Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

by Carmen Johnson

  The coffee shop is muffin-themed, and all the food—even that completely unrelated to muffins—is forced to involve muffins in some way. Grace orders a muffin salad, which turns out to be an ordinary salad with a savory cheese muffin on the side. She eats half the muffin and offers the rest to Roger, who spears it with a fork, leaning in close and smiling as if they are coconspirators.

  “You know,” Roger says, “how cats knead people with their claws? When they’re purring? Another name for that is making muffins.”

  They walk a couple of blocks to the apartment. The rain has not let up, and they huddle together under Grace’s umbrella. So close to him, Grace can smell food on his breath when he laughs. It’s not a sour or unpleasant smell; rather, sweet and bready, something reminiscent of home or childhood. When they enter the building, Roger hesitates at the bottom of the stairs and their eyes meet. He looks away and laughs. “So wet,” he says as he removes his jacket and shakes it. Drops of water splat on the tile.

  The apartment is on the second floor and is not very large but is light and pleasant inside, simply decorated with a few houseplants and black-and-white photographs of innocuous landscapes. Grace sees nothing related to cats except an odd porcelain figurine high on a bookshelf. The bedroom that will be hers doesn’t have a closet, but the previous roommate has left behind a fiberboard wardrobe. Though the rent is cheaper, this apartment is far nicer than the dark and cramped one where Grace currently lives in the far northern reaches of Manhattan. There, the lock on the front door is broken, and Grace sometimes finds homeless people asleep in the lobby.

  She doesn’t hesitate: she tells Roger she’ll take it.

  Before moving in, she gets a call from him. He remembers that she’s looking for a job, and a position has opened at his organization. Roger works, Grace learns, in the communications department of a well-known nonprofit. The position is temporary, but could be extended to a permanent job if they like her work. Grace applies and gets it. Roger had put in a good word for her.

  She starts work immediately—answering phones, photocopying, filling out spreadsheets. She works in a different department from Roger, and on her first day, she sees him only once. He is walking quickly, talking to a colleague and carrying a folder heavy with white paper. He smiles and makes a flurried gesture, as if to say that he would like to talk but is on his way to a meeting.

  She doesn’t see Roger again until she moves into the apartment, at which point she finds that he maintains certain privacies. To avoid walking down the hall in a towel after showering, he changes his clothes in the bathroom. When she finds him reading on the couch, he hugs the book close to his chest so that she can’t read the title.

  But once, having just come home from work, Roger leaves his bedroom door open as he changes his shirt, and Grace, walking down the hall to the kitchen, sees him. His chest is covered in fine black hairs, but Grace, who generally prefers a smoother torso, finds his oddly attractive. She notices herself, after this incident, glancing toward his bedroom door, and listening to the sound of water running while he showers. Grace doesn’t like to think of herself as the kind of person who would do anything so awkward as to sleep with her roommate, but then again, she believes she’s an open-minded person, and doesn’t entirely rule the idea out.

  Grace seeks out small details to expand her understanding of Roger. She notes a medicinal scent in the bathroom, and in the living room, an old rolltop desk, nicked in several places so that a light wood shows through the dark stain. On a bookcase are two shelves of self-help books. “I used to feel lost,” Roger explains.

  Next to the bookshelf is a glass case displaying tiny models of buildings. Roger tells Grace they’re an old hobby of his. She leans in close. They’re made out of paper: tiny castles and important buildings from around the world. Roger has labeled them: Taj Mahal, Mount Vernon. They are coated in thin dust. He explains that he doesn’t make these anymore, that he’s lost interest in buildings. “Enormous examples of people pretending to be civilized.”

  Now, he places in her hand a model of the Centre Pompidou. She feels the delicate edges, the careful work Roger has performed with knives and glue. It gives her a strange and intimate thrill.

  Most evenings, Roger stays late at the office, and Grace has an hour or so to herself. She goes to her wardrobe, removes a dull brown case, and straps an accordion over her shoulders. Heavy notes fill the apartment. A casual listener would deem her playing skillful, but the instrument is still fairly new to her. She doesn’t want Roger to hear. She plays only ten minutes before switching to guitar, a quieter instrument and less eccentric. Ten minutes of accordion here and there will not allow her to improve, and this worries Grace.

  She expects to find more time to practice on weekends, when she supposes Roger will have plans with friends, but as the weekends pass, she finds that he socializes less than she would expect of someone with his confidence and charm. If she goes out in the evening, she imagines he has done the same, and when she returns, she listens for the sound of a woman’s voice coming from his bedroom. In the mornings, she expects to find a woman in the kitchen, a woman with long smooth legs, a woman who will be making coffee and wearing one of Roger’s shirts. But no such person ever appears. Instead, on these mornings, Roger walks into the kitchen alone, and when Grace asks him what he did the night before, she learns he stayed home. “Independence and solitude are part of my nature,” he says with a shrug, as if this were a sentence that could be uttered casually.

  Grace starts staying home with him. When friends call, she finds herself making excuses. She and Roger cook dinner together and watch movies and have long conversations. She plays her guitar for him (though not her accordion) and he responds with enthusiasm. In a matter of only a few weeks, her life begins to revolve around him, and she lives according to his advice. When he smells cigarette smoke on her clothes and suggests healthier ways of relieving stress, she quits smoking and takes up jogging. She feels comfortable following his advice. These changes in her life have all been positive.

  They live together six weeks before they have sex. They are sitting on the couch, watching a television drama, and Grace leans her head on his shoulder. He strokes her hair. Grace’s heart beats hard and she almost stops breathing. His hand runs over her arm, and then his lips are against hers. They are half-undressed when they move to his bedroom. She is on top of him, then he is on top of her, and she can’t stop kissing him, as if his mouth has something she needs but can’t quite get. She slips her hand over his back, which like his chest is covered with hair, but the hair isn’t coarse—rather, very soft. She slips her hand slowly down and when it comes to just above his butt, she feels a hard, bony bump.

  She draws her hand back fast. They carry on, but Grace is distracted. Roger must know she felt the thing, and yet he behaves as if nothing has happened. And then it’s over, and they’re lying next to each other in bed, and Roger says, “It’s a tail.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m growing a tail.”

  Grace has never heard of anyone growing a tail—perhaps infants born with unwanted appendages, but a tail growing on an adult? She doesn’t know what to say and ventures, “I’m sorry.”

  Roger smiles. “I want the tail. It’s something I want.”

  This is when Roger tells Grace that he is turning himself into a cat.

  Grace wakes early the next morning, in her own bed. When she hears the first stirrings in Roger’s room, the creak of him turning on the mattress, she pulls a hat over her unwashed hair and heads out the door.

  Outside it’s wet and unpleasant. Old women wrapped in coats carry heavy loads of groceries. Their steps are impossibly slow. Grace takes the train into Manhattan and, despite the weather, heads to the park. It is early December and the last leaves are brown and falling. Few people have ventured out today, so if Grace’s face betrays emotion—not to say it necessarily does—no one sees. Occasional shadowy figures keep their heads down as they pass. Grace w
eaves around the paths for an hour before she decides she’s too wet and cold to continue, and she leaves the park and heads to the art museum, where the slightest donation will allow her entry to a place that is dry and reasonably warm. She finds herself first in a special exhibit featuring an eighteenth-century painter, a man who devoted his practice to portraits of a monarch’s private menagerie. But leopards, tigers, and lions feel too close to home, and Grace moves on to safer subjects. She spends several hours in rooms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits, admiring minute details of women’s costumes: the ribbons, the ruffles, the changes in corset shape.

  At last, Grace gets on the subway and heads home. She feels calmer, full of reason. Changing into a cat is impossible, and what evidence does she have? Roger’s body hair is oddly prodigious and soft, and she did feel a strange protuberance in the place where a tail might be, but she hasn’t actually seen this tail. It could be anything. A prosthesis, perhaps.

  As the train rumbles through its tunnels, the previous night’s conversation replays in her head. At first she’d thought Roger was joking, but he’d insisted with great earnestness. He had realized that he needed to live the rest of his life as a cat, and then he had learned it was possible.

  “Like a sex change,” Grace had said at last, biting at a corner of her lip.

  Roger scoffed. What was a sex change—surgery on a couple key places, a regimen of hormones—compared to his own transformation? Every inch of his body would change—every limb, every organ. He would no longer walk on two legs. He’d no longer speak. He would cease to be human.

  As Grace exits the train, she shivers. Roger must be delusional. She’ll have to find a new apartment.

  But then, walking home from the station, she passes vintage clothing stores and the muffin-themed coffeehouse, and a restaurant packed with people with attractive hairstyles. It’s a charming neighborhood, she thinks, and her rent is so very low. She remembers her old apartment, with the broken lock and the men asleep on the lobby floor.

  She’ll stay in the apartment, but she and Roger will be no more than roommates. What happened last night—that will never happen again.

  Grace pauses at the door to the building. The rain has turned to something approximating snow, a slushy mix that half floats, half plummets. She watches it fall in the glow of the streetlamps. It’s close enough to snow—the first of the winter—for Grace to find it beautiful.

  Roger explains that he is achieving his transformation through a combination of medication and mental exercises, a regimen he has cobbled together through extensive research. Grace has just walked in from work to find him already home and seated at the coffee table, which he has covered in books and stacks of paper. She has learned today, as Roger predicted, that her temp job has been extended to a permanent position. She feels grateful, so she sits beside him. He places a hand on her knee. She gently but firmly removes it.

  Roger lifts one of the books from the table, a paperbound journal claiming scientific contents. He wants her to understand that this is real, that changes like his are described in resources that are reputable in appearance. He flips through yellowed pages and holds open an article with the title “On Probable Future Advances in the Mutability of Species.” Grace starts to read further, but Roger shuts the book and picks up another.

  He flips through countless photocopies, preserved in plastic sleeves. Grace sees pages of tiny print, grainy photographs, and incomprehensible diagrams with dotted lines and arrows. Roger tells her of Soviet experiments, of twentieth-century medical breakthroughs covered up for unclear political reasons, and of ancient tales of alchemy and miracles. Then he picks up a heavy leather-bound book. This, he explains, is his most important reference.

  He opens to columns of tiny type. Grace leans in to inspect the text, but finds it beyond her understanding. Though the sentences seem to be written in English, there are too many long and unfamiliar words, in strange syntaxes. Roger explains that understanding the book’s teachings has taken him many months—almost two years—of study, and as she can see, his transformation is still in its early stages.

  Roger flips through the pages, showing Grace the density of text, the complicated science of which he is master. As he flips, he comes to a section of lithographed images, which he quickly moves past, but Grace stops his hand and turns the pages back so that she can see. The illustrations are of people and animals—cats, dogs, horses, monkeys—but when Grace turns the page, she sees a spread of horrifying in-between things.

  Roger snaps the book shut and gathers his resources from the table. He stacks them neatly on the surface of his rolltop desk, then pulls down the cover and locks it with a gentle turn of the key. He turns back to Grace and smiles.

  Over the following weeks, Grace contemplates breaking into Roger’s desk and destroying his books and papers, but worries this might be excessively cruel. The leather-bound volume looks old and rare. It may be quite valuable.

  When the holidays come, Grace visits her family in suburban Virginia. She eats mashed potatoes, sings carols, and tries not to think about Roger. But when she unwraps a pair of fluffy black slippers, she imagines Roger’s hair growing dense like the faux fur. She thinks about his tail, growing ever imperceptibly longer. Suddenly, the normality around her seems false and unsettling. When she returns to New York and enters the apartment, she feels a small degree of relief. When Roger approaches, she allows him to hug her, but when he moves to kiss her cheek, she steps away.

  Grace notes slight alterations in his appearance, though she can’t be sure if they occurred in the time she was gone or if it’s the shock of seeing him again after being away. He seems to be hairier—furrier—than before, perhaps slightly shorter, and there’s something about his eyes that’s new and strange.

  Roger walks with Grace into the living room and hands her an envelope. Inside is a videotape. Living with Species Change, the label reads, For Family and Friends. “You don’t have to watch now,” Roger says, but Grace is curious. He pops the video in, and after a few seconds, warped strains of New Age music pour from the television. People with Australian accents talk about acceptance and new ways of living. These people wear velvet clothing and jewelry of crystals and pentagrams. They offer few specifics, though many note the period of transformation as being more difficult than the completely altered state. Grace waits for the transformed themselves to enter the scene, for a cat to leap onto someone’s lap or a rabbit to hop across a coffee table, but the video’s population remains strictly human.

  The following week, at the office, Grace is delivering a document to another floor and passes a conference room humming with voices. “Birthday party?” she asks a woman leaving the room. The woman is giggling and turning back to wave to a group of laughing coworkers, and hardly seems to hear Grace. “Have some cake,” she says, touching her fingertips to Grace’s wrist. “It’s Roger’s last day.”

  Roger stands in the middle of the room, a forkful of cake midair. He sees Grace and shrugs.

  That night, back at the apartment, she asks how he’ll support himself. He explains that he’s saved up some money he inherited when his father died, and besides, once he’s a cat, he’ll have fewer expenses. “I can’t keep working as if I were human,” he says. “I have to act like a cat. Quitting is part of the process.”

  Roger’s absence at work feels heavier than Grace would have expected. Now that he’s gone, she understands how comforting it had been, imagining him just one floor above. She leaves the office on her lunch break. It snowed the day before, and Midtown Manhattan is a mess of slushy streets and salt. People crowd in the shadows of monstrous skyscrapers. They hover around kebab carts and trucks selling dumplings, and file into burrito chains and upscale sandwich shops. All these people, in perfectly tailored suits and coats, are forced to fulfill their animal need for food. Humans, Grace thinks, are just a kind of mammal, and suddenly the structure of civilization seems tenuous and fragile. Perhaps Roger is right—perhaps th
ese buildings, these clothes, the lives people lead, are complex forms of denial—and though his reaction is extreme, maybe there’s something to it.

  The idea burns in her all day. That night, she’s cooking with Roger in the cramped space of their kitchen. As they move about, their bodies brush against each other. At one such moment, Grace reaches for Roger’s arm and lets her hand caress it before moving away. The next time Roger moves past her, he takes her in his arms.

  The following morning, Grace slips from Roger’s bed and walks to her own room. She pulls on her bathrobe, then reaches into her wardrobe and pulls out the accordion. She unclasps the case. She has not looked at the instrument in weeks, and she takes a moment to admire its shiny blackness, its mother-of-pearl inlay, before carrying it into the living room. She sits. Her fingers brush against the keys. Then she pulls the instrument out with a breathy heave, and as she pushes in, clear chords fill the room.

  The song she plays is simple, not the jaunty polka generally associated with the accordion, but slower, sweeter, somewhat sad. When she looks up, Roger is standing in the doorway. His eyes are closed. He smiles.

  Roger rarely leaves the apartment now, and there’s little chance anyone will see the two of them together. They allow their relationship to exist in secret. At work, Grace tells her coworkers that Roger has moved to California, that he’s working in animal rights, she thinks, but he hasn’t kept in touch. The coworkers don’t ask many questions, and Grace is amazed at how easily she has created a private life separate from her public one, a true life hidden from the world.

  Perhaps it’s the warming temperatures that make Grace optimistic, for the winter is melting into spring, and when walking in the park, she notices blossoms appearing on one tree, then another. She imagines walking with Roger in this place, their hands clasped, the sun warming their hair and shoulders. It’s not too late, she thinks in such happy moments. Their relationship has not come too late, but at just the right time. Roger might yet change his mind. He might stay human.