The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  Caleb watched the new thing, large and substantial in his father’s hands. It was a baby, but it was covered all over in dark black hair, which was slicked with blood and mucus. It had a long, bearlike snout and its fingers were mashed together into useless claws. It growled, and its furry hands reached up toward the ceiling and batted at his father’s face. Caleb realized now that it was not his brother, not a baby, but an animal, a creature, something wild. It was something inside their house that should not be there.

  His mother continued to motion for the baby, and his father, dazed, disconnected from what he was holding, placed it on her chest. She held on to it, stroking its face. “My baby,” she said. “It’s my baby.”

  “Jenny,” his father said, his voice now quiet but anxious with what he had to say. “It won’t stop. I can’t make it stop.”

  She touched his father’s face, kissed him. “It will be okay. This is our baby, Felix. We have our baby.”

  “We have to take you to a hospital. Something’s wrong. The baby needs a doctor, too; there’s something wrong with him.”

  His mother kept yawning, her eyelids heavy. “We can’t go. We’re here—we have to stay here.”

  “Jenny.”

  “Go find help.”

  His father went back to the foot of the bed and removed the towel, which was now heavy with blood, and threw it to the floor. “Jenny,” he said again, crying now, pleading with her. With the baby still resting on her chest, she fell into a half sleep. The baby tried to wriggle out of her grasp, but she held on to him.

  His father pressed a new towel tight against her. Caleb stared at the bloody towel, twisted and curled on the floor. His mother was dying, he now realized; the baby had brought something else with it, slow and painful.

  “I’m taking you to a hospital,” his father said finally. As he walked toward her, he tripped over the towel, and it uncoiled, showing slashes of white cotton patterned against the blood. He moved to pick her up, but she moaned in pain.

  “No,” she panted. “Don’t do that. I don’t think I can move, Felix.”

  His father touched her forehead, which left a streak of blood. It looked like a lowercase j to Caleb, sweeping over and up with a dot, before it mixed with the sweat on her forehead and became nothing, only blood. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said. She nodded, closed her eyes, and nuzzled the baby.

  Caleb’s father threw on his jacket and took the flashlight from the table. His hands shook so hard that the beam of light jittered across the room before he finally turned it off. Caleb was afraid of him, of the look on his face, but he did not want to be left in the house. “Can I come with you?” he asked, but again his father did not seem to hear him. Caleb pulled at the arm of his jacket. “What about me?” he asked.

  “You watch over them,” his father said, and now tears were spilling down both cheeks. “Keep them safe.”

  His father started the truck, and the engine clacked and then hummed with power. He rolled down the window and told Caleb, “I’ll be right back. I’ll come back with help, and we’ll fix this and we’ll all be okay.” But he was still crying and Caleb could hardly listen anyway. “Okay?” his father repeated. Caleb nodded and the truck backed out of the driveway, onto the road that led to town, which was nearly obscured by the snow. Ice crunched underneath the wheels, and the truck crept at such a slow pace that it seemed like it might be going in reverse.

  Caleb went back inside and leaned against the window, afraid to go back to his mother and the baby. He felt the possibility of his father’s never returning move down his spine—that he would drive into town and keep going into the next town and the next, until home and the new baby, the strange thing he’d made, were only a memory.

  The truck slid down the road and made the first curve. There was the sharp sound of the brakes tapping on and off, and the headlights were steady on the road in front of it. Caleb rubbed the fog from the window and watched as the truck headed into the next curve, nearly out of view, and then he heard the brakes dig in, and the wheels skidded across the ice. Too fast, it seemed, still going, around the bend and disappearing from view, the lights gone, the brakes still squealing, and then, for one brief second, silence, the snow falling. Then a crash, loud and jarring, and the sound of metal twisting, the world giving up its shape.

  Caleb ran beneath the dinner table and hid himself under a white sheet. His mother called out for him, but he didn’t answer, could not bear to go to her. “Caleb?” she asked again, her voice so soft. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know it would be like this.” The baby started again. Its cries were now empty of anger or confusion, merely a noise to fill the house. He could hardly hear his mother, but he refused to move from under the table. Instead he strained his ears to the sound of her. “Take care of him, Caleb. This is your brother and I want you to be a good brother and make sure he’s safe. I need you to watch over him until your father comes back. Will you do that, Caleb?”

  He didn’t answer, pulled the sheet tighter around him.

  She was crying now. “Caleb? I’m so sorry.”

  He waited for her to speak again but there was only silence, interrupted by the occasional sound of the baby’s whimpers and cries. Caleb closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, waited for her to come to him, to lift the sheet off and carry him to bed. With every minute that passed, he grew more tired, lulled by the nearly imperceptible sound of snow freezing, turning into ice.

  The fire had all but burned itself away, and the house was growing cold. Caleb did not want to move. He willed his body to stop shaking, but the cold was getting inside of him. When he finally stirred, pushing one of the chairs out of the way as he crawled from under the table, the baby heard the sound and gave a small cry and then stopped, as if waiting for a reply. Caleb walked to the stack of wood and removed a piece. The weight was heavy in his tired arms. He opened the door to the stove and slid the piece into the waning fire, watched the wood slowly ignite around the edges and hold the flame. As he warmed his hands, he looked toward the bed, where his mother was still and quiet. He moved a step closer and saw the baby shivering under its soft coat of black fur; it had fallen from his mother’s hands onto the bed and had pulled its limbs tightly against itself.

  When Caleb touched his mother, he knew that she was dead. He could not explain the feeling except to understand that his mother’s arm felt lifeless, that nothing was left to move through it. He quickly pulled his hand away and stared at her calm face. He took a washcloth and wiped the streak of blood from her forehead. While the baby softly moaned and kicked in its sleep, Caleb cleaned each of his mother’s fingers, scrubbing the nails until they were spotless. He kissed her cheek and his lips tingled until he looked down at the baby, the only other thing alive in the house.

  He poked at the baby, trying to jab it awake. The fur on its head was soft, but the hair on its body was like steel wool, rough and bristly and flecked with blood. The baby finally stirred and immediately began howling, its mouth a perfect O, though Caleb was not yet up to that letter in the alphabet. To him, the mouth was a circle, around and around and around, with nothing but a sound coming out. The sound echoed through the house and hung in the fire-warmed air. This thing had killed his mother. It had come in the dead of night and left his mother hollowed out and empty.

  Caleb placed his open palm over the mouth of the baby. He pinched the baby’s snoutish nose closed with his thumb and forefinger. The muffled sound traveled through his arm, thrummed against his elbow. He could feel the anger inside the baby and he clamped down harder as he felt its lungs shrink with the effort to fight back. He could end it right now, could snuff the baby in mid-scream and hide it in the woods. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to live long, was strangely twisted up inside and could not last on its own. Its breath stumbled and sputtered against the closed door of Caleb’s hand. A few seconds more.

  But he couldn’t continue. He didn’t want the baby and what it had created, but he could not take the eas
y steps to end it; he remembered his mother’s plea for him to protect his brother. He took his hand from its mouth and the baby sucked in air, pulled the world into its lungs. The scream returned; the baby’s claws curled up in rage. Caleb lifted the baby into his arms and pulled the heavy weight close to his chest. He sat on the floor and held his brother in his arms, allowed him to fight and scream and scratch the air until he had tired himself out. Caleb took the honey from the nightstand and removed the wand from the jar. The baby sucked on the end like a pacifier, his first food in the world. When it was gone, Caleb pried the wand loose. The baby had a small tooth, malformed and gray, on the top left side of his mouth. Caleb touched it with his finger and found the edge surprisingly sharp. The baby clamped down and Caleb removed his finger just in time. He dipped the wand into the honey again and fed the baby this way for the next few minutes; after each feeding, he would wipe the sticky excess from his mouth to keep him clean. The baby was his brother and they were alone in what was left of the night, pitch-black and cold except for the tiny space their bodies occupied. Caleb reached into his pocket and produced the duck his father had whittled, with its dark blood. He placed it between the baby’s paws and the baby twitched as he sniffed the blood that had soaked the duck before he was ever born. The object seemed to further calm him, and Caleb continued to steady the duck as it constantly threatened to slip out of the baby’s grasp. As if teaching him a lesson, Caleb softly quacked and then shook the duck so gently that it would not frighten his brother. “Duck,” Caleb said, though the word sounded as if it were from a language that had died out hundreds of years ago. He knew it meant absolutely nothing to anyone but him.

  The baby curled against Caleb’s shirt and squirmed to find comfort, unable to sleep. His body left a damp, bloody imprint on the fabric. Caleb would watch over him.

  When the front door opened the next day and the morning sun spilled into the room, there was Caleb, stained with blood, and the newborn baby, finally asleep in Caleb’s arms, all that was left of the day before.

  Hisham Matar

  Naima

  MY MOTHER DID NOT like the heat. I never saw her in a swimsuit or in sudden surrender closing her eyes at the sun. The arrival of spring in Cairo would set her off planning our summer getaways. Once we spent the holidays high up in the Swiss Alps, where my body stiffened at the sight of deep hollow chasms emptied out of the rocky earth. Another time she took us to Nordland, in northern Norway, where the splintered peaks of austere black mountains were reflected sharply in the unmoving waters. We stayed in a wooden cabin that stood alone by the shore and was painted the brown of withered leaves. Around its roof hung a gutter as wide as a human thigh. Here whatever fell from the sky fell in abundance. There was no other man-made structure in sight. Some afternoons, Mother disappeared and I would not let on to Father that my heart was thumping at the base of my ears. I would keep to my room until I heard footsteps on the deck, the kitchen door sliding open. Once I found Mother there with hands stained black-red, a rough globe dyed into the front of her jumper. With eyes as clean as glass, wide, satisfied, she held out a handful of wild berries. They tasted of a ripe sweetness I found hard to attribute to that landscape.

  One night, fog gathered thickly, abstracting the licks and sighs of the northern lights. You need adulthood to appreciate such horror. An anxious heat entered my eight-year-old mind and I curled up in bed, hoping Mother would pay me one of her night visits, kiss my forehead, lie beside me.

  I woke up several times believing that Naima was there. She was our maid, and had been since before I was born, before my parents left our country and moved to Egypt. In winter, when the sky got dark early and Mother worried about her making the long commute home, Naima would sleep on my bedroom floor. I would watch her lying on her side, facing the skirting board, her leg bent with the tight determination of a tree branch. Her devotion had always seemed muscular, too intense, but now I yearned for it; I wished that she had come with us, or even that I had been left behind with her in Cairo.

  In the morning the still world returned: the innocent waters, the ferocious mountains, the pale sky dotted with small, newborn clouds. I found Mother in the kitchen, warming milk, a glass of water on the white marble counter beside her. Not juice, tea, or coffee but water was her morning drink. She took a sip and with her usual insistence on quiet muffled the impact of the glass on the marble with the soft tip of her little finger. Any sudden sound unsettled her. She could conduct an entire day’s chores in near-silence.

  It should not have been difficult for me to speak, to say the usual “Good morning, Mama,” but at times she seemed impenetrable, as if contained within an invisible structure. I sat at the table, where, when the three of us gathered at mealtimes, Mother would occasionally glance at the fourth, empty chair as if it signaled an absence, something lost. She poured the hot milk into a cup for me. A sliver of steam brushed the air then disappeared beside her neck.

  “Nuri, habibi,” she said, speaking my name the way she often did, with careful affection, “why the long face?”

  She took me out onto the deck that stretched above the lake. The air was so brisk it stung my throat. I remembered what she had said to Father in the car when the naked mountains of Nordland first came into view: “Here God decided to be a sculptor; everywhere else he holds back.”

  “Holds back?” Father had echoed. “You talk about him as if he’s a friend of yours.”

  In those days Father did not believe in God. He often greeted Mother’s references to the divine with irritated sarcasm. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when, after Mother died, he now and again voiced a prayer; sarcasm, more often than not, hides a secret fascination.

  Was it the romance of wood fires, the discretion of heavy coats that attracted my mother to the northern and unpeopled places of Europe? Or was it the impeccable stillness of a fortnight spent mostly sheltered indoors with the only two people she could lay claim to? I have come to think of all those holidays, no matter where they were, as having taken place in a single country—her country—and of the silences that marked them as her melancholy. There were moments when her unhappiness seemed as elemental as clear water.

  After she died, it soon became obvious that what Father had always wanted to do in the two weeks off that he allowed himself every summer was to lie in the sun all day. So the Magda Marina, a small hotel in Agamy Beach, near Alexandria, became the place where he and I spent that fortnight. He seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child. When we sat down to eat he either read the paper or gazed into the distance. Whenever he noticed me looking at him he would fidget or check his watch. As soon as he finished eating, he would light a cigarette and snap his fingers for the bill, not bothering to check whether I had finished, too.

  “See you back in the room.”

  He never did that when Mother was alive.

  Instead, when the three of us went to a restaurant, they would sit side by side facing me. If we were all engaged in a conversation, she would direct most of her contributions toward me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court. And when his unease led him to play the entertainer she would monitor, in that discreet way of hers, my reactions to his forced cheerfulness or, if he could bear it no longer, to his silences. With Mother’s eyes on me I would watch him observe the other patrons or stare out at the view, which was often of some unremarkable street or square, no doubt daydreaming or plotting his next move in the secret work I never once heard him talk about. At these moments it felt as if he were the boy obliged to share a meal with adults, as if he were the son and I the father.

  After Mother passed away, he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors held together by circumstance or obligation. But then, at the most unexpected moments, a tenderhearted sympathy, raw and sudden, would rise in him, and he would plunge his face into my neck, sniff deeply and kiss, tickling me with his mustache. It would set us off laughin
g as though everything were all right.

  At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.

  “Baba, who are you looking for?” I once asked.

  He shook his head and said, “No one.”

  But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for. Kamal Pasha, those books said, had been a close adviser to the king and one of the few men who could walk into the royal office without an appointment. Whenever the young monarch was in one of his anxious moods—perhaps suspecting his end to be near—it was Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who was called to ease his fears. In these books my father was also described as an aristocrat who, having been forced into exile by the revolution, had moved “gradually but with radical effect” to the left. I read these things about my father before I could understand what they meant. And if I came to him with my questions he would smoothly deflect them: “It was all so long ago.”

  I rarely persisted, because I knew that he was being true to Mother’s wishes.

  “Don’t transfer the weight of the past onto your son,” she once told him.

  “You can’t live outside history,” he argued. “We have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary.”

  After a long pause she responded, “Who said anything about shame? It’s longing that I want to spare him. Longing and the burden of your hopes.”

  I recall how sometimes, during the edgeless hours of the afternoon, I would use Mother’s hip for a pillow. I would listen to the steady rhythm of her breath, the pages of her book turning. If I fell asleep, the sound would become a lazy breeze rustling a tree, or a broom brushing the earth. I hold the memory of her collarbone. I used to reach for it the way a rock climber would a sturdy ledge. I recall also her hair, strands as thick as strings. I would stretch one across my forehead, or on my tongue, and feel it tighten like a blade. None of this would distract her from her reading. I would watch the wide blossom of her eyes scanning the lines, those same eyes which grew keen whenever I caught her standing behind a heavy curtain in a game of hide-and-seek or when I revealed to her a luminous butterfly I had captured. How quickly her cheeks would redden then. She would speak, a warm whisper, before laughter flexed her throat. She was as close as I ever came to having a sister.