Yoshi ran ahead blindly, flailing his arms, deeper into the darkness. Searchlights arced above their heads. Yoshi’s movements were panicked, like a small animal caught in a snare. Hiroshi caught a glimpse of Yoshi’s arm, his neck. Yoshi stumbled and fell, and Hiroshi aimed the gun at where Yoshi scrabbled in the dirt. A quick and honorable death. He could kill Yoshi and then kill himself, and when their bodies were returned to Japan, his father would wet his lips with water and cover the family shrine with long sails of white paper. His mother would hold the juzu in her hands, repeating a sutra for each bead, before offering incense to him, once, twice, three times. Yoshi would never even know that the bullet had come from him.
Hiroshi, Yoshi whispered, where are you? Don’t leave me alone.
Close behind them, the prison guards called to each other. No matter where they ran, Hiroshi knew that their recapture was imminent. If they were captured with the dead guard’s gun, they would be executed on the spot. Why was one death better than another? What was honorable about smashing in the skull of an Australian boy who was still too young, perhaps, to know pleasure? Had he died for his country so that they could honor their own? Hiroshi clasped both hands around the gun and flung it as far into the distance as he could.
I’m here, Hiroshi responded. Keep going. I’m right behind you.
V
Masaru took a job in an American sideshow. THE HORRORS OF ATOMIC WAR. The poster showed him surrounded by oval cameos: midgets, bearded ladies, legless men. He made a good wage, the villagers said, and he sent back money to his wife, who moved up in the village’s esteem. Miho overheard this at market, where she was overcharged for even rice, flour, and salt.
Nakamura had invited Hiroshi to appear on television, but he demurred and referred Nakamura to other crew members. They were men untouched by cowardice, and public opinion of them had swayed from disgust to pity, and now, to sympathy. It was possible that people thought differently of him too. Perhaps they were willing to forgive his conduct in the war. Strange: when he was a man, he had been a monster; now that he was a monster, he was once again a man.
Hiroshi’s hair had fallen out, and the top of his head was hard and smooth as a helmet. Deep creases scalloped the length of his forehead, a permanent ridge of worry. Scales ringed his body like ruffles of armor.
Yoshi laughed at the news of Masaru. “You know,” Yoshi said, “that his wife used to never touch his burned arm? Now she lives high off his deformity.”
“We’ve had offers too,” Hiroshi said. “They will fly us to America.”
“Haven’t the Americans done enough?” Yoshi said. He raised his arms, as if surrendering. “You know what people call us? They say we are ningyo. Mermaids! Already some of the villagers think that if they eat our flesh, they will live forever.” He rapped his knuckles against the carapace on his chest. “Maybe they will break their teeth on me.”
“Ningyo are omens,” Hiroshi said. “To catch one is to invite misfortune.”
“It’s too late to throw us back,” Yoshi said. He lifted a scale on his arm. The flesh underneath was gray and bumpy, like lizard skin. “What do you think I taste like? There’s enough of me to feed the village for a week.”
“You? You’re as stringy as week-old beef. And if you taste the way you smell, no one would be able to stomach you.”
“We could be a boon to this village,” Yoshi said. “Remember the story of ‘Happyaku Bikuni’? One bite of me and everyone would have eternal life. They would hail us as heroes.” Yoshi flexed his hands, the webbing as translucent as kelp. “Or maybe our flesh will poison the village folk, and they will know what our pain is like.”
“Why do you say these things?” Hiroshi said. “Why can you not be at peace?”
“Look at us,” Yoshi said. “Better to have died in Cowra all those years ago than to live like this today.” He exhaled—a wheeze, a gasp. “You should have shot me,” Yoshi said. “You should have pulled the trigger.”
VI
Yoshi hanged himself. Hiroshi found him—maybe Yoshi had meant for Hiroshi alone to serve as witness to his bravery, but the truth was that no one else visited him. He had fastened one end of his obi to the pine beam bracing the ceiling and looped the other end beneath the scales on his neck, where the skin was still soft. A green forked tongue lolled out of his mouth, and his eyes were yellow, glassy, streaked with red.
Hiroshi did not cry out when he saw Yoshi’s body dangling there, nor did he cry as he tried to cut his friend down. But his webbed hand could not hold a knife; his fingers were too stiff and clumsy. He slashed at the cloth with his talons until it frayed and snapped. Yoshi’s body crashed onto the floor, and Hiroshi cradled his friend, scales scratching against scales. Hiroshi’s eyelids had atrophied, but his nictitating membrane flicked ceaselessly to keep his eyes moist.
Soon, people gathered outside Yoshi’s door, looking in, hiding their words behind their hands. The crowd grew as news spread, and it seemed as if the whole village were looking in. Hiroshi didn’t move. Let them look. They had wished us dead—let them look at the result. He no longer had ears, but he heard them whispering, If it’s dead, we should have the body. He heard Miho gasp. How could you say that, she said. That’s his friend. That’s Yoshi.
Monster’s whore, they replied.
Enough. Hiroshi lifted Yoshi’s body and walked outside into the night. The villagers trailed him, holding aloft torches. Miho was among them. He smelled the detergent she used to purify herself. Here they were: a procession of monsters.
The villagers shouted, Give us his body. Give him to us.
If you want him, Hiroshi said, come take him from me. He gouged a nearby tree with his claws, and none of the villagers dared pass the patch of splinters he had made.
Hiroshi did not know if Yoshi’s body would burn, as leathery and resilient as it was. And it would be impossible to bury his body in secret. What if it tainted the land where it lay? Hiroshi walked to the beach with Yoshi in his arms. Miho stopped at the sand. She placed his sandals at the start of the path back to the village, as she used to do when he went swimming. The water is too cold for me, she used to say. But you go on.
Hiroshi stood at the ocean’s edge, the water sluicing onto his feet. He thought once again of Sugiro, the commander who had committed hara-kiri. Perhaps it had been the brave thing, the honorable thing. But Hiroshi had seen a new world blossom, a world born of light and fire, and this world no longer had a place for the proud, the defeated, the disgraced. The old world held on to its illusion of bravery, like the cowardly men up on the hill brandishing their torches, as if they had driven him toward the sea themselves. But all Hiroshi had to do was turn and open his mouth—his square teeth had fallen out weeks ago, replaced with triangular shards—and the men ran off like curs.
He no longer felt the cold. Even waist-deep in water, he felt no unease. Indeed, it seemed comforting. The tide pulled at his body, urging him forward. Yoshi’s body was buoyant, and the sea lifted him out of Hiroshi’s arms. But there could not be even the remote possibility of Yoshi floating back onto land. A ningyo washing up on shore was an omen of war, and they had both seen their fill of calamity. Hiroshi ventured further, deeper, until the light from the stars vanished.
He sensed the thrumming of fish around him: the mackerel low on the ocean floor, a squid curling its tentacles around an unlucky clam, and a school of tuna bustling about, mouths open and hungry. He breathed and exhaled through the slits in his neck. He propelled himself, undulating his torso, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, vast forests of seaweed unfurled before him. Fish darted out of his path. He released Yoshi’s body. He swam forth, examining the endlessness of the new world, and Yoshi followed in the pattern Hiroshi cut through the water, almost as if he were himself swimming. Yoshi, Hiroshi wanted to cry out, where are you? Don’t leave me alone. And Yoshi, now given to
the ebb and flow of currents, called to him, Keep going. I’m right behind you.
Michael Parker
Stop ’n’ Go
EVERY DAY BUT SUNDAY he dresses in the uniform of his former profession: khaki-colored work clothes, steel-toed brogans, a thin windbreaker zipped to the Adam’s apple if there is a shadowy sweetness in the morning breeze. He rises before dawn, lights the pilot of the kerosene stove, lets the dogs out, careful not to slap the screen door. He sits at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee, black, for an hour until his wife rises and fries breakfast wordlessly in her housecoat. Neither of his sons wanted to take over the farm and his daughter moved up to Raleigh to work in a bank and he doesn’t understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to them, they begin in the middle and it’s never quite clear to him what it is they’re even advertising. He stands in the backyard looking out over the fields he leases now to an outfit out of, by God, Delaware, working a pick between his teeth, dogs at his feet. Maybe I have outlived time. Soon there will be no such thing as dew, the thing he once had to rouse himself early from bed to beat. Get it done before the sun burns the dew off. They’ll do away with that, too. In the war he had been walking through a French forest pretending he was back home quail hunting in Beamon’s woods with his cousins when he took two bullets: one through the palm of his hand, another in the shoulder, shattering his clavicle. The Germans pinned them down at the edge of a field for sixteen hours. Mortar rounds exploded the trees above him, turning tree limbs into tiny, deadly slivers. It grew dark and so cold he bit a wadded-up sleeve to quiet the chatter of his teeth. He lay there hoping he would freeze to death before he bled out because he had heard a frozen man just fell finally asleep. But some old boy came along, picked him up and slung him over his shoulder like a sack of fertilizer, took him deeper into the woods. He laid him down and stripped off his clothes and bound his wounds with tourniquets and fetched from somewhere a medic who told him they couldn’t risk the light needed to clean his wounds but he had a choice between a shot of morphine and a shot of Scotch. He said he’d take the morphine and ten minutes later the same medic came back as if he’d not been there before and asked him the same question and he said he’d take the Scotch. By that time the old boy who’d hauled him back from where he lay dying had taken his own clothes off and zipped two bags together and, because of the heat coming off that boy’s body, here he was, pondering the disappearance of dew. He’d only been with his wife, one woman in seventy years, and all he had to compare the feel of her body to on a morning when the windows were frosty and the radiators clanked on was that boy, who was big but all muscle and hairy. It felt like a sin to still retain the memory of the roughness of the boy’s cheek when in the night it grazed the back of his neck but this wasn’t the worst thing, nor was getting shot at and lying alone in the cold and dark trying to choose which way to die. After he spent six weeks recuperating in England, they sent him to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist asked him was he scared to return and he said hell yes I’m scared, wouldn’t you be? The psychiatrist shrugged and said to the sergeant who’d brought him over there, Nothing wrong with this one, send him back. Later, by the time he got back across the water to France, Hitler was dead. He figured the whole thing was over and he could go on home but they sent him to supervise the POWs whose job it was to clean up Dachau. He saw a lot of things during that detail he’d just as soon forget, worse things than when he was getting shot at, but it wasn’t what they hauled out of there that got to him. For weeks after they’d liberated the place, men and women were camped outside the gates. Roma, someone told him they were called when he asked what they were doing there still. Gypsies. They ain’t got no home. Here’s as good as anyplace to them. Every morning his captain would come along with an interpreter and tell these people they were free to leave, but the next morning there they’d be, sitting around a fire, dirty, skinny as saplings, eating the C rations they gave them.
When the sun has burned off the dew, he climbs into his pickup and motors, slow as a combine, the half mile down to the Stop ’n’ Go. He knows it is just spite that keeps him from climbing out of second gear, spite for the traffic bottling up behind, all in a hurry, eager to get to that someplace, he doesn’t know where or care, somebody told them they needed to be.
Dounia Choukri
Past Perfect Continuous
“THE PAST IS SO FAT, no one would ever know if you slipped a lie into its armpit,” said Aunt Gunhild. She actually used a more colorful body part, but then Aunt Gunhild was a jaywalker and a smoker in a family in which women, unless they were dead Nazi great-aunts from Hamburg, didn’t smoke. Not on the outside—they puffed on the inside until their throats burned and tears welled in their eyes. Our women braved north German winters in clumpy shoes that gave them chilblains. They married early and stayed married to reasonable men with ice-blue eyes, men who only traveled in wartime. When the rest of the family had already gone to sleep on starched sheets, they would sit in the halo of their own silence and mend the wear and tear of clothes as wounds on their own skin. By the time their faces were as threadbare as their husbands’ last fine-rib undershirt, their past would be woven into a fixed memory, the first spring after the war or that summer when the goat had clambered up the stairs and nibbled on the sleeping children’s chins.
If the past is another country, then it must be lenient toward trespassers.
“There will never be the likes again!”
My father’s words, his finger in the air whenever Gene Kelly tap-danced across the TV screen, Kelly’s esthetic apple buttocks as sexless as Grandma’s groceries bouncing around in the bag when the streetcar makes a turn.
“Those were the days!”
Every kid takes away one main lesson from home—one dish that is cooked and recooked until you’ve seen it in all shades and textures. Your life’s meat and potatoes.
THOSE were the days. Those WERE the days. Those were the DAYS.
There’s a particular loneliness to sitting down at a table others have already eaten at, flicking at hard crumbs and tracing the rings of cleared glasses with your finger.
But what about the Second World War, huh?
Were those the good old days?
No, but when the past sucks it just becomes a welcome lesson in how not to do things.
Thirteen is a great age for lessons.
It’s an age like a witch trial. You sink or you sink.
Sink, sank, sunk, I recited, learning irregular verbs. These irregularities sounded so final, like a Roman emperor holding his thumb at twelve, nine, then six o’clock.
Stink, stank, stunk.
Some of the kids in my class had started stealing things. Little things like pencils, erasers, candy. It was a daring contest, won by Laura, the girl with the biggest breasts who pinched the other girls’ breasts and shouted, “Honk, honk!”
I too had started stealing stuff here and there, but not the kind that could get you into trouble with the Polizei. No, I would cross the border to another country and like a tourist smuggling home street signs, I would strip down bits and pieces that weren’t meant for taking.
I couldn’t steal from my grandfather, who cut out pictures of airplanes from newspapers and magazines to paste them into neat albums that he locked away in a cabinet with a tiny key. The war had made his mouth very small and flat, and he only opened it to eat and to complain about lottery numbers.
The room to my grandmother’s past wasn’t locked. She told me about swinging milk cans on the way home, ten-pfennig lemonade on Sundays. I looked at her photographs while she rolled up her support stockings. She was part of the purpose generation. She couldn’t sit for more than five minutes without mentally cooking the next meal or weeding flower beds. Every visit at Grandma’s, I stole bits of her past, checking under the pillow of her memory, then
working on the seams until I found a little worn tear in the lining and slipped my finger inside the stuffing.
“Before your granddad and I got married, he got leave from the front and that’s when I knew love for the first time.” Grandma’s neck blushed and she searched her pockets in the oblivious way Leonard from next door played pocket pool. I had always thought of her as a sexless flower. She needed no gardener to manure her roots, clip her blooms.
“What do you mean?”
Grandma didn’t reply. She stared into the distance where I assumed she was projecting her past in all its perfection—all sexual organs hidden under the covers.
Ours was still a family of prudes. We went to the beach with our swimsuits already sticking to our skin underneath our clothes.
“You made…love?”
“There was a war on and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again.”
Grandma got to her feet. “And now I have to get dinner ready.”
The way she said it made me think these two facts were linked.
If Granddad hadn’t survived the war, Grandma wouldn’t have been cooking us any dinner because none of us would exist now—except for Grandma.
One by one, the ingredients of the meal wafted into the living room.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 11
