still kids at this time. It was the moment just before they made the turn into what they are now.

  When I look back, I see this was the peak of our intensity together, a wilder period than even the sleepless newborn nights or t
he toilet training. I don’t know how we survived for years on nothing but rude endurance. It was probably something automatic, the natural outcome of great forces working through us. We were like a complicated rain forest ecosystem, full of winding tendrils, lush, surging life and steaming wet rot. The balance was intricate and precise and we were completely mixed up in each other’s lives, more fully integrated than we would ever be again.

  The kids had been pushing and pushing us and eventually we just gave in. All the friends had animals, all the neighbors and the cousins. There were designer wiener dogs and husky pups with two different-colored eyes and hairless purebred cats. It felt like there was no way to escape the coming of this creature.

  We started with the standard bargain aquarium setup and a cheap tank bubbled in our living room for about a month and we drowned a dozen fish in there. After that, there was brief talk about other possibilities, but in the end, the rabbit felt like our best option, a gateway to the mammal kingdom. Better than a bird or a lizard, we agreed, more personality, more interaction.

  “Maybe a rabbit is kind of like a cat.” I remember saying those words.

  We got him from a Kijiji ad—“Rabbit available to a good home”—and the Acadian man who once owned him ended up giving him to us for free.

  I went to his house and visited his carpeted basement. I learned all about the food and the poop and the shedding.

  “Is there anything special we need to do?” I asked. “We don’t have any experience.”