PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  Serven is a journalist who also writes fiction. In “A Message,” there is a sense of the investigator who is open to every conclusion, always searching for an elusive truth. This is a story that doesn’t depend on “tired tropes and plot holes,” as Serven explained to us. Instead, she has come to think of it “as a continual ‘coming-out process,’ of revealing what is already in my own head or subconscious.”

  Odette Heideman, editor

  Epiphany

  A Message

  Ruth Serven

  Perhaps it begins like this, you say earnestly to your disbelieving friend in a coffee shop, or the secondhand store, or the line to buy banitsa at the metro stop—

  —perhaps, no listen to me, my father, Stefan, had to go back to Serbia for business. Perhaps his passport was stolen by a nationalist. He rushed to the embassy to get a new one. But the embassy was overwhelmed by refugees and worried about terrorists, though of course he wasn’t one. Irena the receptionist told him to come back another day, but every day was the same. He had leva in his pocket that the bank did not want, and not enough euros to pay the right lawyers and border guards.

  He stayed in Belgrade to work, and got an apartment. Every day he told himself, I must go back, I must return to my family, but he was never able to get away. He is very important. He works all weekends and holidays. But someday he will finally get away for Christmas or summer holiday and take me to the sea.

  The train passes.

  You say you do not have money for the metro anyway. We can just walk to the park. We circle the lily pond and talk about boys and music. You ask me to quiz you for your next English test. You sing the new Britney song. All around the world, pretty girls.

  Perhaps it begins like this, you start again—

  —it was during the new Republic. And we were getting things from France and the States finally, clothes and cars and toilet paper, but no one had any money and the government was collapsing. And my father came to Sofia to flee the wars in Serbia, which was then Yugoslavia.

  One day he was walking in the Borisova Gradina, and he saw a woman playing a violin on the steps by the lily pond. He stopped to tell her how beautiful her playing was, and they began talking, and then he asked if he could take her out to dinner. They talked and talked all evening and then they went back to her

  apartment.

  They were going to get married, but my father had to return to Serbia to take care of some property matters. They could not afford to talk on the phone and this was before the internet. He was going to return immediately, but you know how the Serbians are, everything takes forever, and I was born before he could return.

  You haven’t met my mother, but let me tell you: She is crazy. When things were settled, my father asked if he could return and marry her but she said no, she had had the baby by herself, and she was going to raise me by herself. And then she moved and he could not find her again. But she still gave me his last name, which is Blankov, which is how I was able to find him. She also gave me this stupid first name, which you must never call me.

  The train passes.

  Perhaps it begins like this—

  —I knew his last name. I told my neighbor about my mother and my father, and Vesi said she would help me find him. She is a very nice person; we cook meals together and share flour and milk. We searched and searched, but there are too many Blankovs in Belgrade. It took a very long time. Sometimes Vesi despaired but I always cheered her up, and we kept looking. Finally we found him, first name Stefan. He had been an adviser for the government! I found a picture of him standing with our king, would you believe it? They’re shaking hands in front of the old palace in Sofia. I printed off the picture. I keep it in my purse, here. So if I see him, I’ll recognize him.

  The train passes.

  You say you have fought with Vesi and are not speaking to her. You fight with everyone, have fought with Vesi before, but usually you make up quickly. This time, you will not say why you fought. You say it makes you too angry to talk about.

  You say your mother has left again. She works in France as a caretaker for an old man. The jobs are bad in Bulgaria and many people leave for other countries in Europe. Your mother sends money back, but it barely covers the rent and you are left to scrounge leva for food and clothes and phone minutes. You are very thin. You invite yourself over for dinner, and I make tacos, but you say they are too spicy.

  We often go to the mall. Usually to H&M. Your mother is planning to pay for a new computer before you begin university, but you wonder if she might turn the money into a clothing allowance. Perhaps you can get a job and pay for clothes that way. We go look in the windows of each store that is hiring. But at every place, you say you couldn’t possibly work there—it is too ugly, too dirty, too small. Everything in Bulgaria is like this, you say.

  We walk back down the street. We part ways and you get on a bus.

  I know he has other children, you say once.

  We are in a bookshop, flipping idly through journals. What?

  You say you’ve met a half brother. You found him through Facebook and went to his apartment in Iztok. You didn’t tell him who you were. You said you were selling subscriptions and he said he didn’t want any. Then he shut the door. That was it, the end. He was tall, like you, but of course you’re more attractive. You thought about knocking again but you were afraid.

  You say you know there are others. You say your father loved a lot of women.

  You say that someday you’ll find each of your siblings. Your father will buy a house and you’ll all live together. Like Full House.

  The train passes.

  Perhaps it begins like this—

  —one bottle too many of Zgorka, a dark room, an expired condom. Do things like this still happen? A note in the morning swept up by wind from the mountain. Twenty years of lost messages, until one photo, one name, one message breaks through, just like I knew it would, and some day he’ll get on a train—

  The train passes.

  Perhaps it begins like this—

  —one bottle too many of Zgorka, a dark room, an expired condom, no note in the morning.

  I asked you once if you wanted me to contact Stefan for you. I asked if you wanted to send a letter to his address in Belgrade. How would I know what to write? you asked, twisting your hands. I asked if I should write the letter. No, never, you said, you would refuse to speak to me.

  Still, I looked up the word for stamps in my dictionary, and I walked to the post office and jigsawed five different kinds of international stamps onto the envelope. Meet me at the station in Sofia in five days, I wrote, and I can take you to your daughter.

  I wait and wait at the train station. I see people pour out of the coach from Belgrade, from Bucharest, from Istanbul.

  The trains come; the trains pass.

  Perhaps the train was late, perhaps the luggage was lost, perhaps wind from the mountain blew my note away. Perhaps there are a million reasons. I write all this in a note so that there is one more way for Stefan to find us, so that there is one more way for him to come home. I put the note on the bench.

  A train passes.

  Then I write another note to you, Lana, so you know that someone remembers all the stories, all the ways you thought Stefan might have left you, all the times you wished he would come back. I write so you know someone listened. Maybe we will not speak again, maybe we cannot be friends again, maybe this note will be thrown away after you pick up your poshta, but, still—here is this message.

  I stand up as another train is coming in.

  ______________

  Ruth Serven is a creative writer and journalist in the flyover states. She is a native of Oklahoma City and a proud graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism.

  Editor’s note

  Amber Caron’s “The Handler” stood out to our editors for many reasons, among them its
bounty of wonderful sensory details, its assuredness of voice, its deft pacing, and the power with which it expresses human resiliency. The surging sense of well-being that a person feels in achieving freedom from need animates the story’s climax. The breakthrough does not arrive in a drumroll epiphany but sneaks up quietly as it does in life, amid simple, quotidian routine. When this moment of grace appears, the trembling leaves of the aspen trees sound like “polite applause,” but the protagonist—politeness be damned—feels the sudden urge to howl for joy.

  Greg Brownderville, editor in chief

  Southwest Review

  The Handler

  Amber Caron

  The morning Leslie arrived in Jefferson, New Hampshire, Brent picked her up from the bus station wearing ripped jeans and a flannel shirt that had been cut at the elbows. It was twenty-five degrees. It was January. It appeared he was sweating. He opened the passenger-side door, put his hand on her back, and helped her into the truck. Leslie guessed he was older than she was but younger than her father. She found it difficult to name a man’s age.

  “Moved here in ’95,” he said. “Never got around to leaving.” He sped up around the hairpin turns, pointing out every bend in the river, every mountain peak, every place there had ever been a car accident serious enough to kill. Each crash site was marked with a yellow ribbon and a bundle of fake sunflowers. She suspected he was responsible for them. The flowers, not the accidents. He steered with his knees so he could light his cigarette, and Leslie forced herself not to grab the door handle.

  He kept talking. Constellations. Moon cycles. The flood of ’97. The blizzard of ’99. The fire of ’05. When they finally pulled up to the house, the dogs erupted, and Brent went quiet.

  

  Siberians, Alaskan malamutes, Akitas, Russian wolf-hounds, salukis, Saint Bernards, and mongrels—greyhounds mixed with Newfoundlands and a dash of Belgian shepherd; Labradors mixed with coonhounds. Their names had been painted on the green wooden boxes they slept in: Mars, Frost, McGee, Bandit, Minnow, Tip, Empire, Stewpot, Pluto. Back of the property was the Scooby-Doo litter: Velma, Scooby, Shaggy, Daphne. Next to them, the pianists: Billy Joel, Elton John.

  “That there is Ray Charles,” Brent said, pointing to the glassy-eyed dog at the end of the line. “Was named Ray Charles before he went blind.”

  Leslie bent over to take the dog’s muzzle in her hands. His nose twitched. He lifted a paw.

  “Well, maybe you should start naming them after billionaires,” Leslie said.

  “I like it. A sense of humor. That will help you here.” He bent down, held Billy Joel’s nose to his. “What’s that, Billy? How’d this lady get here? Well, you’ll just have to ask her.”

  Brent stared up at Leslie. “Well, answer the dog,” he whispered.

  “Ruff.”

  “Billy Joel, are you going to accept that answer?”

  The dog rolled over onto his back.

  The truth was that the night before she boarded the bus for New Hampshire, she left her boyfriend, Dennis, a voicemail: I’m leaving you. This time for the woods and fifty-seven dogs. It sounded funnier when she’d rehearsed it in her head. She waited all night for him to call back and talk her out of it.

  “First and foremost, your job is to take care of their paws.” Brent brought the dog’s front paw close to his face. “No paw, no dog.”

  He said it again, like a mantra, and taught Leslie how to check for ice balls between their toes; lacerations, abrasions, swelling, and cracks on the pads; abscesses and inflamed nail beds. “These paws need to get me from Anchorage to Nome in three months.”

  Fifty-seven dogs. Two hundred and twenty-eight paws. She wanted to show it all to Dennis.

  The first night she couldn’t sleep through the country sounds. Wind in the trees. Dogs calling to a distant coyote howl. A train on the other side of the valley. When the sun came up, Leslie’s eyes had already adjusted to the light.

  She dressed and went outside. Brent was waiting on the front stoop of her cabin, halfway through a sentence she had to imagine the beginning of:

  “. . . dry food. A hunk of frozen beef. A ladle of chicken broth. Twice a day. While they eat, you scoop their shit into this bucket, and dump it over there past that stand of pines.” Brent pointed in a vague direction. There were pine trees everywhere. She followed him to the shed behind her cabin.

  “And you’ll want this, too.” Brent pulled an ice pick from a hook. “The shit freezes over night. Got to chip it into the bucket.”

  It took Leslie three and a half hours to finish morning chores. By the time she had rounded up the empty bowls, cleaned the yard, and checked all two hundred and twenty-eight paws, she had three blisters on her palm and a bloody shin where she’d clipped herself with the ice pick. One of the dogs had lunged for her ear, three dogs tried to hump her leg, and another mounted her back. At 10 a.m., her stomach was still empty, but the smell of blood from the raw beef made her want to retch. She forced herself to drink some water, which sloshed around in her stomach. Not funny anymore, she thought.

  Brent stepped out onto the porch of the big house across the valley where he waved Leslie over. She trudged across the snowy lawn and found him standing at the stove in the kitchen, a book in his hands, a line of jars on the counter. He pulled out a large pot from beneath the sink.

  “We make our own salve,” he said. “Too expensive to buy the other stuff. And it’s got a bunch of crap in it, anyway. This is all you need.”

  She looked at the ingredients: Vaseline, Betadine, lanolin, glycerine, vitamin A, vitamin E.

  He pointed at the stove. “I’ll help you with this first batch.”

  Leslie measured and poured according to the recipe. Brent talked and stirred and talked more. Behind her, Leslie heard footsteps coming down the hall. A girl appeared in her pajamas, her hair in a high ponytail, eyes wide like Brent’s.

  “My daughter, Jill,” Brent said. He handed Leslie the wooden spoon and put his arm around the girl as though they were posing for a picture. She shrugged him off. “This is Leslie,” he said, pointing toward the stove. Jill rolled her eyes and reached for the bananas on the counter. Leslie turned back to the salve and pretended not to be offended, and the girl dragged her feet down the hall and slammed a door.

  “Some advice: Don’t have kids until scientists figure out a way to skip age thirteen.”

  Leslie did the math. Her own child would have been one. Tantrums. Diapers. Meltdowns.

  “She’s not a talker,” Brent said.

  “I wasn’t at thirteen either.”

  “I mean she’s deaf. She signs, reads lips.”

  “So I shouldn’t take that whole scene personally?”

  “No, you should,” he said. “She wants to go to Alaska with me in March to help with the dogs. When our handler quit last month she thought she was a sure thing since no one before you has ever taken this job in the middle of the winter.”

  Leslie had never been to Alaska, had never even considered it before.

  “Shouldn’t she be in school?”

  “Maybe.” Brent moved the pot off the burner and grabbed a funnel from under the sink and a line of tiny vials. “She hates it. I don’t push the issue.”

  “But there are laws.” She filled a vial, held it up to the light.

  “You think anyone’s coming out here to see what a deaf girl and her musher dad are up to?”

  “She needs an education. I mean, even a high school education.”

  “You go to school?” he asked.

  “Yeah. College. A few years of grad school.”

  “And here we both are.”

  At the end of the first week, Leslie wrote Dennis a letter. She told him how the dogs ran for hours on the trails beyond the pines, and still they barked, cried, howled for more. She told him how she clipped nails, wrapped paws in booties, and massa
ged pads with the salve. She kept a small vial of the medicine tucked close to her body so it would stay warm. This made it easier to massage into the paws, and the vials made her feel like a doctor. At the end of the letter she wrote, Come for a visit. I’ll teach you.

  When a week passed without hearing from him, she wrote another letter. Each day she checked the mailbox at the end of the long dirt driveway.

  

  All she had eaten in her first two weeks was canned soup and granola bars, so when Brent invited her to the big house for pork chops and mashed potatoes, she accepted.

  Before they had even finished loading their plates, Brent started talking. Race strategy, dog diets, harnesses. He’d raced the Iditarod twice, the Yukon Quest three times. He spoke slowly, story after story of his victories, of his run-ins with moose, of the time he rounded a corner on day thirteen of his first Iditarod and found an old boat frozen in the middle of the Yukon River. It was a sign, he said. He knew he’d win.

  “But really it was bootying the dogs that won it. Bootied every one in under twenty seconds at every stop. Shaved three hours off my time. That was the difference between first place and third last year in the Quest,” he said.

  Jill didn’t take her eyes off her father’s lips. Leslie watched them, too. They were chapped, a firm line down the middle like a cut that might open any time. More gray than pink. When he chewed, the tiny hairs of his moustache and beard touched.

  “In her first race,” he nodded at Jill, “she was disqualified when she took a wrong turn two miles in and raced the entire course backwards.”

  Jill sat up straight now, leaned in closer when Brent tipped his head toward his plate.

  “People tried to stop her, but she thought they were just cheering her on. She finished last. Two hours after everyone else. An hour after dark.”