PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Read online

  “Isn’t running away what we Gameli children do best?” I played along.

  “Ah, if only it was just the children,” Ane started.

  She slipped into the tale she always spun when discussing our family misfortunes. She started from the first Gameli who defied the odds and married the village beauty, a taciturn young woman with eyes black as obsidian and skin soft as feathers. The bachelors had been seeking the beauty’s hand since her first blood, and while the men seemed blind to her lack of status—she was an orphan—the women of the village grew suspicious of her vague origins. Some suggested she was the wife of a river god in her previous life, hence her charms. Others claimed she carried an ancestral curse, hence her solitude. The men, perhaps because they were enchanted, dismissed these rumors and envied Gameli his fortune. For that is what she brought him—weeks after the wedding, Gameli happened upon a diamond in a stream, then another, and another. Even the wise elders could not explain his sudden prosperity. The women began to think maybe Gameli’s marriage was not a curse but rather a boon.

  Even if it was a boon, time revealed it to be an ephemeral one. His wealth amassed in cattle and farmland for years until it became clear that Gameli’s wife could give him diamonds but not children. No longer a young man, he hoped to leave his riches to a son. He sought counsel from his peers and elders, who advised him to take another wife. This is when the invisible thread of his bride’s silence snapped. That moonlit night, the villagers heard a loud cry and saw a blazing trail of fire, from Gameli’s compound into the forest. Months passed and no one heard from either Gameli or his wife. One day, the man appeared with a baby boy and no wife. Whatever happened in the depths of that forest had stripped him of his memory. Such was the origin of an affliction that would linger in his bloodline for generations to come.

  WHEN ANE FINISHED, she leaned her cane against the wall and sat a step below me. I released a broken breath. I had heard this story many times. It was the reason I left for the capital at sixteen, in search of answers that were not hidden in lore. Answers that would lead me to a cure and a future.

  “Ane, what does that story have to do with Chief?” I asked, to keep her talking.

  “Oh, child,” she said. “It has to do with everything in our family.”

  Her ensuing silence sent me back into the halls of my mind.

  I used to believe in curses. In womanhood, however, I felt emptied of faith regarding blessings and curses alike.

  At least one child in our family contracted Gameli’s affliction every generation. Sometimes the symptoms were mild, as it was with Ane, whose mental lapses did not hamper her life—she raised nine children and was respected for her wisdom. But there were also cases like my mother, who, like the first Gameli’s wife, wandered into the forest, never to be seen again. The elders told me her dark eyes had been wild that morning, rolling around in search of a fixed point to latch on to. They said she had not recognized anyone’s face, not even my father’s, and by the time they thought to restrain her, it was too late. She was gone.

  Tasi Mary shared my distress—she had holes in her mind too. When I became a woman and informed her of my plans, she paid for my passage to the capital. I arrived in the city before realizing that answers did not grow on trees. They were held in books and those books were locked in towers I could not reach. I needed to eat and so I searched for work. With my primary school English, I became a nanny for a private school teacher who later recommended my services to her employer, a white woman named Hannah. To join her household staff, I was baptized into Hannah’s faith—at the time, the sprinkling of water on my head seemed a harmless prerequisite for the coveted job. I raised Hannah’s twins for four years. The girls clung so closely that their mother invited me to accompany her to England. Shocked, first by her willing detachment from the children, then by her recognition of my service, I asked for time to think on it.

  A few weeks before Hannah needed my final answer, a hand gripped my shoulder as I was shopping for groceries. It was my brother, then a newly crowned chief. We embraced and addressed each other’s health. I praised his brawn and his batakari, a smock he had won off a gambler from the North. He told me I had grown beautifully. Our pleasantries dissipated, however, when I shared Hannah’s offer. He demanded I return home immediately—how could I even consider running off to some unknown land, the white man’s land no less? His rage did not give room for my defense, and I did not get the opportunity to bid Hannah’s girls farewell.

  Back in the village, Tasi Mary was my sole advocate. Outside of Ane’s tale, no one understood my reasons for leaving. Even surrounded by my well-meaning relatives, I felt drained of purpose, like an empty vessel that can never hold water. The elders asserted, in that resigned manner of the burdened, that life’s questions often do not have clear answers.

  While their words were validated by experience, my aunt and I—afflicted as we were—could not find peace in their truth. She arranged for me to marry Edwin Agbezuge, a city doctor whom she believed could find a cure for me, if such a thing were possible.

  Less than three years later, I stopped recognizing my husband’s face. I ran back home to an infuriated Chief and a departed Tasi Mary.

  I WOKE FROM my thoughts to the sun receding beyond the horizon. I did not even remember Ane leaving her place on the steps. The only sign of her presence was the shawl around my shoulders. I walked home, considering whether a jug of palm wine would clear my mind. I moved the bags inside the hut, too weary for caution. I pulled out a stool and rested my back against the clay wall. I was placing a cool cloth on my forehead when the knock came.

  “I’m looking for Rose,” the person on the other side said. “Rose Gameli.”

  I raised a candle to see who was asking for me and saw eyes that mirrored mine. Eyes the color of dusk.

  “I am she,” I told the owner of those eyes.

  “My name is Efua,” she said. “Efua Anya Agbezuge. I’m your—”

  “Child,” I said, the word like the abandoned secret it was, a revelation I had never intended to hide. “You’re my child, my daughter.”

  Her reply was a grave nod.

  “Are you getting married?” I blurted, forgetting custom. No come inside, sit down, what will you like to drink, and tell me of your journey? my better half chastised. The opposing half, who was curt and brash, replied: Why else would she be here?

  “I’m sixteen,” Efua said, and I wasn’t sure if that was a reply to the marriage question or the question I had asked myself.

  A gust of wind rattled the plywood door. Efua shivered. I let her in. Normally I would request proper identification from a stranger but Efua’s identification was in her eyes, her mouth, her nose. I presumed the long forehead came from her father, whose face I still could not recall.

  “Are those yours?” I asked, pointing at the bags I had dragged inside.

  She nodded. “They’re gifts for you,” she said.

  Gifts. Gifts were for women who did not leave their two-year-olds crying on a dock, women who were not always looking for an escape from the future. Gifts were for mothers, and I had relinquished my motherhood fourteen years ago.

  “Are you returning from Lagos?” I asked, because I could not confess my ruminations on gifts. And because Ghana-Must-Go bags, in those days, carried Nigeria’s outcry for Ghanaians to go back to their country.

  “I’m sixteen,” Efua repeated. I suppose she felt that was all I needed hear in order to understand. As in, I’m sixteen—isn’t that too young to marry, too young to leave home for a foreign land?

  I wanted to tell this girl who wore my face that children younger than she had gone to Nigeria. Children like Chief’s son who left at fourteen, against his father’s wishes, to find his own path. I wanted to tell her she could not trust anything I said, since even the knowledge recorded in my journals came from other minds, those who remembered what I could not. I wanted to tell her sorry, that Tasi Mary was not here to offer t
he possibility of a more coherent truth. Sorry, for everything else.

  Our eyes met for a moment—hers searching, mine avoiding—as I was thinking of the next thing to say. I swallowed, a lump that irritated my parched throat. I could not think of the appropriate words and felt a hot wave of shame; I was awkward and uncertain, like a child.

  “Make yourself at home,” I murmured finally. My eyes returned to the ground.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I opened my eyes to her face hovering above mine. I blinked in question. She withdrew, almost reluctantly.

  Efua poured some gari into water, allowing the mixture to rise to make eba. I thought she was preparing her breakfast, but then she handed me the bowl.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  She shrugged and prodded me to eat with only her gaze. I succumbed and ate half, offering her the rest.

  After breakfast, Efua braced her head on her palm. We waited for something neither of us knew how to initiate. Was it mother-daughter conversation or something more rudimentary? And where could we begin when I did not possess all of myself, and she could only know what others had said of me? We were both unreliable.

  I left for my daily trek into the forest and returned at the close of day to find Chief Ega at my door. He was speaking to Efua.

  “You are always welcome here, child,” I heard my elder brother telling my forgotten daughter. This was the same man who had said, upon my return from a failed marriage, “What did you think would happen to a girl who went without her family’s consent to marry a man named Agbezuge? Of course she will bring us his belligerent life.”

  At least there was some comfort in the knowledge that his frustrations did not extend to that belligerent man’s child.

  “Where’s Tasi Mary?” I remembered to blurt out before he could vanish again.

  “Dead to us,” was all he said. Like you, I expected him to add, but then my mind lingered on his use of “us,” to his crippled tone. I wanted to ask whether he was finally including me, but by then my brother had departed with the last light.

  Later, when I browsed through the words in my journals, I would wonder if I had asked of his son, if he had shared that knowledge with me, if I had willingly left the answers out of my written memory.

  THE NEXT DAY, we rose to the first rooster’s crow. Before I could roll up my thatch-mat, Efua prepared breakfast and filled in my gaps. She had roamed the village for two days—first upon her arrival and then again when I left her in my hut the previous day. She had introduced herself as my daughter, interviewing those of my relatives whose doors remained open. Surprising myself, I asked if she had heard anything new about Tasi Mary.

  “Chief said he traced her to the Southwest, where she had married a Yoruba man and bore three children,” Efua said.

  She pulled her stool next to my place on the mat. Her head cocked to the side as she peered at me through thick lashes.

  I nodded, not just to satisfy her. I was relieved to hear my aunt continued to live even as I grieved the distance between us.

  Efua took a deep breath then added, “He also said she did not remember him.”

  I looked up at her then, not expecting what I found. It was solace, however temporary, I saw in the swirling black inside the brown of her irises. She, at least, had discovered some of the truth she was seeking. Lips pursed in a sympathy I did not deserve, Efua gave a nearly imperceptible nod before turning to my cooking utensils. I studied her shoulder blades as they curved in and out. Imagining the focused frown she now hid from me, I listened to the grating of a spoon against an earthenware pot, the promise of a shared meal, of full stomachs and hearts warmed in homecoming.

  If I had not known better, I would have thought the Harmattan fog was seeping through the space under the door, clouding my vision so I couldn’t see where either of us would be the next day, the next year, or the years after that. But I knew better. I knew the girl sitting across from me was not a trick of the mind, that we were two strangers seeing each other for the first time.

  Elinam Agbo moved to the United States from Ghana when she was ten and has since lived in Nevada, Kansas, South Carolina, and Illinois. She received her BA from the University of Chicago, where she won the 2017 Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Ernie’s piece initially came to our attention through a reader, who came upon it in Submittable and assured us it deserved a serious look. We were immediately struck by the graceful and relaxed manner in which this story is told; there is a confidence and an ownership in the voice that is extraordinarily compelling. Right from the start, the reader discovers a very dynamic and three-dimensional character in the narrator, one whose voice alone draws you onward. Throughout the piece, Ernie showcases a very sharp command of narrative timing: he has a great instinct of when a scene should end, when a scene should be teased, suspended, to be returned to later. All this creates a kind of river that carries you along as a reader, that breaks your heart over and over again. Ernie’s is a voice that readers ought to listen to, which, on top of an impressive narrative command, is overflowing with tenderness and earnestness that couldn’t be fabricated with any amount of literary might.

  Claire Boyle, managing editor

  McSweeney’s

  STAY BRAVE, MY HERCULES

  Ernie Wang

  THERE’S A TUG on my skirt. I look down.

  “Hi there, young fella,” I say.

  “Hercules,” he says.

  I nod.

  “I have a question,” he says.

  “Go on then, young man.”

  “Hercules,” he says. “How do I become strong like you?”

  I look at his parents. They beam at their son and smile like they already know.

  We’re at the corner of Frontierland and Fantasyland. From a distance, I hear screams at the top of Splash Mountain and calliope music from the riverboat making its way downstream. The smells of butter popcorn and churros wafting through the muggy afternoon air remind me that I’m hungry and I’ll be on my break soon.

  In the far corner, I see Buzz and Woody ham it up for a large Chinese tour group. Cameras click, and the tourists point and shout furiously at them. Buzz and Woody take it in stride and swivel randomly and wave enthusiastically and do this jiggy kind of dance. Today, Zac is Buzz. He’s a good dude. He sees me, and without turning from the tourists, he lowers his arm and flips me the middle finger.

  I kneel down and clasp the kid’s hands. He stands straight and puffs out his chest. I no longer have to think back to the script. I got this shit on lock.

  ALL OF DISNEY’S eighteen Herculeses have nicknames for each other; mine is Babyface Hercules. There’s also Douchebag Hercules, NASCAR Hercules, the high school twins Juicehead and Jailbait, Born-Again Hercules, and everybody’s favorite: Grandpa Hercules. Grandpa Hercules is literally a grandpa, and between shifts he brings out photos of his granddaughters in the breakroom, and we tell him they’re beautiful, because we love him. Then one of the Jasmines or Snow Whites help him reapply his makeup, because he needs a shit-ton.

  I’ve been Hercules ever since I dropped out of college to be with Jay. I would’ve come back even if he wasn’t sick. But the night he called and matter-of-factly explained that it had spread to his lymph nodes and his testicles and brain, I immediately packed a backpack and left the Michigan snow and drove straight back to Florida.

  Jay is thirty years older than I am. He had warned me when we first met that something like this might happen. Bodies break down over time, he had said.

  On the drive back, I replayed his last words on the phone: I am statistically unlikely to make it to the end of the year, but these standard deviations are large, as you might expect, Jeremy . . . Jay always talks like that. He’s an actuary, which surprises nobody.

  When I pulled into his driveway that morning in y
et another torrential Orlando rainstorm, my fuel tank empty and my eyes bleary and my breath reeking of gas station coffee, he walked out onto the driveway, his glasses fogged and dripping, his robe pressing into his gaunt frame as it absorbed the rain. He looked at me as if he was struggling for words, and then he said, “You just drove a little over twelve hundred miles, which by my calculations puts your average speed at—”

  I flung myself onto him and kissed him. “Not fast enough,” I said as I pulled him back into the house.

  “I’m starving, let’s grub,” I said later as we lay in his bed. “And I’m done with this long-distance shit,” I said. “And, I told my parents I’m moving in with you, and that you’re not doing well.”

  He just kind of shook his head and looked sad.

  The first thing I did after I moved in with Jay was look for a job. Aladdin and Gaston and Donald Duck train at my gym, and one day we were all talking by the water fountain, and they said they might be able to help. The next thing I knew, I was at Disney employment headquarters getting my head measured and my chest waxed under the watchful, glowering scrutiny of the casting director.

  I got over myself and threw all my chips into this job. I mean, it’s not awful, and at night, after Jay falls asleep, I hop online and look for other jobs, as I promised him I’d do. I get to the park an hour before my shift and they tell me where I need to be at and at what time and anything I need to be aware of. Then I get in line with the other cast members for makeup. I go to the locker room and change into costume. The casting director sometimes scrutinizes me—she calls it quality control—and checks me off on her clipboard. Then I’m out the door, squinting under the bright Disney sun. For the next three hours, I smile and hug and flex, and the best part is that I get to drop wisdom bombs on adoring crowds, even though my answers are limited to what’s on script. Be strong and be brave, I say. Listen to your parents. They’re not half bad.