PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Read online

  God’s grace didn’t work in oncology with the kids’ cases. You could put your hand over a parent’s hands and look into their eyes, but you couldn’t bring yourself to mutter about God’s grace to them. And I never did. I talked. I listened. I played with stuffed animals in funny voices and pressed the pen in my pants pocket into my leg until I was sure I wasn’t going to cry. I asked doctors to slow down and talk a little louder when they spoke if they could, because Paul’s dad, who wears the orange suspenders and comes in every day after sunset, is a little hard of hearing after twenty years on a chainsaw and if you could just talk a little louder when you come by, I’d appreciate it as a personal favor.

  After so many years, I’d finally had enough of dying and decided to take out the middle man. Work a job in straight death. No ifs, ands, or buts. The work doesn’t seem any easier, but I don’t have to talk about God and his grace. I just have to try to help people, shrug my shoulders, and say things like, “What are ya gonna do?” Some call what I’ve done losing faith. I tell them to take it up with God. I already got too many cases.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER Daniel becomes my problem, I tell him Susan responded to my phone call and has agreed to see him. I tell him this over coffee, after picking him up from the overpass and doing my best to dust the dirt off him. I tell him we’re going because he hasn’t shown any change and I need to see some change so I can mark it down in his case folder. He sits in his chair uncomfortably, staring back and forth and keeping his back and the hole in his head pointing toward the wall behind him. I can tell he wants a cigarette. Daniel chain-smokes. Nearly every single one does. I used to think it made them feel alive, but how can you feel alive when you can’t say, These things are killing me?

  “Do you remember Reagan?” Daniel asks, smelling the steam of the coffee through his tipless nose.

  “Yeah, I remember him.”

  “I remember Reagan and the Wall before and after it came down. I remember Coca-Cola and black-and-white TV and catching sockeye in Snake River, and I don’t remember the internet. I remember my daughter. But not all grown up.” As Daniel talks, I see bits of the painting behind him through his mouth and the exit wound in his head, using him like a bad telescope. I see the tendons in his face straining where his cheeks are shrunken in. There are pictures of Daniel in his folder from before. He was handsome in a gentle way, and he looks handsome in that coffee shop. He looks tired and gentle and handsome.

  “I’ll go if you say I have to go.”

  The pamphlet says he has to go.

  So we go.

  JAMES TURK IS the poster child for successful risers. He’s one of Doug’s, of course. He died in a fire. Fell asleep smoking a cigarette after flushing a hit of heroin through his veins. He managed to crawl out of his house and die on the front lawn mostly from smoke inhalation, but the burns covered almost his entire body. His case stunk. He’d been a beater of women, a user of drugs, had a rape charge he’d avoided somehow. But he woke up after five years and showed real promise. He sells hot dogs from a stand down in Long Beach, Washington, now. He sleeps in a bunkbed. He pays his taxes. They made a documentary about him; almost everyone, even people outside of this line of work, have seen it.

  I met him once. I bought a hot dog from him, took it out of his gray hands and ate it, and asked him about his life. He whistled through the hole in his cheek where the burned flesh was thin, an ingratiating move he’d picked up somewhere along the way. He said he’s famous now. He said that in the summer families come by with perky teenage daughters and good tips, and in the winter he moseys on down to California and surfs and stays with friends. When I talk to Daniel I want to tell him about James Turk. That there is a success story out there of happiness. And then I think, I’m not made out for this kind of work.

  WE DROVE TO Portland a week later and met Susan at a deli by her apartment in Hawthorne. She looked as pretty as she sounded on the phone, dressed up in the electric blues and pinks of punk. Her hair dyed with an undercut exposing the short stubble on one side of her head. Her blue eyes went bright and big when she saw Daniel. We made awkward small talk, and Daniel jumped a little every time they yelled, “Order up!”

  Daniel says, “What do you do for fun?”

  And Susan says, “I like to listen to live music and play the guitar.”

  And Daniel smiles and sucks at his teeth. He pulls his beanie down farther over his head to cover the hole. To make sure no light comes through when he talks.

  “Do you remember when I used to carry you around on my shoulders?”

  “I think I was too young to remember that.”

  Daniel nods and works his hands together like he’s polishing brass.

  “Mom kept all your pictures. So many of them. She didn’t want me to forget what you looked like, I think. But I can’t remember what’s a memory of you or just something I made up over the years of staring at those pictures.”

  “You were a runner. Did your mother tell you that? You didn’t learn to walk, you just went straight to running.” Daniel smiles at his daughter.

  Susan takes the crust off her sandwich, then looks up at him and says, “I don’t understand why you did it.”

  Snow falls outside but doesn’t stick to the ground. It just melts and disappears. The cook yells, “Order up!” I try to think of something to say, but I fail.

  Daniel works his thin fingers over the beanie again. “I . . .” he starts but stops.

  “Go on now,” I tell him.

  Daniel looks at me, and whatever I have made my life about shudders under the weight of its lie.

  “I’d thought about it before then. Before you, I mean.” Daniel works his hands together in front of him, knitting and reknitting them. “It’s all like a dream now, you see. It’s like this dream that I’m trying to remember after all these years. I had wanted to be released. Not from you. Not like that. Just the . . .” Daniel puts a fist to his chest and looks at his daughter.

  I look at them. Both of them are different now. Strangers to whatever versions of themselves they were together.

  “I’d been waiting for my dad to go before I did it. I thought it’d hurt him too much, you know?”

  Susan is crying one tear at a time. They run down her cheeks in single streams until she wipes them away with her sleeve.

  “I needed to be done. I needed a release from the hopelessness. You see?”

  Susan puts her hand on Daniel’s. I watch her jerk away from the cold she wasn’t expecting, but she recovers herself and grips his hand.

  OUTSIDE THE DELI, we stand in the cold air. I take a picture of them together. Susan and Daniel. Clouds of her breath and only her breath floating upward. They each smoke a cigarette, the same brand. I think, at least they have this in common. Maybe this is what progress looks like. But then I remember: they already have death in common. You might wonder, a guy like me, whether I’m ready for it. That great big beyond that’s rushing toward us. I worry less about that than about coming back, rising again years later and seeing this world all dressed up in a new wardrobe and smelling different. Like running into an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in years, and you struggle to recognize her or the man you were when you were with her. I’ll have to come back and have weekly meetings with a guy like me. Some working stiff leading my stiff body around the ashes of my past, trying to make amends for a life already ended. Maybe he’ll have me go back and apologize to Deb if she’s still kicking. I wouldn’t mind that, I suppose. Maybe she’ll be back, too, and we’ll start all over again. Two dead divorcés with all the time in the world on our skeletal hands. Till death do us unite.

  DANIEL AND I are driving back north to Seattle when I decide to take us to the ocean. It’s still a hundred miles away, but as soon as we take the junction and head west, I can taste the saltwater in the air. I roll down the windows and let the breeze hit us. Daniel stares forward, his shoulders slumped. I wonder what Doug would do in this moment, but I think that maybe
the ocean can do the thing that needs to be done.

  Daniel never asks where we’re going, but an hour and a half later, we drive down the hill and the ocean spreads out before us. I take us to the state park and we pull into a sandy spot. I get out and breathe in the air, and Daniel pulls himself out of the car and follows me down the sandy bluff.

  We stay at the beach awhile, not talking, just picking up sand dollars and digging our toes in the cold, wet muck. Eventually we end up back at the car, watching the surf.

  I ask Daniel, “You gonna go back and see her again?”

  But he shakes his head. “I’m just a bad memory.”

  Then Daniel explains it to me. Why they want to sleep so much. He tells me to think about an afternoon. A warm one, with a slight cooling breeze coming in through an open window. Think about the moment, he says, right after you’ve just made love, and you’re lying on that couch feeling the breeze. And you know you’re falling asleep. There’s a calm tingle to your whole body. Like you’re feeling every single cell you’ve got. You know you’re drifting off. That you’ll wake up again in a bit. But right in that moment, that perfect moment, your eyelids drop like anvils, and each time you just barely manage to open them again. Fighting sleep just cause of the way it feels. The rest of your head and body are clear and weightless. Like you’re floating. And then, and this is when Daniel places his cold hands over mine. And then, when you’ve struggled enough and you give in, the euphoria laps and washes over you like a warm wave and your last blink turns into sleep. You think, I’m going to sleep now, and then I’m going to wake up to this perfect moment.

  He stops talking, and the sounds of the ocean wash over us. I want to say something to Daniel after this, when his eyes are searching mine and his grip is so strong. I want to give him the absolution that walking death has robbed him of. But I don’t have that to offer. I won’t tell a dead man about God’s grace.

  I can only write that Case 7 shows progress and drive us the long way home.

  Drew McCutchen earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Washington. His fiction has appeared in the Baltimore Review and is forthcoming from Pleiades Magazine. Drew is an assistant editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal. A Washington native, Drew enjoys backpacking in the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges. He lives in Seattle with his partner, Brooke, and their cat, Henry. Without the support of his friends and family, his writing would not exist. He is currently at work on a novel.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  Our editorial process is a collective one. The day we discussed “Black Dog” by Alex Terrell, the most common reaction was awe. This story is wild and transformative—but it also unsettles. Terrell addresses the human body as a site for the animal element, a multiplicity of identities, as well as an inheritance of mythology and trauma. As readers, we felt like children, standing on the cusp of an ancient and terrifying forest, where past and parallel selves trail behind like ghosts and stalk like predators.

  Cat Ingrid Leeches, editor

  Jackson Saul, assistant editor

  Black Warrior Review

  BLACK DOG

  Alex Terrell

  SHE WOULD AWAKEN in the woods. In sunlight. Underneath trees and laying on rocks.

  Roots.

  Unsheathed and exposed to all manner of elements. But she was warm. Leaves were twisted and mashed into her hair, but she could not feel them on her scalp. This was a reminder that her hair was not hers. It belonged to the girls in India who cried when their heads were shaved and their sorrow could be bought and sold for $79.99 a pack at Lovely’s on Bright Street. She’d only needed three packs.

  She paid her cousin, Drea, sixty to put the weave in and another twenty for the pizza she ordered. That investment now had leaves attached to it. And mud, she found.

  She also found that there were no tracks, from small animals or large ones. No drag marks. And no explanation for the scratches on her arms and ankles. The bottoms of her feet were stained black like she’d been dancing around in pitch. Her fingernails, which had been short last night, were now long.

  She stood on unsteady legs, knees knocking together, quaking under the weight of her body. Out the corner of her eye, she saw several versions of herself dressed in all white, and as a buzzing behind her eyes settled into a slow ache, she thought, How did they follow me here?

  THE NIGHT WRAPPED its great arms around her, hanging on her shoulders. The cool air, a haint riding her back. She remembered when she was little that she had asked Momma why she was painting Grandma Pearl’s porch blue and Momma had said, “Haints can’t cross water. The blue confuses them.” So she avoided very blue water. As she’d watched Momma run the paintbrush over rows of chipped paint, she’d thought that she might be a ghost and how strange and wonderful it might be if she couldn’t cross the porch. But she was able to plant her feet firmly on those dried blue planks. She was a real girl after all. Or maybe haints were just smarter than Momma thought. She didn’t understand until she was older that being a real girl didn’t mean you couldn’t be invisible. Even now up on the roof, she was a ghoul.

  She took in the scene of the rooftop bacchanalia, eyes drifting over sweating bodies and strung lights. The crowd was a mixed bag of hipsters, indie kids, pill-pushers, and weed dealers. It wasn’t even midnight and almost everyone was wasted and writhing in agony against each other. Or maybe they just looked that way to her with their shirts clinging to their backs, hair greasy under knit caps, denim jackets dark blue from drinks being spilled on them all night. Io thought they looked miserable, but then she didn’t like dancing. And she was sure she didn’t like the city at all. She hated the way smoking a cigarette somehow tasted worse when the chemicals mingled with city air.

  Io had realized early on that she had played the night to its full potential. She’d had a few shots of whiskey at the bar and bought a dime bag of weed off of Slim Jimmy. She’s waited patiently for him to finish getting off with the pale-faced girl in the bathroom. He’d said, Slide it under the door. The transaction had taken place over thumping bass and underground in The Attic, where Io had had her first drink with Sola Delgado when they were sixteen-and-some-change. Sola had told Io to push her skirt up a bit before they went in—Let them see your legs, Io—and Io had waited outside of this same scratched up bathroom door while Sola lost her backdoor virginity to Slim Jimmy, who never discriminated based on age, he’d said. But that was when Io and Sola were Sola-and-Io. When they were fused at the hip like a chimera of bone and sinew and hair all one color. Sharing the same breath. Now, Io rarely saw Sola, except for the occasional glitch in the matrix when they were in the wrong place at the same time. Usually this was only for a few seconds before Io lost sight of Sola’s bouncing curls pulled high into that infamous ponytail, another head in the crowd.

  When Slim Jimmy had opened the door, the smell of sweaty body parts and hair had filled the space and this was about all the night could wring out, Io decided. He’d put the baggie in her hand, lingering there longer than she would have liked. His fingers, burnt from smoking joints to the bottom, passing over Io’s palm slowly.

  Thanks, Jimmy.

  Up on the rooftop, Io watched phantoms of herself walking back and forth. She was standing by the couch wearing a leather skirt and tights, a shirt that showed her stomach and a silver ball that sparkled on her tongue when she talked. Io-Leather-Skirt laughed with her whole body at a joke someone said and the crowd consumed her.

  Another one was standing near the makeshift coatrack, wearing jeans and a sweater that fell loose in all of the right places. This Io stood with better posture and her lipstick was a shade darker than Io-Leather-Skirt’s lipstick. She talked easily with a couple of girls. Neither were prettier than the other. Neither were prettier than Io, but she could not see this. Io-Leather-Skirt watched through keyholes made by arms and legs as she was brought down further by the small crowd. Io-in-Jeans didn’t notice Io-Leather-Skirt’s demise, because she was admiring herself in
the reflection in one of the girls’ glasses. Io-in-Jeans was cornered by the white girls with talks of a trip to Panama City Beach, and eventually, she disappeared into the wall behind her. Io-in-Jeans’s untimely departure was witnessed by Io-in-Red, standing near the drink area flirting with three guys.

  Io watched those same specters fall off the rooftop, run into the door, and nearly crash into other people before she slipped back in her skin. She looked down at her shirt, the color of bland chicken, and her thighs, sheathed in leggings that were worn out from too many wears. Her hair was pulled back and she wore too much makeup, which covered patches of dark skin and craters from years of picking at her cheeks. And as she watched the night pass in front of her, she knew she had gone unnoticed yet again. That she had been little more than a wall fixture, sitting crooked and undisturbed. She knew the specters would have fared better than she, because she was barely there. And they were much more than ghosts.

  She came back to herself. For Io, sometimes the walls of the world were fuzzy, and she found herself wading through a daydream. She took in the rooftop scene one last time before knocking back another shot. As vodka hit her tongue, her eyes were drawn over to the door. The man wore nice clothes. Autumn colors were a compliment to his deep brown skin. With full lips and a prominent nose, he was beautiful. Did he know he was? Did he notice how eyes drifted to him? How the rooftop drank him in?

  She thought she smelled him. She thought then that she could almost taste him. Pheromones? Were those real? Did they apply to humans? Weren’t humans also animals? Yes, she could almost taste him. But she couldn’t place the flavor. Like presque vu, Momma would say. Having that thing on the tip of your tongue. Momma’s tongue was a creole one. When Momma spoke, it conjured smoke and mossy cypress trees. Tupelo trees. Sentinels of the swamp. It conjured the bayous and what did you say gal? Io hadn’t been to the bayou since she was small. She hadn’t remembered the swamp except through peepholes in Momma’s tongue. But she was cityside now. Long gone from those dirt roads. From plantation homes.