PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Read online

  It was an hour until closing at the Treehouse and it was packed. I ordered a drink and went to the dance floor. Maybe fifteen minutes later, Rickey and I spied each other and waved, but I didn’t stop dancing in the patch of empty space I’d claimed near the girls’ restroom. I used a straw to sip my white Russian. The sweetness burned my throat. Rickey was talking to this bro from poli sci, the one she had called an asshole after his presentation on John Locke. I wondered where Ricki-baby was.

  I ignored the smell of vomit and rum punch. I danced. My landlocked body moved as loose as a forty-peso gypsy scarf blowing in the breeze next to a stall of hanging meat shanks. That night, my body was on vacation. Albeit a kind of crappy one, a staycation.

  The lights came on. The jarring silence drove everybody into the night. That’s when I saw her again. Rickey was kissing that bro.

  All around me, tipsy students piled into their cars, kicking up gravel as they revved out of the Treehouse’s lot. Dust swirled under the yellow sodium lights, and Rickey was still kissing that bro.

  I stormed up to them, grabbed her hand, and pulled. But her mouth was stuck to his.

  “Rici, leave me alone. I’m fine,” she hissed.

  She pushed me. Not that hard, but enough. I walked away, but they started back up again. Kissing. And I reached down and flung handful after handful of gravel at them until a truck caught me in its beams.

  “Bitch!” some kids screamed out their window. And then I flung more pebbles at them and the truck’s tailgate as it pulled away.

  Just like that, Rickey and the bro were gone. The parking lot was empty. At least that’s what I remember. That and I got a C on my organic chemistry final the next morning. Bye-bye, college.

  We graduated.

  WE STOOD IN front of a sea of white chairs, the Rickies plus an older sister in taffeta dresses, gerbera daisies and baby’s breath in hand. We peered at Claire/Rickey standing two lengths ahead, swathed in silk the color of crème brûlée.

  The pastor said, “You may kiss the bride,” and as her now-husband, Jim, dipped and smooched her I wondered if he knew her name, her real name, the one she paid a hundred dollars for. It had only been three years.

  The couple exited and we, the remaining Rickies, squeezed hands, until one by one we peeled off to walk down the aisle.

  At the reception, the DJ announced the bridal party. His miked voice was too big for the room. My accompanying groomsman, some cousin, bolted to the bar. I didn’t know where Ricki or Ricky were so I made a dash for the table of cupcakes and then realized maybe there was some tradition we were supposed to wait for, even though it was cupcakes and not a wedding cake. I had no clue. It was my first wedding.

  The bro from that night at the Treehouse, who Claire dated for six months and now calls her BFE (“best friend ex”) and who must drive Jim nuts because he still twirls and lifts Claire whenever he greets her, approached. I acted fast, grabbing a lemon meringue cupcake and sticking half of it in my mouth. Somehow I still ended up on the dance floor with him. Alongside Claire and Jim, Ricky and Ricki, a cartwheeling ring bearer, and twirling flower girls, we grinned and shouted the lyrics. I hadn’t been with anyone since study abroad, and surrounded by friends I felt as brave as the choo choo in the story I read every first day of school to my students. I was the Little Rici Who Could.

  I invited the maybe-bro outside into the cool night air. I wanted to cover his neck with my new burnt sienna lipstick (worn flat now but still in my makeup bag) or at least I wanted to want to, and so I did. His hands ran over the horrible bridesmaid dress, and instead of lumpy and tacky and scared I felt amazing. Well, okay.

  When a few minutes later I had my hand on his zipper I realized I was moving with that same odd mix of painstaking carefulness and adrenaline as when I go to the gun range.

  I unzipped his slacks and worked my way under his boxers and he managed to push down the top half of my green poofy dress. I felt like a half-naked Tinker Bell. And I was overtaken with belly-shaking laughter. So shocked and thrilled I was at our pale silly fleshiness that I couldn’t stop laughing. His cock cradled in my hand was as light and sweet as a just-born kitten. It could be stamped out with my hand or underfoot, drowned in a milk bucket with no effort at all. Nothing ultra-scale or gunmetal gray about it.

  I can’t believe I just said that. Anyway, the maybe-not-so-much-a-bro smiled with me, though he probably didn’t know at what, and we kept going.

  We, no me, me and him, lay next to each other in the dewy grass. Naked-white and mouth-pink half-buds on gangly spring trees shone in the darkness, and I stared at them a bit longer before I went back to the party. Alone.

  A FEW WEEKS later Belle and I started getting together again. She was nearby at her graduate program. Back then she had Rainbow Brite hair, a cheery ombré that went down her back. It was fun to see her. I often went out with my teacher friends for happy hour, but it’s true what they say about women who teach elementary school: they are kind people who once dreamed of being dolphin trainers but are thrilled all the same to watch small children jump through hoops. Sometimes it was difficult to drink wine and pretend I did not want more. I had needed Belle more than I knew. When she talked about her classes I would think maybe I could go back to school too. We talked about ideas and books and sometimes even guys. It was so good to spend time with someone who had more than a three-minute attention span. One afternoon I noticed we’d both just said and then. I had been waiting so long for this that I’d forgotten I’d been waiting.

  And then we will. And then. And then. And then.

  That late afternoon, drinking $4 red wine at a coffee shop, was our moment in the sun. It had taken us longer than Ricki and Rickey, but we were okay. We had made ourselves anew and then anew again. We were Belle and Lisa. Maybe for a minute I even believed we were butterflies. And then we lived happily ever after.

  OF COURSE, THAT’S not what happened.

  The Rickies thing was dead. Embarrassing, even. No one ever mentioned it. Not cheerfully centered Beth and certainly not married Claire. Now Belle and I didn’t need it either. I put the stuff in the box and shoved it under my bed. I decided that, someday, if I had a daughter, I would explain that riding in cars (or rickshaws or scooters or buses) with boys isn’t something she can avoid, but that with me she can be as ugly as she wants. She’s never got to smile unless she feels like it. She can leave all her dark thoughts out in the open. I will take care of them.

  I told Belle all this a couple years later when I was finishing up my second year at vet school and she took the train (she avoided buses) from Boston to Philadelphia to visit for the weekend. She had short-cropped hair dyed gray-purple and was writing her dissertation. She was on and off meds for depression and anxiety. She told me that in ancient Egypt women dyed their hair dark with walnuts mixed with the blood of a black cat and that “everything comes back.”

  “Belle, did something happen?”

  “Everything comes back,” she repeated.

  I stole two of her Xanax. The world swam by for an hour. She told me she met a guy in the history department who was really cool until he wasn’t, not at all.

  “Report him,” I said. “Do it.”

  She shook her head no. “Then that’s all history will have to say about me.”

  We drank wine. I offered to sneak into this guy’s condo and chop off his toe, because that’s what has to be said when your friend tells you it happened again. She thanked me, and for a minute we wondered if we could do it. The breaking and entering. The threatening. The sawing through bone. But this isn’t a movie, and Belle and I figured we didn’t look good enough to get away with it if we got caught and ended up on the news.

  We ate at a fancy Greek place where they served us a plate of cheese that was on fire, and she stuck her hand into the flame.

  The waiter screamed. I dumped a glass of ice water on her.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” she said. “I thought it was fake or something.”

  But I�
��m pretty sure that wasn’t what she thought, that she wanted to burn herself alive for a second, as though she were nothing more than an effigy, a dummy of herself made for one purpose: to get rid of.

  That’s when I decided to show her the box under my bed. We added the receipt from the restaurant and a small piece of her blistered skin. She asked if she could send me her long rainbow ponytail, which was in her sock drawer.

  “It doesn’t feel right there,” she said.

  “What else have you been hanging on to?” I asked.

  I haven’t seen Belle since that night. We finished another bottle of wine. I took my Ambien. We went to sleep in my queen-size bed, holding on to each other, until one of us shifted, and then the other. Our backs to each other but our feet touching. When I woke up she was gone. Her phone on my bedside. Her backpack missing.

  Her parents filed a police report. No one expected it to do any good.

  It’s been months, and here’s the thing. I’ve started to wonder: if I left the box open next to my bed, if I ran my hands through it (the sweaters, the gravel, the letters, the dead skin and kitten claws), if I didn’t put the lid back on it and instead let everything out—what would happen?

  Could she find her way back to me?

  Is she down there, inside the box somehow, drinking whiskey with the Rickies? Are they keeping her there?

  I had told her the box keeps the Rickies alive, no matter what. And the Rickies keep us—Lisa, Belle, Beth, and Claire—alive. The Rickies live under my bed. They tame the ugly things. They are the ugly things. They are the bravest and worst pieces of us. They live in the dark on nothing but dust, so we don’t have to. I hope she believed me. She said so herself: everything comes back. But I’m still waiting.

  Sarah Curry earned an MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal. Her fiction has been a finalist for the Center for Women Writers International Literary Award in Prose and the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers. She is at work on a novel. She lives and works in Kentucky with her children and husband, a mathematician.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  We are always searching for formally innovative work by new writers, and Kelsey Peterson’s imaginary dialogue between the famous Pascal siblings serves as a distinctive example of such experimentation. A meditation on the origins of knowledge and spirituality, rendered in epistolary fragments brilliant as gemstones, the piece explores questions such as “Can God be found out?” and “What have we to fear when he tells us to fear nothing?” Beyond these existential themes, the siblings’ mutual curiosity reveals much about the historical personages themselves and the minute intimacies of their relationship. With minimal, deft, seemingly effortless strokes, Peterson’s piece is a remarkable achievement—not only a unique approach to narrative but as ambitious in conceit as it is successful in execution.

  Bradford Morrow, Editor

  Conjunctions

  THE UNSENT LETTERS OF BLAISE AND JACQUELINE PASCAL

  Kelsey Peterson

  Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician and Christian apologist born in 1623. He was very close with his younger sister, Jacqueline, born in 1625, a poet who became a nun. Both were considered prodigies.

  Brother,

  I saw a perfect circle today. The yellow disk at the center of an anemone bloomed early and whose white petals had curled back in the wind. I marveled at its humble perfection, springing forth from some superabundance of the unrelenting spring. I am curious if there is an equation for such a flower, the formula to project its arcs and angles, its radii and planes. But I think: what an excessive, joyful thing. Let us smell it and give glory to God.

  Jacqueline,

  Printed in the Gazette today there was a poem of some merit, and I wondered if you still write. To harness the imagination to your whimsy—it’s a dangerous, even dangerously useless gift, but you had have it.

  Port-Royal has seen a premature yield of flowers and herbs, some eager but underdeveloped fruit. I have been apprenticing in our little school, but Mère Angelique wants me acquainted with all of our abbey’s operations, especially before I take my vows.

  I don’t doubt that Mère Agnes has dissuaded you from practicing it. Instead, you must be mending socks. The clink clink of your needles.

  M. D’Andilly is a master gardener. He’s cultivated rows of espaliered pear trees, their branches tamed to grow flat and straight as boulevards. As he trains the young trees, tying their soft bendable limbs against the trellis, he pulls and lashes them quite firmly.

  I’m writing because it’s been six months since you left, and I thought—

  I am far gentler, afraid they will break, but he knows the stuff of which they’re made. It’s this intimacy, more than any of his knowledge, that tells me he’s a master gardener.

  Dear Jacqueline,

  I wait for your letters, in the pattern they once arrived. I wonder how often you must pray to God.

  From my room, I can sometimes smell the garden, if the wind is strong enough.

  As you rise, your voice still hoarse, your face puffy.

  In those moments, my happiness is greater than my own two arms spread wide.

  Noon, your mind cast ahead to the thoughts of the day, back to what was left undone. At dusk, languor setting in.

  Then I think: brother.

  I am curious.

  Are you still trying to measure the air?

  Do you ask Him questions?

  Are you still perfecting your triangle of chance?

  Does He answer you?

  Do you believe God can be found out?

  I don’t doubt that you believe He does.

  Blaise, my brother,

  I began to write you a letter, but I lost it. You might wonder how, with so few possessions to my name, I could lose something. The truth is I carried it with me into the swamp.

  Were we to speak as we once did, I would tell you about magic numbers.

  8

  1

  6

  3

  5

  7

  4

  9

  2

  Sometimes I can feel what you describe as the atmosphere in the swamp. I can feel how it is different from in town. It’s as though the air is holding in water, bloated, sleepily weighed down, slumping against the earth.

  In this array of numbers, every integer in every direction adds up to the same number. This number is called the magic constant. The magic constant here, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is fifteen.

  Somehow, I lost your letter in the swamp.

  This arithmetic originates with the Chinese, who believed magic squares mirror some essential balance in the universe. They are inherently satisfying to produce, as if you’ve discovered some mystery that is, while invisible in the world, the very stuff that undergirds it.

  I began to write again, a little ditty. I know you despise Poetry, but you don’t despise my poetry. When I see the words on the page and hear in my mind the well-ordered, lilting lines of verse, I feel a small dose of the pleasure I’m sure God felt when he fashioned us out of dust and saw that we were good.

  But I could not speak with you about this now.

  I remember when I appeared before the queen and the princess. I was so young then. You were banging against our pots and pans and scribbling your thoughts on acoustics. Meanwhile, I had my own thoughts on acoustics: the flow and cadence of words confined to lines, bursting from lines, refracting each other’s sounds as water does light.

  You would condemn me.

  I remember improvising verse for her highness, an exercise like embroidering in my head, a more satisfying reward in itself than the treats they gave us to follow, the tart lemonade and the shining cherries.

  Dear Sister,

  You won’t believe it, but I sold another one of my machines—the “Pascaline”! I know you found it, I believe your words were, “as cumbersome as a cow in labor,” but I believe the gentleman
, a tax collector in Paris, will find it perfectly functional.

  Brother,

  I am so hateful. I am—I hate myself. I write a poem and I am smitten, as though I were the one who held the waters in a span and with a look tamed the Leviathan. And then! I return again to the pen. Like a dog to its vomit.

  There are times when, as I draw close to numbers, as I learn to fine-tune and predict them, I find there is no knowing them. Numbers are immortal. They sprawl.

  Living water will never issue from my pen. All I set down will be dried up. And while I am agog in my poesy, I am oblivious to the one who makes the sun to shine and gives the flowers growth.

  I come close, as one comes close to a person, only to realize, on the physical level, I will never consider each hair and freckle on their body, and within those tissues and follicles, blood rushes and humors balance, and within those, atoms break into tinier iotas;

  But most hateful—I must let go this hate—is that I left.

  and then, on the spiritual level, there are thoughts and subthoughts I will never know; even the memories and ways of thinking that create those thoughts; even the structures of the mind and the hidden waxings of the soul that produce those impressions . . .

  I left without saying goodbye. In the morning, as though for a walk, before you had woken.