PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  dead dog.

  That night, weather came in. Snow, wind, ice, more snow. The line of spruce trees, their tops hunched over, looked as if they were running from the wind. The oaks groaned; two aspen snapped. The birds clutched branches and then disappeared on some invisible current. Even in the cabin, the wind pulled the heat from Leslie’s neck, her cheeks, her eyes. Then it became all she could hear.

  On Saturday, Leslie woke thinking of how, on the morning after they visited the clinic, Dennis had rolled over in bed, grabbed her hand, put it on his chest, and said it hurt right there. She’d pulled her hand away and left him in bed alone. But she felt it now, that darkness in her chest, and all she could think to do was climb out of her cot, layer herself against the cold, and do the morning chores. Food, shit, hay, paws.

  Outside, the entire world glimmered white in the bright sun, but the snow, all eleven inches of it with a thin layer of ice on top, looked razor-edged and dangerous. She heard Brent in the barn, and when she went in, he was already working on Sass. He pushed an electric razor in and out of the pads of her paws, spread her toes, and trimmed around each nail. It was supposed to be Leslie’s job. He lit a long taper candle and, moving the flame across the shaved pad, singed the hairs that were too small and too deep for the razor to reach. When the hairs sparked, Leslie expected Sass to yelp the way the dogs always did for her, but the dog, staring straight ahead at the barn wall, didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Before long the barn was filled with the awful stink of charred hair, and Leslie went back to her cabin.

  Inside, she showered, put on her cleanest jeans and a real bra, not the sports bra she’d been wearing since she arrived, and dried her hair with the hair dryer she hadn’t yet used. She left her hair down because Dennis liked it best that way, and she skipped the lip gloss because he didn’t like the way it felt when they kissed.

  She sat in the rocking chair next to the window and watched Brent bootie up Sass. He straddled the dog, pushed the button of his watch, and began: he lifted one of the back paws, pushed the snow out of the pad, pulled the bootie on, wrapped the strap around the leg. Three more paws. Twenty-seven seconds. He did it again. Paw, push, pull, wrap. Twenty-five seconds. Again. Twenty-three. Twenty. He stopped when he hit nineteen—as Leslie knew he would—brought the dog back to her house, and walked across the yard to his own.

  For the rest of the day, Leslie tried not to think of Jill inside, wrapped up in bed, holding her ribs. Or of Inca, her cold body in a black bag, or Brent, lifting the dog into a fire. Instead, she sat down to write another letter. She didn’t tell Dennis to come for a visit because sometimes changing the subject worked better than begging. She told him only that Inca had died, knowing he would find that hard to ignore.

  Hours later, in the dark, just before Leslie was about to give up and crawl into her sleeping bag, the dogs stirred. Like toddlers, Leslie thought. Screaming for attention, leaping onto their houses, trying to out-howl the others. Every sound—squirrel, rabbit, door—set them off.

  Tonight she couldn’t take it. She stood and reached for the door, but she heard someone climbing the steps to her cabin. It wasn’t Brent—she knew his heavy gait. No, this was softer, less sure. A knock.

  Leslie opened the door to find Jill hunched over a walking stick, furious and in tears.

  She pushed a piece of paper at Leslie. He hired our last handler to go with him.

  Jill snatched the paper back.

  They’re leaving next week! Three weeks early!

  When Leslie didn’t respond, Jill wrote more. He’s taking Sass. She’s mine!

  You need rest.

  I’m not going back in there.

  Leslie led Jill to her cot and covered her with the sleeping bag. Once settled, Jill wrote again. You have to stay.

  Leslie turned the light off next to the bed. The bare bulb in the kitchen was barely strong enough to light the room.

  Jill held out the paper once more. You look pretty.

  After Brent left, Jill told Leslie that the two of them would race together the following season. Since she was still too frail to train the dogs, Jill trained Leslie instead. In the first week, she filled tiny notebooks of instructions that Leslie studied each night: Don’t let them dip snow; don’t let them play on the trail; be consistent; run McGee next to Legs, Basil next to Tarragon; give Pluto a good whack when he chases a rabbit; put Shaggy in the wheel, Velma in the lead. Make them work, that’s what they want. In the second week, when Leslie confused the dogs with her commands, Jill pulled out a permanent marker and wrote haw on the top of Leslie’s left mitten, gee on the top of her right. By the third week, Leslie was finally ready to run the full team.

  Initially it was just in the morning, and she was always careful to stay within sight of the house. But then it was after lunch, too, and then, if the dogs seemed as though they wanted more—they always wanted more—she’d take them out on Saturday mornings along the base of the mountains. By the fourth week, she was running them for hours, sometimes without even realizing it, never telling Jill when she was leaving or when she’d be back. It wasn’t just the warming air that she liked, and how it felt on her face. It was the buds popping out on the trees. And the dogs, too. The way they listened to her. The way they turned left when she yelled haw, the way they sprinted when she chanted bring it on home.

  It was after one of these long morning runs that she returned to find Jill hanging a large map of Alaska on a bare kitchen wall.

  Where were you? It was already written on the notepad.

  Leslie pointed out past the warming shed, past her cabin.

  For three hours!?

  Leslie dug into her bag. She threw the dog treats on the floor, the headlamp, extra booties, the map, and the first aid kit, until she finally pulled out a book. It was wet from months of snow, and the pages curled up at the edges. The cover had faded, and the text was too blurry to read. But the tree on the front was still visible. Leslie had been looking for it on each of her runs that week.

  Jill smiled, drew her fingers to her lips then stretched them forward, opening her callused palm.

  “You’re welcome,” Leslie said.

  They studied the map of Alaska, following Brent’s journey, marking each stop with a tiny black dot. Anchorage to Campbell Airstrip to Willow and Yentna and Skwentna and Finger Lake, all twenty-three stops along the way to Nome. It wasn’t until after she recorded the mileage between each checkpoint that Leslie thought of Dennis for the first time that day. She indulged in the memory of his persistence—the soil and the seeds, the impulsive proposal. She thought of how she once won him back with a pile of rotting vegetables, but how she’d failed with a letter about a dead dog. And as she watched Jill draw a large red circle around the notorious Dalzell Gorge and the equally treacherous Farewell Burn, Leslie noted she never once mentioned Jill in those letters. She was pleased with this fact, and she realized then she didn’t want to show any of this to Dennis.

  After lunch, Jill went outside and practiced bootying Velma, and Leslie pulled a piece of paper from the stack by the phone and sat down to write a letter.

  Brent,

  I hung a yellow ribbon on the tree today, out where Inca died.

  I couldn’t find the sunflowers.

  Leslie

  She addressed it to the final checkpoint in Nome and walked to the mailbox.

  

  On the day Brent was set to cross the finish line, Leslie woke to a barking dog. Shaggy, she thought, more hound than husky. Another joined. Minnow, with that sharp little yelp. And another. Ray Charles, out there crying at all he couldn’t see. She followed their calls into the yard and made her rounds. Carrying the bucket to the edge of the property, the aspen trees branched out above her, their trembling leaves like polite applause. As she returned to the yard, the dogs all mounted their houses, lifted their snouts to the open sky, and filled the air wit
h long, dissonant howls. It was as close to a thank-you as Leslie ever got, and she had the irresistible urge to howl back.

  ______________

  Amber Caron’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southwest Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Greensboro Review, and Agni. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was awarded the 2016 fiction prize. She is the recipient of the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction from the Southwest Review and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

  Editor’s Note

  From the very first letter—a drop-cap A drawn in American Sign Language—“The Manual Alphabet” gets to work. This beautiful, tender, inventive meditation on language follows the story of a hearing boy born to deaf parents. As the parents teach the boy to speak with his hands, he begins to see the world in visual syntax, such as witnessing the birth of his sister: “. . . her arms and legs spelling endlessly. She looked like every letter at once.” But as the boy advances in age, existential questions of identity emerge: Is he deaf or hearing? Is he the parent or child? It’s not just that he’s bilingual; it’s that the two languages he speaks are based on entirely different senses, sight and sound, which gives him a unique perspective but also sharpens his isolation. He is both and he is neither. Written in short elegant fragments that are emphasized by the surrounding blankness of the page, the form adds to a growing feeling of isolation and probes the nature of memory. The writing itself is spectacular in its clarity.

  When I discovered this piece, hiding among hundreds of anonymous submissions, it was that rarest of experiences, finding not a needle in a haystack, but a prince.

  Trey Sager, fiction editor

  Fence

  The Manual Alphabet

  Samuel Clare Knights

  red face heaving fragile rib cage registering through my father’s work shirt. My mother’s pointed spectacles framing the mouth of a baby. “Is he deaf?” asked the nurses. Eyes reflected in a dry spoon on the Formica, my fair skin held upside down. “Who will hear him when he cries?”

  And so Saginaw’s fields went untouched and the plain would plain further. I learned to speak from a map and a kind neighbor. My mother shapes my hand with her hand. To be the boy is to be the map.

  The map had silver lines embossed in the pulp that started to warp. I could see graphite fields and everything drawn there. Horizon began with a non-sense of floor and I was only as good as the color of each morning. This sheen was common, written over the same place and unknown to a commoner, as lavender as concrete with the composition of tinsel reserved for dusk. When the map moves, only things draped in its colors move with it. The metallic waves shimmer in the brown curl of the paper.

  The place handed to me. By positioning fingers in certain ways, I thought I knew what they meant. Most of the time I would just point or make the shape. Created the sky by reaching out as far as I could on both sides and brought my hands low to cover it with clouds.

  “Cow.” C-O-W. Sign for cow: the thumb and pinky as horns twisting on a temple. Pull the airy udder for “milk.” Each gesture possessed only the trace of a thing, in my mother’s hands I saw quick palms that bent letters to their form; but especially the O, ringed and void, that made the fingers curve in around the microcosm of our living room—where mine would crystallize a little bleached moon, only more like a shadow puppet that still shows the arm of the object that casts it—her hands were the same ones that, before orbiting, patterned an entire world.

  The ice storm in nineteen-seventy-something. How the power was out and the house was a dull song. I would sign to my mother through smoky breath. The letter X hooking our sleepy oxygen. The cold moved freely. My fingers trying to regard the filigree in the corner window. I couldn’t say what I wanted.

  I made an S and shook it in front of my face. My name dropped from a psalm. A same self flecked over an apparition. My letter started to blur as it shifted to the end: palms. Where the soft fist of Sam still hummed.

  Comic books until 4 a.m., the Deaf smoking all night after a workweek with hearing people. I stayed up late and watched Saturday Night Live. On Monday none of the other kids knew the bits and the teachers looked concerned. I would go into a haze at school, missing my name several times before the silence caught me. My teachers thought I was going deaf when really I was somewhere else. Placing layers of gray on gray on gray. I would jolt back after going too far only to find Mrs. Groll’s mouth moving. I knew it was time to grab my coat. Arrowwood Elementary had an outdoor white geodesic dome that I’d walk under to get to the principal’s office. I was taken with the sounds bouncing off the inner circle. Something my parents would never know.

  The teacher asked us to write about what we wanted to be. I wrote in place, one letter on top of the other until a graphite mass formed. A black key hung on a black wall. I smeared my fingers on it and signed letters to myself as fast as I could. The flight of my alphabet a bat vaporizing at my chest. My hand as good a voice as any.

  The lake effect seemed normal. One day I missed the bus on purpose and walked across the field. A footfall cracking through ice, creating a long guide of where not to go. Before I broke the expanse I practiced on paper. Sitting in my room, making a slow tear through large sheets. I would listen for the fibers separating and look closely at an E’s teeth unpulping.

  My brother Gary was the only one I could talk to.

  For we are always

  the limbs

  Gary.

  Speech is Gary,

  it shows.

  Everything is

  eyes, window glass,

  lips, teeth,

  metal signs

  —they’re Gary, quite Gary.

  Cars are Gary.

  Gray is Gary, gloves are Gary.

  The road, robins,

  all are Gary,

  everything is and everyone is

  out of luck who lives here.

  When my sister Jill was born I remember her arms and legs spelling endlessly. She looked like every letter at once.

  The history of J is motion shaped by I. The pinky finger pulling the optic nerve, forming a contrail over the short curl of my mother and sister. How could I say their names otherwise? A Judy-Jill song for the color of any morning.

  I once caught a snake and held it as close to the point of nothingness as possible. It spiraled in the air: a letter bending toward me. What thought created its consonant? Strung such scales together only to tatter? Could such a contortion be its namesake? Was the word snake drawn purely from shape? Its sound? Or all of it at once? The curves combing a repeating letter in the grass until revealing on concrete. Did it also account for this town? Its drooping tree lines and slow bite? Saginaw?

  Saginaw is sadder than I am able. The city shifts on the color of its memory. Around me the fields are thick with ice and the colors of ice, thawing of motors, work, sounds fall. One idles. In the cut of the cold you could shatter. Out there lies the library veiled and lost in letters. It all muddles. The whole riverside down to the water is industry; it sags in the smoky air over streets lined with mailboxes: 48601, 48602, 48603. Birds bearing some yet-to-be color sing faintly under another sun, someone else’s sense of undenied light.

  I would watch my father talk to himself, dust vacillating, his hands slicing through, setting everything into a different motion. He made lists in the air. I could see the transparency of the water bill, fear of losing his welding job, thoughts on the new USPS application. Bill signed, “Tell him,” and how the post office clerk wrote DEAF with a thick marker before tossing it in the pile. I was often locked out of the house, would bend the storm screen back to get through. Once he asked if I broke it. I snapped an N through my fingers and watched him stomp into the kitchen.

  Q bulbs from a factory spire. The billow compounds my vapor and forms hypnotically. Everything licked with the silver curl of a ghostly letter and must, of course, move opaquely so with everythin
g else. Sometimes, especially on overcast days, no matter where, I feel the place. The non-heroic belt of slow fields churning in a microcosm, in which a light dulls, grating and the color of grating. Over it all drift clouds like great manufacturing hands ready to pluck a life.

  The doctor told me Bill had kidney disease. I turned to him and signed it. Turning back to the doctor I said, “I’m donating my kidney.” The doctor wrote in his file. Bill tapped my shoulder and signed, “Say you what?”

  When we got home I told Judy. Her fingers bent and plowed the air in front of her face.

  I could hear Judy getting home from work. I would stare at the flip clock. The motorized cylinder churns two camps of circles in small draws by way of a reduction gear: the dasher at a ratio of one revolution for each hour, the plodder at one for every twenty-four. It is 1:28 a.m. and the wheels move gently, the faster disk connected to an ecliptic of sixty plastic leaves. I stick my finger in the clock to force two neighboring leaves open—they spill a verse. Dropping a leaf increases the dream by one. The book flips vertically, its sheets blearing a memory. One page falls each minute to reveal a new digit. The slower disk bridges a similar fall of leaves, only there are forty-eight. These leaves have hour numbers: two for each numeral to represent absence or presence. One leaf weakens every thirty minutes, at 25 and 55. Minute leaves 45 through 59 have a small stem. At forty-five minutes past, you can hear the stem loose a branch that depresses into the hour wheel realm, catching a falling L at its proper time.

  In some little gray thought I recognized a green idea that had not occurred before: Leave. It lulled through the expanse of an index finger and thumb, actualizing in a drive around the outer rim of town toward the expressway. Cornfields erasing what’s already been erased, burning the shape of the sun after you look away.