The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Returning to the room, I shakily set about straightening it, gathering the chopsticks, nesting the teacup in the bowl, carrying them to the kitchen to be washed. Returning again, I wiped the table, swept the tatami, gently slipping the paper into my pocket. Closing the sliding glass doors, I locked them, vigorously testing the latch. On my way out, I stopped to wipe the vase. There in the bottom was a photograph, its white shape stenciled against the dark, and a sharp chill snaked up my spine. I picked it out. In the foreground was Murayama, his open smile revealing the sunny boy I had not seen this afternoon. Behind him, a field spread out, a few shrubs in the distance, the open meadow bisected by a diagonal line—a newly dug trench. Along this trench was a line of people, roughly clothed and blindfolded, their legs folded under them, their ankles and wrists bound by ropes tied to stakes hammered deep into the earth. Though diminished by distance, their faces were crisp, their flapping blindfolds clearly visible above their open mouths contorted by the imminent approach of the row of soldiers standing perhaps ten meters behind them, bayonets unsheathed. Like the prisoners, the soldiers’ faces were also diminished but crisp, and as I stared, my eyes darting back and forth between the ferocious faces of these boys gripping their bayonets and the runny faces of the prisoners twisted in desperate fear, I realized that their expressions were in fact identical, both parties bound by a ferocious fear, the attackers anticipating the same moment of piercing anticipated by the victims who would receive them, and it was then that I recognized that what I was looking at was not, as I had first assumed, an execution, but rather a training session, the line of shrubs not at all shrubs but a row of chairs fattened by decorated officers observing the performance. Two questions sprung at me: Why had Murayama left this picture hidden here in this vase? Was this, like the others, Yasushi’s photograph? Then it dawned on me that perhaps this whole visit had been a ploy, a cruel, subversive act, plotted perhaps by Yasushi himself, not only to leak the image, a clear indictment of the military, but also a signal to me that Yasushi, though uninterested in presenting himself, had in fact survived.

  This last thought seized my imagination, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed plausible. After all, that would explain Murayama’s peculiar behaviors, and hadn’t he, at the last moment, been careful to prepare me for Yasushi’s eventual return? I brought the photograph closer to my face, its faint chemical odor penetrating my nose. Yes, those were indeed officers, and those definitely a row of training soldiers, one end eclipsed by Murayama’s head, the other end cut off by the photograph’s border, the last visible soldier a mere slice, one visible leg stepping forward, one visible arm raising the bayonet, his face, angled and therefore whole, sending a bolt of shock through me. Yasushi. I put down the photograph. Outside, the sky had cooled, the branching footsteps of the passersby beginning to thin, depositing one pair outside the gate, rattling it: the sound of my husband sliding the bolt. I snatched the photograph. Glancing around for a place to hide it, my gaze, like Murayama’s, alighted on the vase, the coarse interior of which my husband was unlikely to examine. Carefully laying the photograph face up so that its darker hue might blend with the color of the vase’s interior, I stepped back, my knees buckling. Outside, my husband’s footsteps paused. Gripping the neck of my blouse, I braced against the sound of his key fitting the lock and arranged myself, straightening my back, smoothing the hem of my skirt, tugging the corners of my blouse, as all around me, the momentary quiet of the room, assailed once more by the cicadas, was swallowed up by the darkening summer sky.

  Samar Farah Fitzgerald

  Where Do You Go?

  ONE SPRING, WHEN THEY had been married two years, when they both had good jobs they could do from home, they left the big city as they had always planned to and bought a house. The house had a two-car garage, so they bought two cars. In the attic—they’d never had one before—they stored everything they thought they’d outgrown. Kierkegaard, for one. Plus, her thrift-shop leather jacket, his music posters, their longhorn cattle skull.

  They had found the skull—desert angel, dank bone picked clean in certain morning light—on a trip out West, shortly after they moved in together. It was expensive and awkward to carry on a plane but perfect for the front wall of their studio apartment. One year, before a party, someone painted the horns blue. Another year, someone stuck a dried corsage in a hollow eye socket.

  Their new home was an hour from the old studio, in a town that was nothing like the boastful but forgettable suburbs nearby. More of a village than a town, set snugly on a pretty, wooded hill. A person might live five miles away and never know the place was there. But it was. If you took the right road and stayed with it around a narrow bend, then up the hill, eventually you’d come to a clearing with modest homes encircling a small lake. All of the houses were cottage-sized—no three-story colonial fortresses here—and yet remarkably distinct and intricate. Pointed turrets and steep gables, stick work in the Victorian gingerbread style and eaves extending over small rounded doorways like visors. Their three-bedroom stucco sat at the bottom of the hill. It had a prim stone walkway, two short chimneys, and a slim cast-iron balcony with enough standing room for one, facing the water.

  Because they were so charmed by the setting and the architecture they were willing to overlook the fact that most of the residents were older, much older—retired couples, widows, and divorcees well into the winter of their lives. The evidence was everywhere. The nearest supermarket stocked blood pressure monitors at the checkout counter, and signs within a half-mile radius proclaimed street names in a colossal font. Wednesday nights, half the village gathered for card games in a community center at the top of the hill. They could see these tepid parties from their side of the lake, the large atrium windows giving up a dozen or so round, indistinct silhouettes. On weekends, a purple bus rumbled up the hill and idled in front of the center, waiting to carry the cotton-headed gamblers south, to the casinos and beaches.

  It was sort of funny that they’d joined an outpost for the near-to-dying—that’s what they were able to tell each other at first. They enjoyed themselves: “Next stop on the casino bus: diaper change in Freehold.” At the beginning, anyway, they were too busy relocating to give much more thought to their new neighbors. When they’d moved into the studio years before, it had been a simple merger: his things and her things coming together. Now, although their total living space had more than tripled, nothing from the past seemed right—the painted longhorn skull looked kitschy in the foyer, adolescent in the master bedroom—and they were struck deeply with the desire to purge and start all over. Some of their belongings they posted for sale online, some they hauled to a Dumpster, and what they found themselves unable to remove entirely from their lives they relegated to the attic. They wrapped the skull in a large white sheet and set it on an old piano bench abandoned by previous owners. It wasn’t long before the sheet loosened and pooled around the animal’s brow, so one exposed eye socket loomed threateningly each time they climbed the attic stairs.

  They took breaks from the purging to order a new couch, a dining room table, a kitchen table, and matching nightstands for their bedroom. Late at night, worn out from the effort of recalibrating the value of the things they owned, they made their way to the balcony. They stood, holding each other—the only way they could both fit—and contemplated the new scenery. It was high summer by now. When the moon was bright and a light breeze lifted the boughs, they watched turrets and gables undulating on the surface of the reservoir.

  But it didn’t matter how tightly they held each other. Henry and Vega were always alone with their thoughts. Taking it all in, he was often reminded of the porcelain Christmas village his grandmother would unbox every winter. He looked out at the water and swelled with nostalgia, a sweet and mellow sadness for all the things they’d discarded and for the days to come, which of course would one day be past, too. Vega, looking at the same scene, was mostly reminded of a movie—was it a documentary or some kind of supernat
ural drama?—about a group of little people living in a dense forest. Sometimes, though, all she could think of was Hansel and Gretel, the perilous cottage.

  “You ever think,” she said one night.

  “Mmm.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard for me to do something really horrible to you, something really violent, Henry.” His hands were clasped in front of her, and his chin rested lightly on her head. She twisted in his embrace and looked up at him. “What if I strangled you? Or stabbed you with our kitchen knife? It would be possible, you know. A little while ago, I saw you bent over the box in the dining room.”

  He shook his head. He took her slender neck in his warm hands and squeezed gently. “I think I might win that one,” he said. This made her smile, and he let go.

  In the city they would part ways on the front stoop, one of them going east and the other going south to their separate jobs. Now they shared an extra bedroom as an office. It took a little time and effort to arrange the furniture but finally they positioned their desks so that they sat with their backs to each other. And it was sort of pleasant working side by side, or back to back, on their projects. Henry courted Vega all over again. He sent her emails with subject headings alluding to the pattern or color of her underwear, which he noted each morning as he watched her dress.

  Subject: Getting my ducks in a row.

  Subject: Nothing but blue skies.

  Subject: Remember the Pink Panther?

  They had sex instead of lunch some days. And as the summer grew melancholy with signs of fall, Vega threw out her pills—five packs of little blue pellets wrapped in foil sinking in the garbage. They found the added sense of purpose invigorating and kissed more, even when Henry was deep inside her, as if the kisses went straight to his sperm and her egg, pumping their future child with all this love. Nothing except love.

  They slept with the windows open. In the mornings, without a commute downtown or crosstown, there was time to read the paper—the entire front section, plus one or two stories from a “silly” section—before they each had to dial in to the publishing houses where they worked. Some mornings there was even time for a spinach and feta omelet before the telephone rang and their inboxes filled up. They wondered aloud if their work was suffering, but nobody had complained. Still, because nothing in this world was given freely, they tallied their losses. They had to haul themselves into the car for the simplest errand; no longer could a whim, a pang for an apple or a baguette, take them down the block to the corner bodega. The independent movies didn’t always show up in the local theater. And they missed their friends in the city, though not as much as they said they did when they had the chance to see these people for dinner or drinks. All in all, small things.

  Meanwhile, the neighbors had taken notice of the young couple. They waved tentatively as Vega and Henry took the bend around the lake in one of their new cars. “Slow down,” their nervous fingers seemed to say. They came by with gifts. Raisin pie, bran muffins, wheat cookies in holiday tins with wintry scenes.

  Vega found their welcome gestures stale. Or, not so much stale but peculiarly flat.

  “Really? Tastes good to me,” Henry said, snapping a cookie in two and taking a bite.

  “No, they taste like old people,” she said, her hand on her stomach and her lips curling with distaste.

  One afternoon, deep into October—the warm weather now far from everyone’s thoughts—Cynthia Lippincott from next door knocked. She was a short woman, plump from the hips up and with a natural rouge in her cheeks. In the crook of her ample arms she cradled a tin of gingersnaps, like a mother with her infant.

  “I’ve come to warn you about Gordon,” she said brightly, handing over her gift and stepping nimbly into their home. Her husband—the tall, stooped man who never smiled or waved—was not well, and Cynthia didn’t waste any time explaining his condition. It was emphysema: his heart was dangerously enlarged from the stress of breathing. She wanted Henry and Vega to know that Gordon would probably come around asking for cigarettes. “The man who lived here before you, he was a young bachelor, and he liked to give my husband smokes. When I asked him to stop, well, Gordon started paying him to do it.”

  Henry did his best to assure her that neither of them smoked nor would they ever think of buying cigarettes for Gordon. Cynthia nodded, satisfied. Her presence was above all social and, once she was convinced that business had been taken care of, she wanted to know everything about Henry and Vega. How long had they lived in the city? Did they plan on children? What did they do on those computers all day? “You’re both editors? Isn’t that fascinating,” she said, wistfully. “People work at home now, don’t they? Not like when I was young. I suppose it wasn’t his fault, but Gordon was gone such long hours.”

  Henry offered their visitor a seat on the living room couch and disappeared into the kitchen. Vega sat herself on the opposite end of the couch, her knees angled politely toward Cynthia.

  “What does your husband do, Mrs. Lippincott?”

  “Well now he’s a full-time professional pain in my ass,” Cynthia said and erupted into sharp laughter. Her hand extended, as if to pat Vega on the knee in recognition of some wifely bond, but her stubby arm came up short. She let it hang there a moment, then settled for rubbing the cushion between them. “You mean before he retired, of course. Oh, he was, you know, a manager over at Grayson. That large pharmaceutical just two or three miles north of here, closer to the highway? He was with them for a long time. Good pension. We could have moved anywhere, honestly, after he retired, but here we are. Still living up the road. People are funny, aren’t they?”

  Henry came back smiling and carrying a flowered plastic tray with the ginger cookies. The tray caught Vega’s eye. It had been a thoughtless flea market purchase years ago. Where had Henry been storing it? The memory had almost escaped her mind, a last-minute trip to a bed and breakfast in Rhode Island. That night, they had their first shower together: her fingers and his mouth where they hadn’t been before. And the next morning at the flea market, there was a sun so bright and warming that nothing, absolutely nothing except the day itself, entered their minds.

  She forced her attention back on the old woman. Exactly how old was Mrs. Lippincott anyway? She seemed younger than Mr. Lippincott, but her husband looked so frail and pallid he could have been just a few days away from one hundred.

  Not long after Cynthia dropped by, Vega went out one night to harvest her herb garden. Back in July a flare of ambition had driven her to till the small plot on the side of their house, and she had decided to plant more than the ordinary mint and basil—herbs like fennel, lovage, and dill. It was after eleven now. Henry was upstairs, his teeth brushed, in bed with a section of the paper. She was not accustomed to nights like this, black, suburban nights. In a childish way, it frightened her to think about all the small faceless creatures moving around the recesses of the yard, the nameless fish darting in the lake, an intruder skulking past the shadowy angles of the neighbors’ houses. She crouched over her garden and began to fill her plastic bag with crisp, pungent stalks, setting the curve of her body against all of that unknown. Soon, the wind shifted, and the sharp, buttery smell of tobacco wafted over her shoulder. Or, she felt his eyes on her. She couldn’t have said which happened first, but Vega stood abruptly and turned around, in the direction of the Lippincott house. She started.

  There was Cynthia’s husband, Gordon, standing at the edge of his property, under a leafy oak. He was wearing what Vega recognized as his usual outfit of gray pajama bottoms and a navy suit jacket. He was smoking and watching her. She gasped lightly and set her hand on her chest, but he did nothing to acknowledge her alarm. She wrapped her cardigan tight and stepped tentatively his way. She drew closer to his thin, decrepit form as she might have approached the apparition of a large animal, with a mix of fear and irresistible disgust. But just as she got close enough to see the slight quiver of his cigarette hand, he coughed softly. He became an old man again.

&
nbsp; “Mr. Lippincott?” she managed to say. “Gordon?” She was about to add, “Are you all right?” but stopped herself. Henry had a tendency to slip into a ministerial habit with the old people. It bothered Vega, just as it did when he would unconsciously flex his vocabulary around their doorman in the city. “Julio,” Henry used to say, “you are the best doorman we’ve ever had, inimitable.” He hadn’t meant anything terrible by it, of course. She understood that her husband was simply a man who was grateful for the things he had. But still, it made her squirm.

  Gordon nodded “hello,” or “fine,” and reached into his suit jacket. He pulled out a cigarette. For her. “Don’t go telling that husband of yours either. He’ll tell Cynthia, I know he will.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at this, but she shook her head. “I don’t smoke.”

  “You? You smoke. I could tell it right away.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Gordon shrugged. Then he started coughing again, this time more seriously. It was difficult to watch. Only when he finally brought the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag were his lungs tamed. Amazed, Vega watched him exhale. He lifted his head slightly, lowered his eyes, and basked in the release. Who knew, maybe the shortness of breath and coughing were a welcome substitute for words. Vega decided that he did not seem like someone much interested in conversation, emphysema or not. She knew the kind. Before Henry, she had been drawn to solitary and taciturn types. Her eyes drifted to his crotch, unprotected in his pajama bottoms. She wondered how much he could still feel. She looked up and his face flickered awareness of the direction of her gaze.

  The truth was that she used to be a casual smoker. But she hadn’t accepted a cigarette from a man in a long time, not since her years right out of college, first traveling as a journalist in Eastern Europe, then back in the city. “All right,” she said, and felt herself smile coyly. Gordon lit the one for her, and as her dry lips closed around the lost habit, she pictured him briefly as a young man, when he must have been imposing in his new suit jacket. He was not unhandsome. He had an abundance of gray hair and a strong forehead and chin.