No time for his backpack, no time for clothes, his toothbrush, for the change he kept in a pickle jar in the top drawer, no time for anything but to jerk up the window in its creaking frame while the knocking at the front door rose to a relentless pounding and the voices started up there, Sergio’s and somebody else’s and a dog barking, and then he was down in the grass and scrambling hunched-over for the next yard and then the next one after that. It took everything he had. Twice he tripped in the dark, going down hard on somebody’s patio, all the little sounds of the neighborhood amplified now, every TV turned up full-blast, motorcycles blaring like gunfire out on the street, even the crickets shrieking at him, and that dog, the ratcheting bark of that dog back at the house, a police dog, the kind of dog that never gave up, that could sniff you out even if you sprouted wings and flew up into the sky.
Where was he? Some dark place. Some citizen’s backyard with its jade plants and flowerbed and patch of lawn. A cold hand went down inside him, yanking at his lungs, squeezing and bunching and pulling the meat there up into his throat so he couldn’t breathe. He went down on his hands and knees, shivering again, sweating again, and there was no plan now but to find the darkest corner of the yard, the place where nobody had bothered to cut the grass or trim the shrubs, where the earth was real and present and he could let the blood come up and forget about the pills and Rosa Hinojosa and his mother and Rudy and everybody else.
Time leapt ahead. He was stretched out in the dirt. What was on his shirt was hot and secret and wet. He closed his eyes. And when he opened them again, all he could see was the glint of a metal trap, bubbles rising in the clear cold water and the hands of the animal fighting to get out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: The Iowa Review, “The Designee”; The Kenyon Review, “The Five-Pound Burrito” and “Surtsey”; McSweeney’s, “The Argentine Ant”; Narrative, “She’s the Bomb,” “Warrior Jesus” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til the Well Runs Dry)”; The New Yorker, “The Relive Box,” “Are We Not Men?” and “The Fugitive”; Playboy, “Theft and Other Issues.”
“Are We Not Men?” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2017, edited by Meg Wolitzer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), “The Relive Box” in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) and “The Five-Pound Burrito” in The Pushcart Prize, XLI: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson (Wainscott, NY: The Pushcart Press, 2017).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T.C. BOYLE is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published sixteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 1999. The Harder They Come was a New York Times bestseller. In 2014 he won the Rea Award for the Short Story, and he was the editor of The Best American Short Stories (2015).
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ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
NOVELS
Water Music (1981)
Budding Prospects (1984)
World’s End (1987)
East Is East (1990)
The Road to Wellville (1993)
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Riven Rock (1998)
A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Drop City (2003)
The Inner Circle (2004)
Talk Talk (2006)
The Women (2009)
When the Killing’s Done (2011)
San Miguel (2012)
The Harder They Come (2015)
The Terranauts (2016)
SHORT STORIES
Descent of Man (1979)
Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
Without a Hero (1994)
T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)
After the Plague (2001)
Tooth and Claw (2005)
The Human Fly (2005)
Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)
T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013)
ANTHOLOGIES
DoubleTakes (2004) co-edited with K. Kvashay-Boyle
CREDITS
COVER ART AND DESIGN BY JIM TIERNEY
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE RELIVE BOX AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2017 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-267340-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267339-8
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The Relive Box and Other Stories Page 25
