The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Leticia was excited like an expectant parent—the earth was having a baby and she wanted to be there to see its fiery newborn. They were visiting Hawaii so Mark could conduct research at the Gemini Telescope on the Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island. She was thrilled to be on her first volcano but was really awaiting their visit to Kilauea, where Hawaiian legend says Pele now lives after creating each of the Hawaiian Islands, starting with Kauai, and where she was now throwing her tantrums on the newest volcano. Leticia admired Pele’s ability to spark both fear and awe.

  On their way to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, they passed the town of Kalapana, which was buried in lava flows from a 1990 eruption—just a few years earlier. They stopped and took pictures of each other pretending their feet were stuck in the partially lava-covered sections of highway that were once part of the town. When they reached the observatory, Mark got down on one knee and pulled an engagement ring with a brilliant ruby out of his pocket.

  When she said yes, Mark hugged her and whispered in her ear, “I love you. Let’s go see some lava.”

  She cried as she held on to him tightly. She felt like they were harnessing the forces that forged the ruby’s fiery, molten, isomorphic mixture of corundum and aluminum oxide, and together they would be beautiful.

  Outside the observatory, a ranger pointed to distant lava flows oozing out of Pu‘u ’Ō‘ō Crater. The lava flows were actually coming out of lava tubes on the sides of the crater, but because they were slow-moving, they cooled quickly and crusted over, so they didn’t look like the bright orange river that she had expected. As they walked past the sign that said DON’T GO PAST THIS SIGN, the ranger told them that he couldn’t stop them from continuing, but then added that in the previous month, a man had fallen to his death when an acre-sized section of the lava field collapsed and fell into the ocean. Leticia giggled as Mark told the ranger that they had just gotten engaged and that this was how they were going to start their lives together and that they would be careful. They stayed away from the coast, which sporadically steamed from hot lava meeting the cool ocean. Leticia tripped a few times while staring at her ring.

  A few miles later, the ground became warmer and bouncier, strands of dried, ropey pahoehoe lava snapping under their feet. Mark wanted to stop; he felt the air around them getting hotter and hotter, and he was concerned that maybe the lava was closer to the surface than they realized. She knew that the lava was close and that it was moving beneath them, flowing—alive. She was giddy with the thought that they were walking on the newest land on earth. She would keep walking ahead, and Mark would turn around and threaten to go back to the ranger station, but he always remained by her side. She knew he was mad, and probably scared, but she hoped he admired her, that he felt proud to be marrying a brave girl.

  Then she saw it. It was moving slowly and belching sizzling, molten material. There was smooth pahoehoe lava on one side and walls of chunky a’a lava on the other. She crouched down and waited for the lava to reach her. Heat caressed her face.

  Mark screamed, “What are you doing? No!”

  She was not sure how long the moment lasted, but she tried very hard to resist the urge to reach out to the lava, as the earth’s core reached out to her. The movie from her childhood dreams was playing out in front of her; she wanted to be a part of it, affect the process in some way. The increasingly searing heat reminded her that she was mortal and small and weak. She heard Mark call out to her again. She finally stood up, turned around, and said, “I know. I’m sorry. I just can’t believe I’m finally here,” and started walking back toward him.

  Something popped, out onto her foot, her thigh. The feeling was surprisingly heavy, like she was being pushed. She bent down to take off her melting hiking boot, but the lava hit her hand. She made a fist from the agony, her hand encrusted with tiny, sizzling rocks that cracked into her skin. She couldn’t dig herself out of the pain.

  The last thing she remembers is being pulled away, leaving skin mixed with earth.

  Walther Penck (1888–1923, Austrian). His erosion theory argued that different hill slopes reflected variations in the balance between rates of land uplift and denudation. An increase in fortitude can occur only in response to tectonic processes of crustal thickening (such as love and courage), changes in the density distribution of the crust and underlying self-doubt, and flexural support due to the bending of years of accumulated cultural and gender expectations. Uplift relates to denudation in that it brings buried sediment—that is—sentiment closer to the surface.

  2.0—She felt as though she had been sucked into a cave, wedged into a dark, airless space all by herself. One way of looking at Charles Francis Richter’s (1900–1985, American) scale is as a measure of displacement.

  4.0, 4.2, 3.7, 2.9, 5.8—No, it wasn’t the end of the world. Yes, she could re-form her life, make neat stacks out of the pieces. The aftershocks were relentless. Was it really an accident? Did it have to take a piece of her? Was the earth (and maybe the universe) out to get her?

  5.9—Skin. Scabs. Fluids. Bone. Pain.

  6.0—Wait. Stop. She requested that her mother bring her pictures, the ones where she was wearing her ruby ring. She stared at her perfect baby body, pondered what was going on in her unclouded baby mind, and wished she had never existed past that moment. She hadn’t seen her engagement ring since it was cut off her.

  6.4—“You never told me if you finished your research at the telescope.”

  “No. I’ll have to go back at some point.”

  “Because of me? Because of what happened?”

  “Don’t put it like that, Leticia.”

  8.0—He suggested that they leave the house to go somewhere other than the hospital, that they go to the park and sit on some slabs, that she cover this stratum of her life with hope and optimism and good . . . well . . . better feelings and such—and that they have sex. Could they please have sex? It’s okay, we’ll go slow, I won’t look . . .

  She would never let him see her again. He became frustrated when she remained a monolith. This can’t go on forever, he would say, as she felt the layers of forever crushing her down.

  8.5—The coddling of a mother who had never coddled, the guilt magnifying the swaddling and care taken to shield her daughter—herself—from pain. She had lost one and she wasn’t going to lose another one. She was going to hold her close and protect her from her silly ideas. All this scientific pondering to explain what? It couldn’t explain why bad things happen to good people. Leticia had begun to believe her.

  9.1—It came down to the big difference between them. No, not the science thing. Not the money, or the skin color, or the privilege thing. Not even the condescension thing. Yes, he had made judgments, general sweeping comments about her lack of confidence, about her family’s lack of everything. The cleave, the thing, was that he thought that every single thing would be all right. He had smiled and told her, “I found your list. You need to find your place on it. Finish school.”

  As he smiled, pleased he had figured out the narrative that would make sense of the senseless, all she could think was You have hope.

  9.2—About that list. She had listed forty-something of her favorite geologists in alphabetical order, hoping she could someday insert herself last: Leticia Maria Zamora. A few months before Hawaii, Leticia had considered removing Agassiz (the second one on her alphabetical list, the rock star of geologists) after she found out that he believed in a form of polygenism, the idea that races came from separate origins, accordingly endowed with unequal attributes.

  9.3—She and Mark were completely mismatched and she finally knew it.

  10.0—It was decided that her family could take better care of her while she recovered. She retreated back to her life with her parents and Adriana.

  The apartment was on a transform fault (a boundary that occurs when two plates grind past each other), with everyone grinding past Leticia. Her mother said things: Who has a volcano accident? and If she had just stayed home lik
e she was supposed to, none of this would’ve happened. Her father was silent. He flinched when she tried to grab a mug with her missing fingers. Phantom limb is for real.

  Adriana walked into the bedroom she shared with Leticia, which had always been small but was now overcrowded with medical supplies stacked on every surface. As Leticia watched TV in bed, Adriana placed a box by her feet. She said, “My boss gave these to everybody for Christmas—sorry for re-gifting,” then walked out of the room and shut the door behind her.

  Adriana was working as an administrative assistant in an advertising agency and having an affair with her boss, which their parents kept quiet about, hoping it would result in a marriage, but all she ever brought home were discarded executive gifts and kinky lingerie only Leticia got to see. Adriana had been an ambitious girl after all, going after what she wanted, and this would be her way out. She had moved on to more suitable types as she matured and would probably keep working hard at it (not for too long, though, since there was her youth to think about).

  Leticia put down the remote control and grabbed the box. She pulled the box next to her leg with her good hand and read its description: Zen gardening helps clear the mind of the chaos associated with everyday life. The rocks represent mountains and the sand represents water. The patterns you create by raking the sand around the rocks will provide you with serenity. Includes a Book of Meditations to give you a complete set of stress-relief tools. The Deluxe Zen Garden makes a perfect gift for an executive or a client.

  She slipped the box under her bed and picked up the remote control. She had been dormant for some time.

  John Tuzo Wilson (1908–1993, Canadian). Contributed to plate tectonics theory and coined the geological terms “plates” and “transform faults” to refer to the moving pieces of the earth. A restless puzzle—abutting, diverging, colliding.

  From inside a shoebox in her closet, Leticia pulled out the rock she had brought home a year earlier from Hawaii. The rock was rhyolite or andesite, both rich in feldspar and mica. She had picked it up when they went to Mauna Kea the day before the accident and gently snuggled it into a sock in her luggage without telling Mark. Visitors are warned not to remove any rocks from the volcano because Pele will curse you for taking her children. There was a display of letters at the post office in the town of Volcano from tourists who had mailed back their rock souvenirs, describing the bad luck and tragedies that had befallen them upon their return home. Some of the letters begged the goddess Pele to have mercy on them, to reverse their bad fortune.

  She put the rock under her pillow, then walked out of the bedroom, into the bathroom. She grabbed Adriana’s bright-red glitter nail polish that she had been eyeing since it appeared in the bathroom a few days earlier.

  Her mother saw her walking out of the bathroom with the nail polish tucked under her armpit and asked, “Do you need help with that? Are you going out?”

  “Of course not,” she answered, closing the door behind her.

  She considered painting the rock as she had done with her collection, but this rock was the real thing, an artifact from her failed expedition. Further, she could extract its information about the earth’s history, and even its provenance within the universe (according to Mark’s studies).

  Her mother cried in between yelling, “Leticia, you need to go out into the world! You cannot live like this!” She repeated over and over, “This is not what I want for my daughter.”

  She looked down at the striations, the scarring, the stretching and pulling of healing, the foreign skins metamorphosed onto her hand—the missing parts and their replacements. She had once been grafted to her mother, her father even, a long time ago, when they had all been hopeful.

  She discarded the nail polish and started scratching the rock, felt as if she could get some answers from it even if she wasn’t sure of the questions. Brown, powder-fine material accumulated under her fingernail as she scratched harder, her nail snagging on the uneven surface over and over again. She dabbed a drop of blood onto the rock with the pad of her index finger, where it was quickly absorbed, the iron and calcium bonding with their counterparts in the rock. She worked through the pain. She thought of the painting of Pele that hung in the post office in Volcano, her hair flowing, forming the slopes of Kilauea. Mark had said Leticia looked like her—a goddess who moves the earth.

  LAUREN GROFF

  For the God of Love,

  for the Love of God

  FROM American Short Fiction

  STONE HOUSE DOWN a gully of grapevines. Under the roof, a great pale room.

  Night had been drawn out by the way the house eclipsed the dawn. Morning came when the sun flared against the hill and suddenly shone in. What had begun in the dark of the room came clear to the man in the fields who was riding a strange sort of tractor that straddled the vines. He idled, parallel to the window, to watch.

  Amanda’s face flushed: her idea for waking Grant up had come from the tractor’s first squatting pass in the window ten minutes earlier. She slapped her husband’s stomach below and said, Finish.

  A minute later she strode off the bed and went to the window, and, leaning for the curtains on each side, pressed her chest against the glass, to tease. The man on the tractor wasn’t a man, but a young boy. He was laughing.

  In dark again, they heard the tractor moving off, then the flurries of roosters down in the village.

  That was nice, Grant said, sliding his hand down her thigh. Hope we didn’t wake them. He stretched, lazy. Amanda imagined their hosts in the room below: Manfred staring blankly at the wall. Drooling. Genevieve with her passive-aggressive buzzing beneath the duvet.

  Who cares, Amanda said.

  Well, Grant said. There’s Leo too.

  I forgot, she said.

  Poor kid, Grant said. Everyone always forgets about Leo.

  Amanda went down the stairs in her running clothes. She passed the boy’s room, then doubled back.

  Leo stood on the high window ledge, his wisp of a body pressed against the glass. Here, the frames rattled if you breathed on them wrong. There was rot in the wood older than Amanda herself. But Leo was such an intense child, and so purposeful, that she watched him until she remembered hearing once that glass was just a very slow liquid. Then she ran.

  He was so light for four years old. He turned in her arms and squeezed her neck furiously and whispered, It’s you.

  Leo, she said. That is so dangerous. You could have died.

  I was looking at the bird, he said. He pressed a finger to the glass and she saw, down on the white rocks, some sort of raptor with a short beak. Huge and dangerous, even dead.

  It fell out of the sky, he said. I was watching the black go blue. And the bird fell. I saw it. Boom. The bad thing, I thought, but actually it’s just a bird.

  The bad thing? she said, but Leo didn’t answer. She said, Leo, you are one eerie mammerjammer.

  My mom says that, he said. She says I give her the wet willies. But I need my breakfast now, he said, and wiped his nose on the strap of her sports bra.

  Leo bit carefully into his toast and Nutella, watching Amanda. She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age. She had to turn away from him and watched the light spread into the pool and set it aglow.

  You’re not somebody’s mom, Leo said.

  Jesus, kid, she said. Not yet.

  Why not? he said.

  She didn’t believe in lying to children. This she might reconsider if she had one. Grant and I’ve been too poor, she said.

  Why? he said.

  She shrugged. Student loans. I work with homeless people. His company is getting off the ground. The usual. But we’re trying. I may be someone’s mom soon. Maybe next year.

  So you’re not poor anymore? he said.

  You practice radical bluntness, I see, she said. We are, yes. But I can’t wait forever.

  Leo looked at the giraffe tattoo that ran up from her
elbow to nibble on her ear. It made him vaguely excited. He looked at the goose bumps between her sports bra and running shorts. My mom says only Americans jog. She says they have no sense of dignity.

  Ha! Amanda said. I know your mom from back when her name was Jennifer. She’s as American as they come.

  As they come? As who comes? Genevieve said from the doorway. So much coming this morning! she said, showing her large white teeth.

  Sorry about that, Amanda said. She didn’t mean it.

  Genevieve walked lightly across the flagstone floor and kissed her son on his pale cowlick. Her tunic was see-through silk, the bikini beneath, black. She wore sunglasses inside.

  Hi, Jennifer, Leo said slyly.

  Too much wine last night? Amanda said. Was the restaurant worth all of its stars?

  But Genevieve was looking at her son. Did you just call me Jennifer? she said.

  Aunt Manda told me, he said. And someone is coming today. The girl. The one that’s taking care of me until we can go home.

  Genevieve propped her sunglasses on her crown and made a face. Amanda closed her eyes and said, Jesus, Genevieve. Mina’s coming. My niece.

  Oh my God, Genevieve said. Oh, that’s right. What time’s her flight? Three. She did some calculations and groaned and said, Whole day shot to hell.

  Because you had some extremely important business, Amanda said. Pilates. Flower arranging. Yet another trip to yet another cave to taste yet another champagne. Such a sacrifice to take a few hours to pick up Mina, who’s basically my sister, the person who will be watching your child for the rest of the summer for the price of a plane ticket—