The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  “Did you ever read that picture book about Ping the duck?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Ping the duck was always punished for being the last duck home. He’d get whacked across the back with a switch. He hated that. So he ran away. After he ran away he met some black fishing birds with metal bands around their necks. They caught fish for their masters but could not swallow the fish whole, because of the bands. When they brought fish back, they were rewarded with tiny pieces they could swallow. They were obedient, because they had to be. Ping, with no band, was always last and now was lost. I don’t remember how it ends. It seems like a book you should read.”

  She adjusted her mask a little. “Don’t make me cut out your tongue,” she said.

  “I’m ready,” I told her.

  The mask slipped over me and I was on the moon.

  * * *

  Afterward, I sleep and sleep. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so still. I stay on the couch because stairs, stairs are impossible. In the watery light of morning, dust motes drift through the air like plankton. I have never seen the living room so early. A new world.

  I drink shaking sips of clear broth, brought to me by my first sister, who, silhouetted against the window, looks like a branch stripped bare by the wind. My second sister checks in on me every so often, opening the windows a crack despite the cold—to let some air in, she says softly. She does not say the house smells stale and like death but I can see it in her eyes as she fans the door open and shut and open and shut as patiently as a mother whose child has vomited. I can see her cheekbones, high and tight as cherries, and I smile at her as best I can.

  My third sister observes me at night, sitting on a chair near the sofa, where she glances at me from above her book, her brows tightening and loosening with concern. She talks to her daughter—who loves her without judgment, I am sure—in the kitchen, so softly I can barely hear her, but then forgets herself and laughs loudly at some joke shared between them. I wonder if my niece has sold any more knives.

  I am transformed but not yet, exactly. The transformation has begun—this pain, this excruciating pain, it is part of the process—and will not end until—well, I suppose I don’t know when. Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?

  Cal does not call. When she does I will remind her of my favorite memory of her: when I caught her with a chemical depilatory in the bathroom in the wee hours of morning, creaming her little tan arms and legs and upper lip so the hair dissolved like snow in sunlight. I will tell her, when she calls.

  * * *

  The shift, at first, is imperceptible, so small as to be a trick of the imagination. But then one day I button a pair of pants and they fall to my feet. I marvel at what is beneath. A pre-Cal body. A pre-me body. It is emerging, like the lie of snow withdrawing from the truth of the landscape. My sisters finally go home. They kiss me and tell me that I look beautiful.

  I am finally well enough to walk along the beach. The weather has been so cold that the water is thick with ice and the waves churn creamily, like soft serve. I take a photo and send it to Cal, but I know she won’t respond.

  At home, I cook a very small chicken breast and cut it into white cubes. I count the bites and when I reach eight I throw the rest of the food in the garbage. I stand over the can for a long while, breathing in the salt-and-pepper smell of chicken mixed in with coffee grounds and something older and closer to decay. I spray window cleaner into the garbage can so the food cannot be retrieved. I feel a little light but good; righteous, even. Before, I would have been growling, climbing up the walls from want. Now I feel only slightly empty, and fully content.

  That night, I wake up because something is standing over me, something small, and before I slide into being awake I think it’s my daughter, up from a nightmare, or perhaps it’s morning and I’ve overslept, except even as my hands exchange blanket warmth for chilled air and it is so dark, I remember that my daughter is in her late twenties and lives in Portland with a roommate who is not really her roommate and she will not tell me and I don’t know why.

  But something is there, darkness blotting out darkness, a person-shaped outline. It sits on the bed, and I feel the weight, the mattress springs creaking and pinging. Is it looking at me? Away from me? Does it look, at all?

  And then there is nothing, and I sit up alone.

  * * *

  As I learn my new diet—my forever diet, the one that will end only when I do—something is moving in the house. At first I think it is mice, but it is larger, more autonomous. Mice in walls scurry and drop through unexpected holes, and you can hear them scrabbling in terror as they plummet behind your family portraits. But this thing occupies the hidden parts of the house with purpose, and if I drop my ear to the wallpaper it breathes audibly.

  After a week of this, I try to talk to it.

  “Whatever you are,” I say, “please come out. I want to see you.”

  Nothing. I am not sure whether I am feeling afraid or curious or both.

  I call my sisters. “It might be my imagination,” I explain, “but did you also hear something, after? In the house? A presence?”

  “Yes,” says my first sister. “My joy danced around my house, like a child, and I danced with her. We almost broke two vases that way!”

  “Yes,” says my second sister. “My inner beauty was set free and lay around in patches of sunlight like a cat, preening itself.”

  “Yes,” says my third sister. “My former shame slunk from shadow to shadow, as it should have. It will go away, after a while. You won’t even notice and then one day it’ll be gone.”

  After I hang up with her, I try and take a grapefruit apart with my hands, but it’s an impossible task. The skin clings to the fruit, and between them is an intermediary skin, thick and impossible to separate from the meat.

  Eventually I take a knife and lop off domes of rinds and cut the grapefruit into a cube before ripping it open with my fingers. It feels like I am dismantling a human heart. The fruit is delicious, slick. I swallow eight times, and when the ninth bite touches my lips I pull it back and squish it in my hand as if I am crumpling an old receipt. I put the remaining half of the grapefruit in a Tupperware. I close the fridge. Even now I can hear it. Behind me. Above me. Too large to perceive. Too small to see.

  When I was in my twenties, I lived in a place with bugs and had the same sense of knowing invisible things moved, coordinated, in the darkness. Even if I flipped on the kitchen light in the wee hours and saw nothing, I would just wait. Then my eyes would adjust and I would see it: a cockroach who, instead of scuttling two-dimensionally across the yawn of a white wall, was instead perched at the lip of a cupboard, probing the air endlessly with his antennae. He desired and feared in three dimensions. He was less vulnerable there, and yet somehow more, I realized as I wiped his guts across the plywood.

  In the same way, now, the house is filled with something else. It moves, restless. It does not say words but it breathes. I want to know it, and I don’t know why.

  * * *

  “I’ve done research,” Cal says. The line crackles as if she is somewhere with a bad signal, so she is not calling from her house. I listen for the voice of the other woman who is always in the background, whose name I have never learned.

  “Oh, you’re back?” I say. I am in control, for once.

  Her voice is clipped, but then softens. I can practically hear the therapist cooing to her. She is probably going through a list that she and the therapist created together. I feel a spasm of anger.

  “I am worried because,” she says, and then pauses.

  “Because?”

  “Sometimes there can be all of these complications—”

  “It’s done, Cal. It’s been done for months. There’s no point to this.”

  “Do you hate my body, Mom?” she says. Her voice splinters in pain, as if she were about to cry. “You hated yours, c
learly, but mine looks just like yours used to, so—”

  “Stop it.”

  “You think you’re going to be happy but this is not going to make you happy,” she says.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “Do you love every part of me?”

  It’s my turn to hang up and then, after a moment’s thought, disconnect the phone. Cal is probably calling back right now, but she won’t be able to get through. I’ll let her, when I’m ready.

  * * *

  I wake up because I can hear a sound like a vase breaking in reverse: thousands of shards of ceramic whispering along hardwood toward a reassembling form. From my bedroom, it sounds like it’s coming from the hallway. From the hallway, it sounds like it’s coming from the stairs. Down, down, foyer, dining room, living room, down deeper, and then I am standing at the top of the basement steps.

  From below, from the dark, something shuffles. I wrap my fingers around the ball chain hanging from the naked light bulb and I pull.

  The thing is down there. In the light, it crumples to the cement floor, curls away from me.

  It looks like my daughter, as a girl. That’s my first thought. It’s body-shaped. Prepubescent, boneless. It is one hundred pounds, dripping wet.

  And it does. Drip.

  I descend to the bottom and up close it smells warm, like toast. It looks like the clothes stuffed with straw on someone’s porch at Halloween—the vague person-shaped lump made from pillows to aid a midnight escape plan. I am afraid to step over it. I walk around it, admiring my unfamiliar face in the reflection of the water heater even as I hear its sounds: a gasping, arrested sob.

  I kneel down next to it. It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder.

  It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know why I wanted to meet you,” I say. “I should have known.”

  She curls a little tighter. I lean down and whisper where an ear might be.

  “You are unwanted,” I say. A tremor ripples her mass.

  I do not know I am kicking her until I am kicking her. She has nothing and I feel nothing except she seems to solidify before my foot meets her, and so every kick is more satisfying than the last. I reach for a broom and I pull a muscle swinging back and in and back and in, and the handle breaks off in her and I kneel down and pull soft handfuls of her body out of herself, and I throw them against the wall, and I do not know I am screaming until I stop, finally.

  I find myself wishing she would fight back, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sounds like she is being deflated. A hissing, defeated wheeze.

  I stand up and walk away. I shut the basement door. I leave her there until I can’t hear her anymore.

  * * *

  Spring has come, marking the end of winter’s long contraction.

  Everyone is waking up. The first warm day, when light cardigans are enough, the streets begin to hum. Bodies move around. Not fast, but still: smiles. Neighbors suddenly recognizable after a season of watching their lumpy outlines walk past in the darkness.

  “You look wonderful,” says one.

  “Have you lost weight?” asks another.

  I smile. I get a manicure and tap my new nails along my face, to show them off. I go to Salt, which is now called “The Peppercorn,” and eat three oysters.

  I am a new woman. A new woman becomes best friends with her daughter. A new woman laughs with all of her teeth. A new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force.

  Summer will come next. Summer will come and the waves will be huge, the kind of waves that feel like a challenge. If you’re brave, you’ll step out of the bright-hot day and into the foaming roil of the water, moving toward where the waves break and might break you. If you’re brave, you’ll turn your body over to this water that is practically an animal, and so much larger than yourself.

  * * *

  Sometimes, if I sit very still, I can hear her gurgling underneath the floorboards. She sleeps in my bed when I’m at the grocery store, and when I come back and slam the door, loudly, there are padded footsteps above my head. I know she is around, but she never crosses my path. She leaves offerings on the coffee table: safety pins, champagne bottle corks, hard candies twisted in strawberry-patterned cellophane. She shuffles through my dirty laundry and leaves a trail of socks and bras all the way to the open window. The drawers and air are rifled through. She turns all the soup can labels forward and wipes up the constellations of dried coffee spatter on the kitchen tile. The perfume of her is caught on the linens. She is around, even when she is not around.

  I will see her only one more time, after this.

  I will die the day I turn seventy-nine. I will wake up early because outside a neighbor is talking loudly to another neighbor about her roses, and because Cal is coming today with her daughter for our annual visit, and because I am a little hungry, and because a great pressure is on my chest. Even as it tightens and compresses I will perceive what is beyond my window: a cyclist bumping over concrete, a white fox loping through underbrush, the far roll of the ocean. I will think, it is as my sisters prophesied. I will think, I miss them, still. I will think, here is where I learn if it’s all been worth it. The pain will be unbearable until it isn’t anymore; until it loosens and I will feel better than I have in a long time.

  There will be such a stillness, then, broken only by a honeybee’s soft-winged stumble against the screen, and a floorboard’s creak.

  Arms will lift me from my bed—her arms. They will be mother-soft, like dough and moss. I will recognize the smell. I will flood with grief and shame.

  I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies.

  She will touch my cheek like I once did Cal’s, so long ago, and there will be no accusation in it. I will cry as she shuffles me away from myself, toward a door propped open into the salty morning. I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker and she was removed from my charge.

  “I’m sorry,” I will whisper into her as she walks me toward the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” I will repeat. “I didn’t know.”

  JESSE BALL AND BRIAN EVENSON

  ■

  The Deaths of Henry King

  Selected Demises

  with illustrations by Lilli Carré

  FROM McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

  1

  HENRY KING WOKE WITH A HAMMER partway through his head. Someone pulled the end of the hammer out of the hole and then brought it down again, causing Henry’s body to shake a little all over, especially at the extremities.

  2

  Henry King was asked to meet a friend in a park. He went there and was killed. That same day, a bit later on, someone left an envelope on his doorstep. It wasn’t a very fancy envelope, yet neither was it the absolute cheapest kind.

  3

  Henry King signed a piece of paper that said, I want to die. On 42nd and 5th a bus ran him over and he was so unremarkable, even at that moment, that a dozen more cars hit him before anyone thought to stop.

  4

  Henry King was burned to death in a house fire although many others were saved. “There is still someone in there,” said the Fire Chief.

  5

  Henry King fell from an open window. A girl was telling a joke about a platypus. It was an extremely funny joke, and many kept laughing, even when they saw what had happened.

  6

  Henry King stayed late at the facto
ry. His legs were caught in the machinery and it embarrassed him. The factory was sold by the owner that night and no one ever came back onto the premises, leaving Henry to death by starvation.

  7

  Henry King accepted a drink from a wild-eyed girl underneath a bridge. Some minutes later, she was rolling over his body and removing an antique watch, the gift of his grandfather.

  8

  Henry King climbed a ladder and then it began to rain. By chance all the rain went into his mouth and he drowned before he could fall.

  9

  Henry King couldn’t breathe. His throat had closed. He ran to the window and waved to someone outside. He slapped at his neck and chest with his hand. He waved to someone else who waved back and even smiled, yes, smiled.

  10

  Henry King was deep in a mine when the workers’ canaries started to perish. Soon the canary in the cage on his belt, it, too, perished. He had time to do one last thing.

  11

  Henry King ate six and a half pounds of glass before bleeding to death. “I believe that’s a record,” said his friend.

  12

  Henry King fell down the stairs in a building nearby. There wasn’t a mark on him. “You would think he had survived,” said a girl.

  13

  Nobody knew how Henry King had come to be in Little Chute during the Great Wisconsin Cheese Festival, nor why, when the giant wheel of cheddar broke its moorings, he did not at least try to jump out of the way.

  14

  Henry King realized mid-leap that the other building’s roof was in fact much farther away than he’d realized.

  15

  All that remained of Henry King after his fall from the balloon was a Henry King-shaped dent in the ground. Soon that was gone as well.

  16