by Laura Furman
“Whatever it is, it’s already happening,” said Rosa.
“She’s a wonderful mother. You must remember that.”
“I don’t,” said Rosa. “I can’t. Not anymore.”
He wasn’t a bad man. He could be forgiven for thinking it was a war, an ancient one, and that she would fight against the rest of them as long as they were near. In the spring he took Rosa and Marco and Dolly to a new house, and Leonora was left behind. He arranged for her disability checks. He did not take her off the bank account.
“If you get help, we’ll come back,” he told her.
Poor Alan hired a nanny, Madeline, a jug-eared, freckled beauty. A good girl, as her father later described her to the news cameras. She picked up the children every day after school. Rosa worshipped her; Dolly and Marco merely loved her. This went on for eight months, until the day after her twenty-first birthday, when she woke at noon still drunk from the first legal cocktails of her life, in late December, and loaded the children into the car, and found the car was too hot; and as she tried to wrench her black peacoat off one shoulder, and as she felt the last of the Black Russians muscle through her veins, and as she hit a patch of black ice, she understood that there would be an accident. She could see the children hurt in the backseat, the windshield gone lacy. Herself, opening the door and running away, away, away. When the car stops, I’m going to leg it, and that was the last thought Madeline or any of them ever had.
—
No children, thought Leonora. She had intended to get herself upright and go looking for them. She should have eaten them when she could.
For a while she tried to distract herself with the radios. Each bore Poor Alan’s family name like a badge on the pellicle of the speaker. She went from room to room and turned them on, but then she thought she could hear—behind the sonorous daylong monologue of the news station, or the awful brightness of Vivaldi—the voices of her children. She worked the volume and tuning knobs in mincing little oscillations, then there they were: the tootling rhythm of Dolly, the defiant hum of Rosa, Marco sighing. She wondered if they had their own stations, or even their own radios. No: They would be cuddled up together in one frequency, the way they liked.
But she could never tune them in clearly, and slowly the sound turned feral, howling, chirping, shrieking: a forest empty of children. Then she knew they were gone.
The radios wouldn’t turn off tight enough; the voices of strangers leaked through. She unplugged the cords, knocked the batteries from the backs. She could still hear that burble, someone muttering or the sound of an engine a block away.
She lay in bed. At her ear thrummed the old clock radio, with the numbered decagons that showed their corners as they turned to indicate that a minute had ended, or an hour, the thrum a little louder then. She felt her torso, where her children would have been, had she managed to eat them.
Not everyone who stops being human turns animal, but Leonora did.
The top of her back grew humped with ursine fat, and she shambled like that, too, bearlike, through the aisles of the grocery store at the end of the street. She shouldered the upright fridges full of beer, she sniffed the air of the checkout lanes. Panda-eyed and eagle-toed and lion-tailed, with a long braid down her back that snapped as though with muscles and vertebrae. Her insides, too, creatures of the dark and deep. Her kidneys, dozing moles; her lungs, folded bats. The organs that had authored her children: jellyfish, jellyfish, eel, eel, manatee.
I am dead. I am operated by animals.
Her wandering took her to the bakery, where she’d taken her children every Saturday morning of their early childhood, to let Poor Alan sleep in. In the slanted case she saw the loaves of challah. There was something familiar about them.
“Can I help you?” said the teenager behind the counter. His T-shirt had a picture of the galaxy on it, captioned YOU ARE HERE.
She tapped the glass. “Please,” she said, and he pulled out a loaf, and she said, “I don’t need a bag.”
He’d already started angling the loaf into the bag’s brown mouth. Who didn’t need a bag for bread?
“I don’t need a bag,” she repeated. She counted out the money and set it down. “Just the paper.”
He handed the bread self-consciously across the counter. When it was in her hands she adjusted the wax paper around it, admired the sheen of the egg wash, its placid countenance. Then she carried it to a table in the window and spread out the paper and set the loaf upon it.
She saw a sleeping baby in the shape of the bread, knees and arms akimbo, head turned, as always, to the left. Marco. The girls had cast different shadows. She put her hand on the loaf to check for oven warmth. Not on the surface. Maybe at the heart. Later she wouldn’t care what people thought of her, she’d cradle the loaf in her arms before eating, but now she patted the bread, and then, with careful fingers, pulled it apart. Yeast, warmth, sweetness, a very child. Her mouth was full with it, then her head and throat and stomach. She felt the feral parts of her grow sleepy and peaceable.
I am eating Marco. I am eating my boy.
Thereafter, every morning she went to the bakery and bought a challah and pretended it was one of her children. Rosa slept with her bottom in the air. Dolly, alone of them, liked to be swaddled. Marco, akimbo. She carried the day’s loaf in her arms to the table. She patted it. Then she ate it. Not like an animal. Knob by knob, slowly: One loaf could last for hours, washed down with water from the crenellated plastic cups the bakery gave away for free.
That was her nourishment. She lived on bread and good manners and felt sick with her children.
The new mothers of the neighborhood wished the bakery would throw the bulky, unkempt woman out. As they wished, they felt guilty, because they were trying to teach their children tolerance. But then they looked at the slanted case. The center bay was filled with glittering sugared shortbread cookies, decorated according to the season. Hearts, shamrocks, eggs, flags, leaves, pumpkins, turkeys, candy canes, hearts again. Evidence: Bakeries were for children, and children were frightened of Leonora.
Sometimes a mother and child would walk by her table, and Leonora could see the tight, unhappy discomfort of judgment on the mother’s face.
“Say hello, Pearl,” the mother would tell her child, and Pearl, dutifully, would say hello, and Leonora would wave; she knew the mother was thinking, Thank God she doesn’t know what I’m thinking.
These children neither pained nor interested her. They weren’t her darlings. But every now and then a Pearl or a Sammy would smile at her, and even giggle, and she would want a nibble, a taste, in the old way. A raspberry blown on a neck, a kiss with a bite at its heart: nibble, nibble, yum. They weren’t hers, but they were sweet. Yet if you were the mother of dead children that was over. You weren’t allowed.
On those days she ordered a second loaf of bread, which she dragged home and tore apart.
—
Five years passed like nothing. She was recognized in the neighborhood as the monument she was, constructed to memorialize a tragedy but with the plaque long since dropped off. She was Leonora. Nobody imagined that she was a person who’d always been exactly as she was—poisoned, padded, eyes sunk into her face. She existed only at the bakery, at the table in the window, eating in her finicky way. She spoke to the people behind the counter. That was all. Some were patient, and some weren’t.
Then one day a man came in, caught her eye, and smiled.
Poor Alan, she thought reflexively, but then she recalled Poor Alan was dead, though he’d remembered her in his will and set up a trust to take care of her. This man wore a green wool hat like a bucket, which he pulled off to reveal a full head of white hair. The hat looked expensive, artisanal. No, he was never Poor Alan, who’d lost his hair long before it faded. But she did know him. He sat across from her. The tabletop was Formica, the green of trolleys.
“Mike Wooster,” he said.
“Hello, Mike Wooster,” said Leonora. She could smell her own terribl
e breath. She still slept in a bed and washed herself, but she did not always remember to brush her teeth. Why would she? She scarcely needed them.
He bounced the hat around on his fists, then set it in front of him. She had a sense that he wanted to drop it over the remains of her loaf: Dolly this time. He said, “I’m Madeline’s father.”
She heard the present tense of the sentence. “I know who you are,” she said.
Everything about him was rich and comforted. “I heard you came here,” he said. “That bread good?”
She tore off a brown curve. A cheek, a clenched hand. She sniffed at it before she pushed it in her mouth.
He cleared his throat. “We’re having a memorial service. And my wife and I and our kids—well, we thought of you.” He picked the hat back up, brushed some flakes of challah from the brim. “I’ve thought of you.” He said that to the hat. “Every single day I’ve thought of you. You know, they turned my daughter into a monster, too.”
The alcohol, the coat, the ice. Everybody said that if one of those things hadn’t been true they never would have crashed. “Too?” she said. The animals of her body were roaring back to life.
They—whoever they were—had not turned Leonora into a monster. They had erased her. Newspapers, television, the horrible gabbling radio, which spoke only of the children’s father, the left-behind man, the single parent. That poor man, looking after his children. To lose all of them at once.
Poor Alan had a memorial service, too, had invited her. Though he’d asked her to come to the front, she’d sat alone, at the back of the church—a church! since when!—drunk and stunned. No one else spoke to her. She was a mother who’d let her children go, a creature so awful nobody believed in her. She’d had to turn herself into a monster, in order to be seen.
“Madeline never got a chance,” said Mike Wooster. “To redeem herself. But you could. You could be redeemed.”
She laughed at that, or part of her did, a living thing sheltered in a cave inside of her. “Redeemed,” she said. “Like a coupon.”
He shook his head. “Like a soul. Your soul can be redeemed.”
“Too late,” she said. “Soul’s gone.”
“Where?” he said.
“Where do you think?” she said.
He took her hand. “This only feels like hell,” he said. “I know. I do know.”
She shook her head to refuse his sympathy: She could smell the distant desiccation of it. No. Why had he come here? He had a dead child, too, of course. She could feel the loss twitching through his fingers, the sorrow, the guilt, like schools of tiny, flicking fish that swim through bone instead of ocean. He was not entirely human anymore, either. She heard the barking dog of his heart, wanting an answer. Her heart snarled back, but tentatively.
If she accepted his sympathy she would have to feel sorry for him. She would have to transcend. Some people could. They could forgive and rise above their agony.
Her organs turned in their burrows, and she felt an old emotion, one from before. Gratitude. She was thankful to remember that she was a monster. Many monsters. Not a chimera but a vivarium. Her heart snarled and snarled and snarled. She listened to it.
“The thing is,” said Leonora to Mike Wooster, as she pulled her hand from his, “you can’t unbraid a challah.”
“No?” he said. “Well, I’d guess not.”
“Would you like some?” she asked.
He looked at the rubble of the day’s bread. “Oh, no. That’s yours.”
“Let me get you one. Please.”
“I don’t need—”
Leonora said, rising, “It will be a pleasure to watch you eat.”
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Our jurors read the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories in a blind manuscript. Each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors don’t consult the series editor or one another. Although the jurors write their essays without knowledge of the authors’ names, the names are inserted into the essay later for the sake of clarity.
—LF
Tessa Hadley on “A Ride Out of Phrao” by Dina Nayeri
I like everything about this striking, original, unexpected story. Its subject is a middle-aged Iranian doctor who made a new home years ago in America with her daughter but has never quite felt at home there. She goes to Thailand to work with the Peace Corps in a village near the city of Chiang Mai, where there are few modern conveniences and no air-conditioning, where the toilet is a hole in the floor, where she dreads the lizards climbing her walls at night. This sounds as if it might turn out to be a hand-wringing story about the guilt of privilege or the tragedy of underdevelopment—but actually it’s such a gentle, haunting, private, funny little exploration. Much of its effort is to catch the character and experience of this particular rather extraordinary woman: resilient, unreliable, generous, prone to untruth, anxious over certain social superstitions (she mustn’t let her “seams show”), modest in her sense of her own entitlement.
And yet audacious too! How brave she is to make a new life in an utterly strange place, twice over. She has no idea that she’s brave, however, and has rather a low estimate of herself—although she spends no time dwelling on that and doesn’t indulge in self-pity. We don’t feel her character at the level of her ideology, or through learning what she wants to get out of the world for herself, or because we’re invited to engage with her angst. Sentence by delicate sentence, the writer pieces together the richly muddled comedy of this woman’s history, and her thoughts and fears: We dwell with her rare open spirit—open to her new life, her own past, to the others she encounters and works with. She is so alive to every moment, and curious, alert in all her senses—“enthralled,” for instance, by the wonderful Thai fruit she learns to peel, and to name. Dr. Rin, as the villagers call her, has planted herself—but so modestly, with no presumption that she could ever make sense of any of it—at the intersection of several different worlds, which might as well be different planets: America, Iran, Thailand. In its modest refusal to judge, or to lead us to any portentous conclusions or doomy moralizing, the story models such an appealing position, imaginatively, for our relations to our global world.
The subject of the story is important, but of course it only works because of how it’s done. The narrative is so subtly and intelligently positioned, inside Dr. Rin yet also able to give us a perspective on her from outside, as if we were watching her. And it’s built out of such good detail—all the telling detail that gives us Dr. Rin’s Iranian past, her Thai present, and her American interim. The detail is complex and nuanced—a rich ragbag of finely observed fragments—and yet somehow the steady, intelligent sentences find a way through it all so that we’re never muddled or confused. The story finds its clear, pure line through its material; the writing is beautiful because it doesn’t try too hard. “The rain blurs the lines of their faces and bodies, and their movements become dreamlike.” Every observation is wonderfully exact. A seamstress has “a browning half tooth.”
Dr. Rin teaches English in a Thai school, and makes friends with an awkward boy, odd and physically unappealing, who may be slightly autistic, and whose father hits him. The boy tries to touch her breast, and she doesn’t know whether this is moving or distasteful. Her thoroughly Americanized daughter, Leila—who can’t forgive her mother for her lies, her bankruptcy, her quixotic hopes, her “running away”—comes from America to visit, but Leila can’t bear the dreary poverty of the place, or do without a flush toilet. Yet the story doesn’t set itself crudely up against Leila, it doesn’t score points against her; she’s lovely and young and strong and full of appetite, and we can imagine just how she finds her mother exasperating. This writing doesn’t pretend to understand the world, or sum it up; there’s no clinching resolution to any of the questions it raises. We never quite know what the boy wants from Dr. Rin, and there’s never eve
r any confrontation with the boy’s father—in fact he’s the one who finally drives Leila back to Chiang Mai, to bathrooms and civilization. The story’s language is plain, and never overwrought, yet it closes with an exquisite metaphor that feels like a leap of vision when it comes. Dr. Rin remembers the fruit—the Iranian persimmon, or the Thai mangosteen—in which sweet flesh is separated from foul by such a fine membrane.
—
Tessa Hadley was born and raised in Bristol. She’s written five novels, including The Master Bedroom, The London Train, and Clever Girl, and two collections of short stories, as well as a book of criticism, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. She is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and reviews regularly for The Guardian and for the London Review of Books.
Kristen Iskandrian on “Birdsong from the Radio” by Elizabeth McCracken
This story glows with an eerie incandescence and has the aura of a fairy tale. “ ‘Long ago,’ ” it starts—but the telling is through a character, Leonora, whose reliability we are made to doubt almost immediately, “and the telling was long ago, too.” And so, we have a story that begins with a story, told to children who are no longer alive, through their mother who wanted to eat them, because, of course, “[c]hildren long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.”
There are many things to love about “Birdsong from the Radio”: the images, indelible brushstrokes of language—“the unfurling flump of the bedclothes like the beat of the wings they thought they could see on her back”—the musicality of the sentences, their rhythm mirroring the stalking, lurking pulse of Leonora herself as she becomes something subhuman but also superhuman. The subject matter, which seems to encompass the whole of our human condition but also something deeply and dearly specific: a mother’s love and need for her children—primal and unrelenting—set in stark relief to a father’s love for radios, and his fear of his wife’s rabid love.
