The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  I’ll step back then, keep up my aim, and carefully unlock the barrel from my revolver before inserting fresh bullets. Laws of the universe don’t fool me. I’ve always known that snakes live a long time after they die, battling on all warrior-like even once unhinged from this here mortal coil. Decapitated, the snake will still try to plunge its teeth into an unsuspecting person’s flesh.

  Snakes are even more dangerous when they’re dead. Without any control over the chemical impulses in their bodies, they’ll release all their venom into a piece of prey, not having the sense or ability to conserve for later attacks.

  I stand up and remove my jeans, letting the evening chill trickle down my thighs to my ankles as I shuck off the denim. Next comes my sweater. Finally my shirt. Looking over each of my shoulders first, I rid myself of my underwear. My body shivers and shakes as I submerge myself into the river.

  On the train with Luz, I almost remember what it’s like to be a kid. The picture renders itself a little blurry, but I can just make out a creamy coffee drink in one hand and a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in the other.

  I take my thumb and smudge it along Luciana’s cheeks. “You went a bit overboard with the blush.”

  “I always do,” she says. “That’s how I like it. I’m not tryna pretend like I’m some blushing virginal swan. I like the color, so I put it on heavy. If you have a problem with that, go sit somewhere else on the train.”

  She checks her makeup in a small mirror that she pulls from her handbag. “Besides, we’re looking for clothes for me. Practical. Functional. It’s not like I want anybody to fall in love with me tonight or ever,” Luciana says, placing the mirror back into her bag. She crosses her legs and leans back into the cushioned seat of the Amtrak train.

  “Sorry. I was just trying to be motherly, I guess,” I say.

  She shrugs, rolls her eyes, and puts her headphones back on. The teenage trifecta.

  That night, after we return home with eight shopping bags, high off the spell of Manhattan, I dream about him. It’s the day we met, and I’ve run away from home to see an exhibit on Dadaism at the MoMA. Saw an ad for it on the 2 train, and it’s the summer between seventh and eighth grade. The art presents itself as an indistinct mist, and only the sharp angles of the walls and room edges are clear to me in the dream. The dress I’m wearing is short, too short, but I’ve grown a lot in the last year, and I was never one to be too concerned about the latest fashions.

  “Big Francis Bacon fan?” he asks. He’s wearing dark green khakis, a button-up shirt, and a skinny tie.

  I’ve forgotten his voice by now, but in the dream I think it sounds just like him.

  “I think it’s so funny that there are two Francis Bacons,” I say, a precocious little shit, looking at the painting before me. My voice doesn’t quite make it out my throat, though, and it’s like one of those nightmares when you need to scream for help, but no matter how much you want it your voice isn’t going to come.

  I can’t speak, so I take the gun in my hand and point it to the world. “Here I am,” I say. “And yes, I am a big Francis Bacon fan.” The blast from the revolver says what I can’t.

  I awake to the sound of Luz loudly watching cartoons. Sunday mornings should be easier than this. They tend to wait patiently.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” she says, looking up from her cartoon. “How come you don’t work?”

  “What?”

  “How come you don’t work?” she asks again, crossing her legs together. She’s got on the polka dot knee socks we bought yesterday.

  “I live off of an inheritance,” I say.

  “Whoa,” she says. “Bourgie. Shit. So I had rich grandparents? Were they like, those W.E.B. DuBois black assimilationist intellectuals? Did they pressure you to have someone else raise me?”

  “No,” I say. “Daddy was a bus driver. My mama was in medical billing. When was the last time you combed that head?” I ask. Her long strands are starting to mat together. “Looks like a bird’s nest.”

  “I like my hair how it is,” she says. “One of my foster mothers said she thought I had Irish in me. Do I?”

  I walk to the kitchen, flummoxed by the question. I set my percolator on the stove.

  “What does it even mean to have Irish in you?” I ask. “That’s a child’s question and not worthy of an answer. Do you think there’s a piece of a country inside your bones? Or in your belly? Floating around? Making tea?”

  “You know what I mean. Is my father Irish?” she asks. “Or part Irish?”

  “I don’t know. He had red hair, yes, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “Is he how you got all the money?” she asks, standing up to join me in the question. It’s not an accusation, but I take it that way, so defensive.

  “I didn’t ask for it,” I say, remembering being contacted by police and lawyers.

  “Was he a good man?” she asks. “Did he play music at all? I can play the violin, you know. I don’t see any instruments around here. Maybe it comes from him?”

  “Maybe it comes from you,” I say, not wanting to think any part of her is from me, ruined, pathetic woman.

  “I thought you’d have answers for me.” Her breath comes out in a loud huff as she curls up next to the arm of the sofa. “I want to know everything, and you don’t know anything.”

  I take a seat next to her, making sure a foot of distance remains between us. “Not even Sir Isaac Newton knew everything,” I say.

  “Who is that?”

  Luciana decides to go for a walk, and she wears the brown leather jacket I got her over the sweatshirt from my alma mater. She stops at the door, resting her shoulder against the frame. “Do you hate me?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “Don’t catch cold out there. The weather’s getting bad.”

  I wave at her retreating form until she disappears around the block.

  Before I had Luz, Wheelock asked me, “What are you going to do?”

  “Adoption, I think,” I said. “I’m not ready to be a mother and I don’t know. I’m too far along to do the other thing. I can’t provide a good home. I just can’t.”

  He said, “I’ll provide you a home. It’s ours to raise.” He was always like this, so sure that his way was the right away. “If you try to give my child away,” he went on, “I’ll have no choice but to claim my rights as father.”

  “They’re not going to make me give my baby to a sick pervert,” I said, meaning every word. I knew what he was. I knew that I was nothing to him but my youth.

  “You really think they’re going to believe the word of some slut black girl over me? Who would want you?”

  And it’s wrong and a lie, but I’m sixteen and don’t know any better. His words sound like truth to me, like something to be afraid of, and all my life he has only ever given me what at the time felt like honesty.

  I turned from him, stomping toward the door in a fit of adolescent theatrics. He snatched me by the wrist and twisted me backwards, pulling me close against his body. I’m trapped in his embrace, and a looker-on might think that the whole thing was affectionate, but there is vomit in my throat. Mr. Wheelock pushes me against the wall with enough force to snap my head back against the exposed brick. He steps back, then, taking in the sight of me, a desperate apology on his lips.

  I shoot him in the chest three times, and it isn’t even hard.

  “The Tell-Tale Heart” is all lies.

  I hear a crack of thunder and worry after Luciana. She’s been gone for half an hour now, and the storm’s picking up.

  Like a high schooler, I recite one of my favorite poems. “Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain . . . / Remembering again that I shall die / And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks / For washing me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude.” Edward Thomas.

  Mr. Wheelock introduced me to war poetry.

  Sometimes I think he left me all this stuff to keep his hold on me. To strangle me. As
I look out the window out into the gray, I think it’s worked. Jobless, damaged, friendless, I do not feel like a full-grown adult. Luciana will tire of me when she realizes I have nothing to offer beyond shopping trips and random historical and literary trivia.

  I walk barefoot to my room, feeling the texture change from hardwood to soft carpet. A draft is coming through, and thinking of Luz, I turn up the thermostat.

  I write my girl—yes, my girl, mine—a note:

  A percolator: a type of coffee-pot in which boiling water rises through a cylindrical compartment, then falls again into the pot by way of diversion, all the while passing through a basket containing ground coffee beans.

  In this, I pass along to you one of the only things that your father did not teach me.

  I cannot talk to the girl directly about so many things, not yet, but I leave her this small piece of myself on the coffee table so that she’ll see it when she comes home.

  Or perhaps she’ll stay out, walk along the street until the paved road meets the dirt road and eventually the small wood by the river. Maybe she’ll jump in, lose herself in the current, and find she doesn’t need me at all. Part of me wishes for that to happen, so that I do not have to see her face again. There’s too much feeling going on here lately.

  Mr. Wheelock used to read me the letters of James Joyce while I lounged at his breakfast nook eating Lucky Charms. I would memorize the lines, recite passages to my English teachers in order to prove to them that I was worldly and experienced. One in particular I said aloud many an evening but never shared with another, holding it close to me like a twisted secret: “When that person . . . whose heart I long to stop with the click of a revolver, put his hand or hands under your skirts[,] did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? . . . Did you feel it?”

  I felt it, yes. I felt everything.

  Sometimes, you hope for the viper to come, and it does, but you can’t get off your shot fast enough. When that happens you squeeze your eyes shut and just endure the bite, let the venom rush through you, allow your blood to slow and clog, and wait for the toxin to invade every part of you.

  Esmé Weijun Wang

  What Terrible Thing It Was

  from Granta

  Becky Guo, Becky Guo, won’t you play with me

  I can’t, said Becky, I’m hanging in a tree.

  Becky Guo, Becky Guo, let me braid your hair.

  I can’t, said Becky, I’ve died way over there.

  Becky Guo, Becky Guo, where are you today?

  I’m here, said Becky, and I’ll remain until you pay.

  My toes are ice-cold when I enter Wellbrook Psychiatric Hospital. I know without looking that they’ve gone deathly pale beneath my socks and shoes, as though shuttling blood to my vital organs will sustain me in this place that is not old enough to be quaint: stained orange carpet, cement walls, cottage-cheese ceiling. I think briefly of fleeing, and how no one would stop me because no laser-printed hospital bracelet has yet been clipped to my wrist. But I’ve promised to come, and I am attempting to be brave. I approach the front desk while fingering the tin milagro that dangles from my neck.

  The receptionist raises her head and asks, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Wendy Chung. I have an ECT consult at 2 p.m. with Dr. Richards.”

  “I see,” she says, typing. “That you do. Well, follow me.” She leads me to a group of hulking PCs, seating me at one of them. “You need to fill out these questionnaires before you see him. It’s simple, but feel free to ask me if you have any questions.” And then: “You know—I love your hair.”

  I put my hand to the top of my head, as if to emphasize the location of my hair.

  “I love how long and black it is,” she says. “Just beautiful. I always find it upsetting when Asian women dye their hair.”

  She goes back to her desk. I sit and look at the middle of the screen before me, which reads, in blocky green type:

  PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LAST TWO WEEKS (PRESS RETURN TO CONTINUE).

  I press the return key. The next screen offers me four selections.

  I DO NOT FEEL SAD.

  I FEEL SAD.

  I AM SAD ALL THE TIME AND I CAN’T SNAP OUT OF IT.

  I AM SO SAD AND UNHAPPY THAT I CAN’T STAND IT.

  I glance at the receptionist as though she can help me, but she’s looking at her phone. She is perhaps checking the polls, which is what I would be doing if I weren’t obligated to complete an intake survey. I examine her face. Has she voted? If so, who did she vote for?

  PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LAST TWO WEEKS (PRESS RETURN TO CONTINUE).

  The first question stymies me because I’m not here for depression, which is what THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS are clearly meant to evaluate. Even a person without depression could answer I FEEL SAD for a galaxy of reasons. If this survey were about the election I might choose I AM SAD ALL THE TIME AND I CAN’T SNAP OUT OF IT, or even I AM SO SAD AND UNHAPPY THAT I CAN’T STAND IT, which are both interesting ways of describing inner turmoil. Who knows what we can and can’t stand. In my opinion, I’ve been able to stand it if I’m still alive, and maybe my psychiatrist was wrong and I don’t need this consultation for electroconvulsive therapy; on the other hand, perhaps I said yes to the consultation because I can no longer stand the voices and the visions.

  In terms of depression, however, sadness is not so much my problem, in which case it might make the most sense to choose I DO NOT FEEL SAD. Yet it is my belief that this could never be the right answer as long as I am alive.

  “Wendy?” a voice says, and I flinch so dramatically that I almost fall out of my chair. It’s the doctor. He is white, like the receptionist; his glasses are John Lennon spectacles; his smile is bland. He is handsome in an unexciting way, like a bachelor on a reality television show. Out of the corner of my eye I see glossy black shoes hanging, and involuntarily I turn to look at the nothing that is there.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, composing myself.

  His name is Dr. Richards. We shake hands with a grip. He says, “Come with me.”

  Dr. Richards brings me to a messy office with pockmarked walls. The easy chair I sit in smells of bodies and terror—I imagine the others who have sat here before me. I wonder how many of them have ended up getting electricity shocked through their skulls.

  “Tell me what’s brought you here,” Dr. Richards says.

  Becky Guo, Becky Guo, won’t you play with me

  I’ve prepared for this. On the bus to the hospital I stared straight ahead and told myself that it was imperative for me to be honest about my situation, no matter how terrified I was or how many stories I’d read online about people who had permanently damaged their ability to form new memories: goldfish people, I said to Dennis, my husband, who couldn’t be here because of work and is very sorry that he cannot be here to hold my hand. I’m prepared to tell Dr. Richards my medical history and about the first voice I heard when I was twenty and how the election has made my stress so much worse, which has in turn escalated psychotic symptoms that have proven to be medication-resistant. And yet Dr. Richards’s face, which warps and flattens and suddenly seems made of plaster, sucks out all the words I had carefully constructed and lined up delicately in impeccable rows, until I am vacant; the erasure of my likes and dislikes and the hopes I harbor, leaving nothing but agitation behind, is something that terrifies me about psychosis—I cannot survive another bout of catatonia.

  “I hallucinate.”

  “What do you hallucinate?”

  It doesn’t matter, I try to say, but the words won’t come out.

  I’m afraid, is what I want to say.

  Have you voted?

  We’re all going to die.

  Respond; that is how to clear the river.

  “I see,” he says.

  When I was seventeen, Rebecca Mei-Hua Guo was found hanging from a eucalyptus tree near the outskirts of Polk Valley, where I live. To be
hanged from this tree was a feat, given its size; her gleaming shoes dangled far above the heads of the two huntsmen who found her, too high for them to reach, and certainly too high for them to undo the knots that made her noose, or the rope that bound her to the branch. By the time they summoned the police and the fire brigade, she had been hanging for over fourteen hours—so said the medical examiner who evaluated her body.

  I am well aware that any narrative involving a dead girl ultimately fails to animate the dead girl, who remains a corpse—or in this case, a ghost—for the duration. I do believe in ghosts. I believe that the living carry patterns of energy created by atoms and molecules and cells and organs, and that these patterns remain vibrating in the air after we die. Sometimes they disassemble and form other patterns, such as in the Buddhist belief of reincarnation, and sometimes they remain what they were before the death occurred.

  As an amateur Tarot reader, I pulled a card for Becky the day her body was found, and I did not pull the World or the Wheel of Fortune. I pulled the Nine of Swords: despair, nightmares. For years I had dreams in which I was the one hanging, and that the children were singing of me while I gasped for breath, wriggling like an exotic dark-haired worm on a hook, watching the townspeople laughing from below. It could have been any of them who killed Becky. It would have been any of them. As long as the murderer was free I would not know who had sedated and then hung Becky from that high-up branch. I would not know why or how the killer had done it, and because there seemed to be no reason for the act I would have to keep my head bowed. If she had not been killed in part because of her race I could, as the saying goes, breathe easier, but I could not assure myself of that any more than I could wipe off my own face.