The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  It listed his famous relatives, presidents and senators, as he said, and made reference to the months he spent in captivity followed by a heavily negotiated release.

  I never thought to ask if a ransom had been demanded for his freedom or if it had been paid.

  He was fortunate to survive, the article said, when so many others don’t.

  What stayed with me most was when Juan told me that even though people called him brave for having endured his imprisonment, he considered himself a coward because he hadn’t had the courage to try to escape. Instead, he’d spent months waiting for permission to be free, and the shame of this truth, he said, would never leave him.

  Kenan Orhan

  Soma

  THROUGH THE HILLS sprout white turbines, lofted over fifty meters into the air. In the breeze they swing languid arms in arcs across the sky, dipping the tips of blades beneath the horizon and pulling them back up like the strokes of a swimmer. They are propellers anchored to the earth, carrying it through its leisurely orbit. They are bright in the sun, these turbines, and at night their rotors glow from red safety lights, and we can’t see the pillars or the blades, just the hubs sprinkling the air like cigarette butts.

  And the miners walk in the release of the moon, heading with their meals in pails and plastic bags, heading with their hardhats heavy in their hands, heading to the shaft elevator that extends some two thousand meters underground, where they will work in golden pockets of electric light while the sun begins its sweep across the sky. After six hours they will ride the elevator up, stopping shy of the surface to let their eyes adjust before they breach once more into the world above.

  As a boy I woke with my father, and watched him pack his breakfast of sucuk and boiled eggs, and struggled in his arms as he lifted me and kissed my cheek, stamping it black with coal dust carried always between the fibers of his moustache. Then my mother would wake and wipe my cheek clean and perform her own ablutions, and still hours before sunrise I would go to our apartment’s balcony and wave good-bye to the miners. The moon so big and bright I waited all night for it to explode.

  I still wake a little after four and go to the balcony with my coffee while my parents sleep. I wave to the miners as they walk through our village, and I make jokes: “Lock up your women. I’m on the prowl.” They shout back: “Get a job, useless.”

  The file of men disappears behind the curve of the road, a scythe through the hills. For a half hour, at shift change, the town streets are empty and dark; the breeze shakes the homes of absent men, as if the village needs only a little encouragement to leap up into the air and ride the wind far away.

  Now those done with their shifts creep up the road quietly in a long column; the only sound is the shuffle of their feet. At the edge of the village they break ranks and slip over stone streets to their homes, to their beds. I wave at my friend Mesut, who comes to the base of my building wearing his smile like a shard of porcelain in the dirt. I finish my coffee, grab my bag, and hurry down to him. Through the slopes of our village, I follow him, asking about the soccer match, about his shift, about the movie I lent him. The sun is on its way and I am restless.

  We sneak out of the dawn and into his parents’ apartment. The kitchen light displaces darkness, and from the hallway rolls his mother’s snoring. Mesut goes to rinse the grit out of his hair so I sit at the table, take out my test-prep book and start working on the mathematics practice problems. Unable to focus, I pick at the seams of the plastic table cover decorated in daisies, coming undone. Mesut’s mother keeps in a small white vase on the table a purple orchid—plastic stem, paper petals. I tap my pencil on the book, I flip the pages back and forth. I watch the way the windows grow full of light.

  Mesut shoves my book off the table, replacing it with a plate of pasta his mother cooks up each night. “Swallow a big gulp before saying a big word.”

  I pick the book back up and set it next to the pasta. Mesut’s a year older than me. He dropped out of high school and has been working the mine for the last year.

  “Win this race first, İzzet, then you can worry about entrance exams.”

  “I need both,” I say. I tell him they don’t give scholarships to idiots, no matter how fast they swim. My father can’t afford university, not on his pension. I’m jittering my leg like I do every morning, waiting for the water. Everyone in the village moves in smooth, simple motions, their muscles spent from hours underground.

  Mesut sits next to me. His father has already left for the mine. From the bedroom, tremble snores growing louder, a testament to sound slumber. Mesut used to work the night shift with his father, but when one night someone ran off with a neighbor’s bicycle, Mesut’s mother cried worries of thieves and rapists. Now Mesut’s father works by day to spend his evenings at home with his wife. Mesut tells me all their time together strains their marriage.

  Mesut crumbles feta cheese over my pasta and gets a plate for himself, and this is what we do each morning: fork cold pasta into our mouths like we’re furnaces.

  Mesut’s mother sleepwalks through the kitchen and into the TV room. She watches the local weather reports until after we leave, until she wakes up, then she cleans away the dishes, the evidence of us, and goes to cook more pasta.

  I clean my first plate and pile up another. We finish our meal in the silence of smacking lips and digestion, then I fill a plastic container with another helping, and go change into my swimsuit, and pack my book back into my grocery bag with my goggles and towel, and I follow Mesut to the shed out back. The sun is up and already heavy in the sky so that it droops, long like an oval.

  We climb into his dad’s car, a relic from the sixties, and Mesut drives us out of the terraced village on narrow roads. I imagine calculating the village’s slopes with my graphing calculator under the great expanse of mountain-fringed sky.

  “Take the 240,” I say.

  “At this hour it will be slow.”

  For the last two months we’ve said this each morning, and I enjoy Mesut’s route through Darkale, the winding descent. The way we travel is a delay of the sun, a delay of my eager nerves, my return to easy strokes. We take roads that cleave the mountains, roads from which we can count all the tumbledown shacks and hovels of the province falling over slowly, roads covered in shade, roads with streetlamps still on though the sky is lightly blue. Retaining walls squeeze our path, and we skirt around rocks fallen into the road and piles of trash people leave but no one picks up. And then before us opens the mountain range for just a moment, revealing Soma like a secret, tucked into the crevices, atop flat peaks, surrounded by gravel summits, potholed roads, telephone wires, and black trees that dance in the breeze. Far away are rain clouds. Half-finished houses in gradients, their terra-cotta roofs like steps into the air. TV dishes pimple up along the skyline. The minarets are ablaze with muezzins. The streets are built over top a number of buildings; all are curved like funnels flowing down the slopes through paths of least resistance. At a stoplight a man shoves bottles of water through my open window. Mesut runs the light.

  “You could have ripped off his arm,” I say.

  “He’s got two.”

  We turn east and head toward the thermal power plant. We curve around the field where squat cooling towers pop up in neat rows of six—olive trees growing in the shade of their steam clouds. Smoke drifts from the three slender chimney stacks attached to the plant like beautiful cigarettes. The plant fires the poor lignite dug out from the mine by Mesut and his father and every other able-bodied man in our village. The furnaces produce kilos of bottom ash every minute. The ash is mixed with water in a pump and sluiced away from the plant in eleven oversized pipes. We turn at the end of the olive grove and follow the pipes north out of the factory grounds. To our left are the eleven outgoing pipes, to our right are seven incoming pipes. Beyond these are the vineyards and groves and power lines and rusted-out cars and derelict houses
, and farther still are the shops and restaurants and apartments and mosques of Soma, where no one is yet on the street—all still ambling through their dreams. I practice my breathing exercises.

  Mesut slows—ahead there is a dog with valleys in the space between its ribs, with gray hair around its snout, with shoulders sliding up and down like oil derricks as it crosses our path. A car behind us honks, reminding Mesut we aren’t alone, and he gooses it so we speed down the track of road that runs away from the plant in a beautiful line, the kind of line that’s in my textbooks, the desire line, the most efficient line you ever saw, and I swear I can hear the water coursing through the pipes.

  These pipes empty into a man-made dam to the north of town. Its bottom is covered in cement to keep toxins from leaking into water supplies. The ash separates from the water and settles along the cement like multicolored oils in chemistry. The empty water is filtered from the top and pumped back to the plant. We park at the road that runs along the side of the reservoir. Because of the ash and cement, the water is bright, turquoise, as beautiful as the Ottoman palaces of Istanbul, covered in electric-blue arabesques.

  A wall separates spare water from the filtration area where the slurry settles. I stretch, shaking my limbs to get the blood flowing. Mesut sets up a lawn chair in the gravel and begins drinking. I dive into the cold water. I backstroke toward the middle of the pond, keeping my eyes on clouds slicing the blue same as me.

  “Keep your eyes closed, İzzet.”

  I close them. Open-water swimming depends on bearings, straight lines, knowing your way without looking. Mesut shouts when I begin to drift and says nothing when my vector is straight for the telephone pole on the opposite bank.

  Other days I have practiced taking off while treading because Mesut says they might not provide a diving platform. He wouldn’t know, but it is good practice.

  Before that, I practiced turns. He had me swim around buoys he set up while he watched my strokes underwater.

  Before that I practiced swimming in groups. It’s hard to navigate a race with hundreds of people cutting through the same small stretch of water. We’d made planks with short rudders and rope tails. Mesut rigged them all up into a network. I positioned myself amid the wooden swimmer-substitutes, and swam toward Mesut while he pulled the flock of planks along, keeping pace with me.

  Now there is only sighting left to work on. I keep conditioning, but I’m in good shape for the race. Mesut drinks his beers and falls asleep while I incorporate sighting into the rhythm of my strokes. When Mesut wakes, he takes notes of my timing, my pace.

  Nothing is jittery in my mind, my nerves are cooled by the water. Mesut shouts to me, his voice crashing with the crest of the water in my ear. I can’t hear what he says. I reach the dividing wall and push back from it. I backstroke for the beach, for the car. In the middle of the reservoir I look directly up, the blue of the sky converging with the blue of the water in my peripheries so that I am a point in an ineffable expanse of buoyancy. Here I have no thoughts. My limbs negotiate with the weight of the water through which I become weightless. I am deprived of sensation save for the color of the sky. I am miles in the air. My heart steadies. My strokes slow. The beach is close though I can’t feel it.

  We pack everything into the car. My muscle cords twitch and scream beneath my skin. Mesut takes the 240 back to town because he knows I like to watch the turbines while I cool down, because I like to watch the great turns. We don’t park, but he drives slowly. There’s not enough of a breeze today; the turbines hang in disuse over the clefts of hills and fields.

  “I’m going to be up there,” I say.

  Mesut gives a tired laugh. He’s been awake, he’s been working, he’s been drinking.

  “Right there.” I point. “I’m going to straddle the rotors.”

  “What’s the difference, eh?”

  Instead of descending into the dark, I will climb into the bright day, into the sunlight.

  “The same thing is done up there,” Mesut says, “the gathering of electricity. So you are in the air, or in the ocean, or underground, whatever. I want to be flatly on the ground. Safe. I wouldn’t mind taking in a little sun across a bed of grass, or under olive trees.”

  He drops me off at my house, then he’s off to bed. There are friends of his who go straight to bed after work, and most of the year they never see the sunlight.

  At home, my parents watch television. In the kitchen, I study some more. My mom comes in. She cuts up a watermelon and leaves a plate of slices next to me. She sits across from me, watching the flicks of my pencil.

  “I’m so proud of you, you know,” she says.

  What do I say to that? I could tell her it’s not a sure thing. I could tell her I haven’t even taken the exams, I haven’t even swum the race, but what are these things to her? She looks at me, marble eyes heavy with pride.

  “Is that watermelon for everyone?” my dad asks.

  She takes it out to the living room, and they call for me to join them. On-screen is an American show. The cigarettes and cans of beer are blurred out so every few seconds the characters take swigs from pixelated rectangles.

  “Have they asked you what you want to study?” my mom asks.

  “I haven’t turned in my application yet.”

  “You ought to get into architecture,” she says.

  “He’s going to be like his father,” my dad says, rosy glints of melon pooling in the corners of his mouth. He does this more and more, says I’m going to be a replica of him—like I haven’t been training, like I haven’t been studying, like the turbines are the same as the mine.

  “I will be an engineer,” I say.

  “Do they work inside?” my mom asks.

  “Four years of school just so you can wear a bigger hardhat? If you’re going to fantasize don’t do it on a budget,” my dad says as he stuffs another slice of watermelon in his mouth.

  They eat watermelon and laugh at the television. My mom goes to the kitchen to start tea. Without looking from the television screen, my dad says: “What’s that worth?”

  He means What can I do with it? He means How far will that take me from the mine? He means he wants the distance in kilometers that I will escape into.

  “I could be a technician for those windmills,” I say. “Mom would like having me around as you two grow old.”

  “Who’s planning on growing old?” My dad laughs a little. “Who wants to keep you here?”

  “They make a living. It isn’t the mine.”

  We sit like that until my mom brings out the copper tray of tulip glasses. We stir in cubes of sugar, the tinkle of teaspoons tickling our silence. The television is turned way down. My mom falls asleep. The engineers make six times what I would make in the mine. They live twice as long, I hear. They have suntans.

  “It isn’t the mine,” my dad says, trying the words out for himself.

  “There’s a program that I could do. It specializes in…” But I don’t know what to say. It’s too late, and I can see that. My dad doesn’t care about the windmills. We sit close to each other on the couch, the rough fabric scratching our undersides like bark. I’m jittering my leg. I’m feeling my body sink into the cushion. I want my dad to ask me about my swimming, how training’s going, what Mesut thinks of my speed.

  “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” he whispers. “It is the mine.”

  There are cookies and a bowl of nuts on the tray. I swallow the tea as easy as sand, and my throat feels swollen. My dad keeps eating, plucking almonds from the bowl with sticky-glazed fingers from the watermelon. I think about going for a walk to get out of the house, but there’s nothing to see in this town except retired men huddled around small tables at street corners, playing cards and tavla, drinking tea and coffee, their skin drooping like time because of their underground lives. There’s nothing
to see in this town but quiet women, running errands, beating dust from rugs, clipping cotton sheets to clotheslines, dripping soot from their hair at the bounce of each step. There’s nothing to see in this town but coal-stained children like feral dogs through the streets, their lungs sucking all the ash from the air.

  I go to my room instead. I try reading but I don’t like the book and I’m a slow reader. Everyone I know is asleep or in the mine, like I’m a fugitive, like I’m the only unclipped bird in an aviary. I go to bed as well, with the sun in my window. When I wake, the sky is dark, the clouds cover the moon. I take my coffee on the balcony and shout to the miners until Mesut returns and drives me to the reservoir. We do this for two more weeks. I study when I’m not training, though I am exhausted and unable to focus. I think of every face in town. I book a small room at a hostel near the Dardanelles. Mesut gets the day off so that he can drive me to the race. The website claims over six hundred registered entrants.

  The morning of the race is here, and splitting across the sky comes a crash you can hear in your bones. It’s flat, monosyllabic. The ground doesn’t falter, the air is clear and blue, the grass shudders only in the breeze. If you could listen to the scrape of tectonic plates, if for just a flash of time there was the great flow of mantle and crust caught in your ear, it wouldn’t sound like this. It’s not at all like an earthquake. We know those here; you grow up knowing them. We know this too: the silence, the absence of aftershocks, the snap of energy is a single, released moment, the space between heartbeats. It can suffocate you if you’re not careful—the mine.

  I’ve never seen the streets so full as they are now, though no one hurries. They compact themselves into one another, press close, hunch. More people from more homes. I break from my mom’s grasp and run down to the street, her shouts chasing after me. Still we all pack tighter, our closeness brushing black dust from our skin. The crowd shuffles now, searching with stamping feet for the path to the mine. People talk in hushed voices, careful that their words are not picked up by the wind. The mine, everyone whispers, the mine. No one runs, no one shoves, no one steps on toes or heels. We walk deliberately down the curved path to the mine, our voices extinguishing as we near the mouth of the shaft. For a long time, long enough that clouds have moved to cover us, we stand there watching from afar a dozen or so men scraping at the pile of earth obstructing the main shaft—scraping with their hardhats like shovels.