PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  “Enough,” she said out loud to herself. She pressed her right foot down on the accelerator, lurching forward over the forsaken and fertile land.

  When she got to her mother’s house, the ducklings her mother kept were in a delirious state. They had not been fed. They followed her, staying close to her heels, quacking mercilessly. Her mother was not there. Not in the kitchen. Not in the main house, where an old radio played a merry folk song.

  She had been planning to tell her mother why she had returned to the country. In time. She would tell her Umaru’s secret: He had taken another wife in his village and impregnated her. Galina returned to the kitchen and observed the beginnings of a pot of borscht that her mother had started: half a head of cabbage, shredded carrots and beets, a handful of dill hastily harvested, large beans in a white metal cup, and no potatoes.

  A thud on the kitchen window caused Galina to jump back. When she peered beyond the windowsill covered with unripe heirloom tomatoes and dead flies and onto the ground below, she caught sight of the swallow that had just flown into the glass. It had fallen by a gooseberry bush and stood immobile, stunned. Galina turned away from the window and walked out into the yard where the ducklings accosted her again. They followed her as she made her way to the wide sloping garden behind her mother’s house, along the narrow path lined with sunflowers on one side and vegetables on the other, and toward a small pond covered with duckweed. The ducklings entered the pond, and Galina watched as their small orange beaks dove into the water, searching for sustenance.

  If she hadn’t taken her favorite path back and wandered as she had done as a child, through the orchard where a carpet of rotten apples and pears crunched beneath her feet, over the sturdy mound of the underground cellar emerging out of the ground like a grave, she probably would never have heard her mother’s voice, muffled and distant, coming from the open rusted pipe above the mound.

  “Galina!”

  And that was how she found her mother, not dead but six feet underground in the cellar, where she had gone to get potatoes for borscht and fallen, twisting her ankle.

  After three days, when the swelling in her ankle had gone down, Galina’s mother ordered Galina back to work.

  “Go. I will be fine. Besides, you promised to come visit again this weekend.” Her mother was perched comfortably on a divan by a window that overlooked a walnut tree, its branches hanging low with green fruit.

  Since she had found her mother in the cellar, something in Galina’s being had shifted and a feeling of euphoria had crept in. She flitted around the house, her arms light and reaching, for the rugs on the floor that needed dusting, for the empty water bucket, for the knob on the old television, for a bowl of borscht that she placed by her mother’s bed, for apples in the orchard that she also placed by her mother’s bed, and finally for her mother’s face, which she held close to her own and kissed goodbye.

  She got into her car and drove toward home, and as soon as she passed the guards at the checkpoint, she remembered a childhood song. It was short and sweet, and the words rolled off her tongue like soft clouds. The first line, sung underneath gray skies: May there always be blue skies. On either side of her, large evergreens grew thick inside a darkening forest. The second line: May there always be sunshine. The sun hid behind clouds. The third line: May there always be Mother. Galina’s eyes filled with tears and she found herself laughing into the fourth line: May there always be me. The end to an odd sequence, to a song she had learned in Soviet youth camp. She repeated the words, and again her tears and laughter occurred together.

  The city of Drabov also lay underneath gray skies. In front of her apartment building, Galina parked her car by a small playground filled with children wearing colorful clothes. With a quick wave, she greeted the old women sitting on a wooden bench by a sandbox, and then she walked into the dim musty hallway of the building. Because she felt lucky and happy that day, she took the old elevator, which banged shut and rattled loudly as it journeyed to the fourth floor. She had just emerged from the elevator and was unlocking her door when she heard the phone ringing. Like a bird she alighted toward the telephone and picked up the receiver, and without much of a pause said, “I am here,” for she was sure it was Olexa.

  But the voice on the phone was not Olexa’s. It was Uncle Ivan’s.

  “I’m sorry, Galochka.”

  Galina’s arms grew heavy. She cleared her throat, but her lips emitted almost no sound.

  “I just found your mother on the divan—she’s dead.”

  All Galina heard, through an open window in the kitchen, were the peals of laughter coming from the playground outside.

  ______________

  Angela Ajayi’s essays, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in The Common online, Wild River Review, Star Tribune, and Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies. She spent more than ten years in publishing, mainly as a book editor at Africa World Press/The Red Sea Press. She holds a BA in English literature from Calvin College and an MA in comparative literature from Columbia University. Recently she was selected for the 2016–2017 Loft Mentor Series in fiction. Nigerian and Ukrainian by birth and American by citizenship, she lives in Minneapolis with her husband and daughter.

  Editor’s Note

  From the first paragraph of Laura Chow Reeve’s “1,000-Year-Old Ghosts,” I knew this story was something special. I was immediately intrigued by the attention to the sensory details involved in the act of pickling memories and the odd but confident way Reeve treated memories as something physical. What followed was a beautiful, magical story about three generations of women wrestling with their painful memories. The story is deceivingly simple, despite its fabulist qualities and poetic prose, and yet it moves deeply. The transformation of memories—both a blessing and a burden—into something physical and malleable allows the story to leap beyond the familiar philosophical questions of their importance. Instead, it highlights how many immigrants and those descended from them wrestle with the paradox of both wanting to hold on to the experiences that have made them, and wanting to forget the pain that these memories have caused.

  “1,000-Year-Old Ghosts” exemplifies what we’re looking for when we select fiction—lyrical writing, inventiveness of plot, a point of view touched by the Asian American experience, and, most important, a story infused with deep empathy and heart.

  Karissa Chen, editor in chief

  Hyphen

  1,000-Year-Old Ghosts

  Laura Chow Reeve

  Popo taught me to pickle memories when I was thirteen. It’s just like cucumbers, radishes, cabbage. I learned to cut them into even squares. Memories cut like apples; the knife slides through their protective skin with a crisp snap. I packed them in jars filled with salt, sugar, vinegar, and water. No herbs and spices because they can distort the memories, make them seem too sweet or too bitter.

  “It’s a family secret,” she said to me. “It allows you to forget.”

  “Forget what?” I asked.

  “Anything. Forgetting does not come easily to the women in our family. We have our jars.”

  “What are we trying to forget, Popo?”

  “So many questions. Chop this into smaller pieces.”

  We started with minor moments: (1) When I dropped my underwear on the floor of the changing room after swim practice at school and Abigail Kincaid picked it up and showed the whole class. (2) The time I tugged on a strange woman’s skirt in a Costco checkout line because I thought, for a second, that she was my mother. (3) A recurring nightmare of being alone in an abandoned building with no way to get out.

  “How do you feel?” she asked after the first lids were tightened.

  It felt like clenching and unclenching my jaw, like a steady beat of tension and release. It felt like being full and empty at the same time. Instead of telling her this, I shrugged.

  She never asks him about a future
where he does not come back. When she is alone, she prays that he will return to her. She asks him what he would like for dinner. Before they go to bed, she prays that business will stay good. Their silence is steady and it endures. It is a silence they have agreed to.

  He travels back and forth between their apartment in San Fran-cisco and southern China. It is rare to have a husband whose body tastes like the Pacific Ocean. It is rare to have a husband made mostly of salt.

  I was Popo’s daughter’s daughter, but our saltwater bond was stronger than blood. We exhausted my mother.

  “Ma, why are you teaching her that?” she asked. It was a gray Sunday morning and Popo was helping me pickle a few things. It had been a bad week.

  “Because you won’t,” Popo said.

  “Do you have your own jars, Mom?” I asked. I had searched for them without any luck.

  “No,” she said. Like Popo, my mother was good at shutting down conversations. There were so many times that she felt far away. My arms could never quite reach her.

  “That’s not true, Anne,” Popo said. “We made you one or two when you were younger. You remember that.”

  “Is that right?” Mom wasn’t looking at either of us. She was still holding a paper napkin she had used at breakfast. She was trying to smooth out the creases with her fingers.

  “Yes,” Popo said.

  “I’m sick of this.” My mother’s fingers tore the napkin to pieces. “How come you decide what all of us remember or forget?” There was water in her eyes.

  I wanted to wipe it away for her, but I was afraid her tears would not be like mine. I was afraid my mother was not made of salt.

  “You know what, Ma?” my mother said. “I remember everything.”

  The street outside their apartment is loud the way city streets tend to be. The sound drifts in through the open windows of their front room, and she lets it fill up the space he left behind. It sits in his favorite chair, the blue one next to the fireplace. After it is well rested, it moves across the front room and embeds itself into the cracks in the floorboards. It touches all of his books and then settles into his side of the bed. She holds it as she falls asleep. She smells it the next morning in her hair. She keeps it there until the rest of the city wakes up and it makes its way outside again.

  When he comes home, he shuts the windows and says he is tired of loud noises. He tells her how the ocean roars and the wind cracks. He tells her he has been looking forward to the silence of home.

  My mother went through my room to find my jars and display them on the kitchen counter. They would confront me when I got home from school. One day, after she had found five of them tucked in my sock drawer, my mother told me to sit down with her.

  “I know Popo thinks this is best, but memories are important even when they are painful. I’m concerned about you,” she said. “Both of you.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Popo is fine,” I said.

  “She’s not fine. Her short-term memory is getting worse. She forgets where she puts things, she doesn’t show up to appointments, she can’t even tell me what she had for breakfast some days. Popo isn’t fine.” Her voice was clear and calm, but it bounced inside my head until it ached.

  I looked at my jars on the kitchen counter and tried to remember what was in them. They could have been anyone’s jars. The liquid inside was murky, almost gray. I wanted to open them up. I wanted to push them off the ledge to see them break open.

  “Do you really remember everything?” I asked her. I tried to remember stories about her before she had me, ones that she must have told me, but I couldn’t find any.

  “Nobody remembers everything,” she said.

  “But you told Popo—”

  “I was upset.”

  “Tell me what you remember then.”

  We stayed at the kitchen table and she talked. The darkness slipped into the room and sat down with us. I couldn’t see my mother’s gaze through the dark—we hadn’t turned the lights on—but I could feel it on my skin.

  Things she told me: Popo would prepare for Gung Gung’s homecomings with his favorite dishes—winter melon soup and salted duck. Popo would wear a pink dress on those days because she said Gung Gung was tired of the blues and greens of the ocean. Popo’s comforter was white and felt like velvet, even though it was only made of cotton. Popo would let my mother sleep with her when Gung Gung was away. My mother met my father when they both worked for an insurance company in downtown Sacramento. They were both already married, but my father asked my mother out for a drink one day after work and she said yes. Popo liked my father because he was really American, unlike my mother’s first husband, who grew up in Chinatown like them. My parents loved each other so much that she was never hungry. When my father left without saying goodbye, my mother ate everything in the refrigerator and the pantry and the cupboards.

  The memories came in pieces. Sometimes she stumbled, searched for something else to tell me. She wanted to fill the silence but didn’t have enough words. When she was done, she asked me how I felt, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it felt the same. It felt like clenching and unclenching my jaw, like a steady beat of tension and release. I felt full and empty at the same time.

  She is less lonely now that she has Anne. She has something to hold on to when she walks through Chinatown, something to ground her to the sidewalk. She used to think that she would float away. Now she walks with purpose.

  She teaches Anne how to say apple and block in English. She does not talk to her in Cantonese. When she does not know the word she is looking for in English she says nothing.

  As I got older, I filled my jars and it was a feeling larger than relief. I poured out jams, mayonnaise, and peanut butter. I clogged every drain in the house to create a space to put myself away.

  (1) The song that was playing when I lost my virginity to a boy who changed the sheets right after. (2) The white woman at the grocery store who told me I was prettier because I wasn’t full Chinese. Her hands in my hair: “You’re so lucky,” she said.

  (3) The men who leered at me when I walked down the street and the one who told me, “I’ve never had one like you before.” (4) How my mother looked after the spindled cancer cells settled into her body. (5) The woman on the bus who spoke to me in Cantonese, and how I did not know how to respond. I searched for words that someone should have taught me, and I couldn’t find them anywhere.

  Popo never warned me not to let it become a habit, a practice, a daily ritual. Mom wasn’t around to count my jars, display them, remind me of things I had already forgotten, witness my slow dissolve. I made the pickling liquid in large batches. I bought sugar and vinegar in bulk. My jars overflowed and spilled onto my hands until they stung.

  Every time he comes back, he feels more foreign. He says, “Néih hóu ma,” but she responds in English. She practices with Anne. She learns new words every day.

  “One day Anne’s children will not know how to speak our language,” he tells her.

  She wants to say, “Maybe that will be for the best. They will stop longing for things they cannot have. There will be no reason to leave. Not everyone can live in between things. Not everyone can survive being split into two. There are fish that die in saltwater.”

  

  Popo drank a glass of saltwater every night before her evening prayers. One night I asked why, and she said it was a leftover habit from when my Gung Gung would travel. “He died on his way back to China. Did you know that?”

  “You told me,” I said.

  “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget.”

  She poured salt into the bottom of an empty glass and then filled the glass with water at the kitchen sink. She took her time, drank it while she was reading a magazine. I had never asked for a glass and she had never offered.

  “Popo?” I asked after her glass was washed and set down to dry
. “What do you put in your jars?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “That is their purpose.”

  “But aren’t there things you wish you hadn’t forgotten?” I asked.

  She looked at me for a long time before she answered. “No,” she said.

  Then she added in a softer voice, “Sometimes I think there are not enough jars in this city for me to fill.”

  He is dying but refuses to die in America. “I am going home,” he says. “I cannot be buried here.” He makes the necessary travel arrangements. He plans to leave in only a few weeks.

  “You are leaving me here,” she says to him.

  “Yes.”

  “What am I supposed to do without you?” she asks. “What about Anne?”

  “What does it matter? I am dying either way.” He looks at her and smiles. “You don’t want my ghost to haunt you. It’s better for both of us if I go.”

  “Yes,” she says. “You’re right.”

  To guarantee that she is not haunted by her dead husband, she stuffs most of what she has of him into thirty-seven glass jars. She leaves only enough to tell her future grandchildren (1) his name (2) his occupation (3) where he was born (4) where he died

  (5) the saltiness of his breath.

  She does not have a backyard to bury the jars, so she pushes him underneath her bed instead. The first night that she sleeps with them, she hears a steady humming that keeps her awake. It never goes away, and she never moves the jars. Instead, she learns to live with the hum until she forgets it is even there.

  “Anne, grab me the measuring cups,” she said one afternoon.

  “Popo,” I said. “I’m Katie. Anne was my mother.”

  Her eyebrows furrowed. She moved around me and grabbed the measuring cups for herself.

  “Please stop. This is making you sick,” I said.

  She continued to measure and chop; she licked her index finger, dipped it into a bowl of salt in front of her, and then popped it back in her mouth to taste.

  I wanted to imitate her, feel the small grains on my own tongue, but I stopped myself.