Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Page 3

  Your brother said, “I like the red color.” He jumped next to you on the couch. “You look just like Johnny when he’s on fire in the cartoons.”

  The apartment smelled of greasy food, and it made you feel normal for a bit. On top of your mother’s notebook, you heard your father’s cell phone ring and you picked up.

  It was a man named Gary. He owned a house that your mother had cleaned since Carlos was born. He was a nice older gentleman in his seventies, and you knew that he was softer than your father.

  “Is this Lila? I recognize the voice,” he said.

  “Yes, this is Lila.”

  He told you that he received your father’s message earlier. “I am heartbroken. Truly,” he said to you. “Your mother had always been very kind to me and to my cats.” You heard him begin to cry.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Gary. We are doing okay. Please don’t cry.”

  “It’s just very heartbreaking, that’s all.”

  Your father asked who it was and you waved your hand at him. You walked to your bedroom to hear Gary better.

  “And how is your father and your little brother?” he continued.

  “They are all right, Mr. Gary.”

  “Golly. It breaks my heart,” he continued, “I want to help. I will take care of you and your brother and your father for the rest of my life. Help as much as I can. It’s the least that I can do . . .”

  You almost chuckled at his offer but you didn’t. You wanted to ask, “Why does it break your heart?” but instead you said goodbye and thank you to the old man.

  He said that he would be in touch with your father next week. You sat at the foot of your bed and thought how easy it was for that man to offer help, how easy it was for him to cry over the phone for someone who cleaned his house.

  In the kitchen, your father set up the table and everyone sat around ready to eat. Carlos was jumpy and talkative because there was company. Josie’s husband had multiple construction projects coming up in the next few weeks, and he invited your father to be a part of his small team. Your father was happy to accept. He joked that he’d been sleeping for a long time. This was a good time to work, you said to your father. You were very happy for him. You sat next to Carlos and cut up the meat on his plate. You chewed your greasy food with delight.

  “That was Gary on the phone,” you said to everyone around the table. “He was crying like a baby . . .”

  Josie looked at her husband and then at Rosalina with concern.

  “I couldn’t understand what else he was saying because he was crying! Like, really loudly on the phone. Like he’s lost everything.” You felt your face smiling. “He said something real funny. He said he wanted to take care of me, Carlos, and Pa for the rest of his life.” You looked at your father and your visitors. Your eyes were wide. “Isn’t that funny?”

  You began giggling at first and then you laughed deeper, fork and spoon in your hands. You laughed while nobody else did. When you stopped for a deep breath, you looked at your father and your visitors. Rosalina and everyone else were staring at their plates.

  Your father looked you straight in the eyes.

  “It would be funny if you heard it. It was just the way he sounded.” You turned to your side and looked at your little brother. He didn’t have a clue what you found so funny.

  6.

  It was a week before school started, and you were ready for it all to begin again. You sat on a bus heading home with a stack of notebooks, pencils, and blank paper in a plastic bag. Your dark roots were starting to grow back, and you cut the beet-red split ends when you needed to.

  The bus drove by your high school and you saw that the announcement billboard had not been updated yet. In orange pixels, the names of students who had graduated and been accepted by colleges last year entered the screen from right to left. The mothers and fathers of those students must be so proud, you thought, to see their long, bright, full names like that for all to see.

  The bus drove by MacArthur Park and you saw the men and women on the streets selling used items. You were glad that you didn’t have to do that for your mother’s clothes again after the first time. You pressed your face against the window and watched the women walking up and down the streets, hoping you would recognize someone.

  A few days after Rosalina, Josie, and her husband’s visit, your father told you, “Lila, I’ve given away your mother’s clothes and shoes.” He kissed you on the forehead. “I am sorry you had to take that on. It wasn’t yours to do.”

  He wept while looking straight at you, but you let him. There was a firmness and resolve on his face that you wanted to respect. You didn’t cry with him. You just stared at how big his teardrops were.

  You said to your father, “Oh. Thank you for doing that, I guess,” then went to your bedroom and felt hollow, just like the first few days after the car accident. But there was also a gradual cool all over your body, a soothing after a deep sting as you sat there for a couple of hours pretending to sleep.

  Your brother walked in through the bedroom door and sat by your feet.

  “Are you awake?” he asked, and you opened your eyes. He told you that Rosalina dropped by earlier that day with a bowl of food, and that she was nice, that she pinched his cheeks and it hurt a little because her fingers were so rough, and that she took the box with Ma’s clothes in it. “Even that shirt with the real nice smell,” he said.

  You stayed quiet, then asked your brother, “Did you try the food she brought? I bet she cooked it good.”

  You guessed that Rosalina sold or gave your mother’s clothes away. Rosalina never told you. Later you kept hoping you would find someone in your neighborhood or on the bus or in the streets or in the park who wore your mother’s clothes.

  YOU STEPPED OFF the bus and walked home. Your brother greeted you at the door and invited you to play. “How about I’ll be Johnny and you be Sue like the cartoons?”

  You told him maybe in a little while and that you were a little tired. You kissed your father on the forehead as he sat on the couch watching the evening news.

  In your bedroom, you organized your new school materials near your SAT prep books. You opened those books and found the newspaper article that reported the accident. It was funny, you remembered, how you just reread those parts about Ashley Smith, never reading the end of the article. Sorrow bent you in an odd way your Ma could never have prepared you for.

  So you read again from the beginning. The facts and the reportage. The “mother of two driving the silver vehicle.” The superlatives for Ashley Smith.

  Then you read the end where you and your brother were mentioned. “The condition of the woman’s two children was not immediately known,” the report said. You read that sentence again and again and again before putting the article back in your book.

  You agreed with a full heart.

  You found no cruelty in those final lines.

  Ani Cooney is a writer based in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of UCLA, where he studied literature and creative writing. A VONA/Voices alum, he is the recipient of a Manuel G. Flores Prize from the Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (PAWA). He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  David Kelly Lawrence’s story came to us on our online submissions system, and neither I nor my associate editor had ever heard his name before. We both read the story and loved it immediately; I believe my associate editor said, “This is my favorite thing we’ve accepted since I’ve been working here.” After I sent back the acceptance note and got David’s reply, we were both amazed to learn that it was not only his first accepted story, but also the first piece of short fiction he had ever sent out. It is always fun to encounter surprises like this. If I had been asked to judge from the level of literary skill alone, I would have said this was an accomplished writer with a number of publications to his credit. Yet the story also has a freshness and originality that can perhaps be attributed in part to his newness to the field of li
terary endeavor. In any case, it was quite unlike anything I had read before, either in that week’s batch or in the whole year of submissions.

  Wendy Lesser, Editor and Publisher

  The Threepenny Review

  THE OTHER CHILD

  David Kelly Lawrence

  I HAD ALREADY finished my studies when I found out about my father’s other child, the boy. I hadn’t known my father was dying, or that he had another family, though to say another seems strange—I had never thought of him and my mother and me as a family, nor had I ever heard anyone call us that, though I suppose that’s what we were. My father sent someone looking for me with a message to visit him at the hospital, and that’s where I met the boy and his mother; we shook hands and she tried to smile and to say polite things while I watched the three of them, looking at each of their faces in turn, starting with her, then the boy, who waited quietly at her side, and lastly my father in his bed, the blanket pulled up to his chin, his eyes wide and unblinking. I remember my glasses fogging again and again, and each time I took them off to clean them on my sweater the three people in front of me lost their distinction, blurred into the wallpaper and the bedspread.

  Later the woman called me, before the telephone stopped working, and she told me where she and the boy lived and when the funeral would be, though I imagine she knew I wouldn’t go. I waited a few weeks and then went to her house. It was cold; leaves were whipping about and gathering in wet clumps on the curb. She came to the door almost as soon as I knocked. That day I walked with the boy around the block, we stopped to look at the papers taped to lampposts and the posters pasted on the walls. How did they get the posters to stick? he wanted to know, and I wasn’t sure, so I told him they used spit, which I knew wasn’t true but also didn’t seem too far off. Afterwards his mother invited me in, and I said no, but I said it politely, and I thought as the door closed that she might be smiling, but really I wasn’t watching her, I was watching the boy, who was already hidden in the shadow of the hallway. I came back the next week, and then after that I came every day. I would pick the boy up from school and we would go to the park, where he counted the birds that gathered around the lake as I waited silently, watching, until he grew restless and we went to ride the swings. I didn’t know his age. He never cried, not that I noticed, though he did smile sometimes, towards the beginning, and then I would see that his teeth were changing, falling out and growing back.

  I still read then; I hadn’t stopped yet, which is fine. I am not ashamed to admit it. I am rarely embarrassed. I still had the books that my mother hadn’t taken with her when she left, small detective stories made of thin yellow paper that fit nicely into the front pockets of my coat, and I would take one or two with me each day to read on the bench in the park. The books never ran out, or perhaps I just read the same ones again and again. At the end, when the killer was revealed, I almost always found that I couldn’t remember the crime, or the victim—sometimes all I knew was the name of the detective, and this would make me laugh, and I would close my eyes and put my head back to see if I could feel the sun or the wind on my face.

  I looked up now and again from my book to watch the boy, who would be throwing rocks at the birds or walking in slow circles around the pond. When it was cold he crouched down and tucked his hands under his legs and stared at the dirt. I had a favorite bench; we sat there every day. It was one of the older ones with fading paint, near the pond, and most of the people who sat at the benches nearby were there because those were their favorites too. I never talked to those people, though sometimes we would nod at one another, each from our own bench, though mostly everyone left each other alone. The boy didn’t like the benches, and he never sat for long, perhaps because his feet couldn’t touch the ground, or maybe because the restlessness that would soon set us off walking was already beginning to stir in him. Sometimes people I didn’t recognize would stop and want to make small talk, and although I consider myself someone that most people like, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I put people at ease—not all people, of course, but who could say that?—I could never think of anything to say to these strangers and they would always leave soon after. I didn’t like the newer benches, with their fresh green paint, or the ones by the merry-go-rounds, where the couples would sit on each other’s lap and kiss. I would have liked to be in love, and I thought about it now and then. I wanted someone to think about when I finished my books and the boy was still playing, someone to occupy my mind so it wouldn’t be left open to any simple thought that might come strolling along. Several times we sat on the benches by the merry-go-rounds, and the boy would count the wooden horses and I would watch the couples, but afterwards I couldn’t sleep, my head ached, and we didn’t go back.

  When the boy’s mother became sick she tried to hide it, but I could tell. I don’t think the boy noticed that anything was wrong; even when she died he showed no change. He didn’t want to visit her in the hospital—he would walk slower and slower as we approached, hang his head as we stood by her bed watching her sleep, the machines humming and beeping around us, and then run out the door and into the street as fast as he could when it was time to leave—and after it was all done he seemed relieved that we no longer had to visit. There was a funeral service for her as well, someone told me she would be buried near my father, but the boy and I didn’t go. It was summer, there was no school, and I let him ride the swings for as long as he wanted, and when the other children lined up and complained I told their mothers that we had just come from a funeral and they left us alone. Afterwards we ate in my room, I cooked rice and sausage, and we drew with thick black markers on the wax paper that the meat came wrapped in. When it was time for bed I left the curtains open, turned out the lights, and lay awake, listening, but I didn’t hear anything. Everything seemed to be the same as it had been before, even if really it wasn’t, and soon we were both asleep.

  When the money our father left for us arrived each month I would take the boy to the market to buy fruit and we would talk. I didn’t have a very good idea about most things, but that was all right, the boy asked fewer and fewer questions, and it was clear that each day he expected less from me, from anyone. Sometimes we talked about what love might be, sitting on the low wall behind the vendors’ stalls, peeling fruit, and then we would talk about adventure, and he would tell me stories he had heard or made up, stories about men in boats who got lost, men in the jungle who got lost, men in the desert who walked slower and slower until they were standing still and their bodies dissolved into puddles of sweat, or tears. He must have been taught these stories in school, or heard them from his classmates; I never saw the boy with a book, never saw him read, which was just as well. After school we still went to the park each day, even when the weather turned cold again, when the rains settled in and we were the only ones at the lake, the only ones on the swings.

  When I noticed the boy growing I told him to make older friends and ask them for their old clothes, and he did, though I never saw him play with anyone else, or talk to the other children that sometimes crossed through the park. Once a week I would wash our clothes in the sink and then hang them out the window. The neighbor below had a large balcony, and our wet laundry dripped onto her table and potted plants. Once a shirt fell and landed on one of her chairs, and in the evening we heard her steps as she came up to our floor, but we didn’t answer when she knocked; we both stayed where we were and watched the door. I could see the boy’s breath in the coarse winter light, the pen poised in his hand. When the woman stopped knocking the boy went back to his drawing, a large maze carved out in thick black ink on the back of the sausage wrapper, which we tacked to the wall, along with the other ones, once he’d finished.

  When the summer came we spent less time in the park and more time walking around the city, out around the edges where the streetlights didn’t work and you could stand under the highways and touch the pillars that held up the cars and feel them vibrate. At first the boy would grow tired, and a
fter five or six hours of walking I would have to carry him on my back. With time, though, he became stronger, and when the leaves began to turn colors he could go until sundown without stopping, and I was the one who would become thirsty and begin to flag, though I would like to think I didn’t show it. Everyone we passed was a stranger; I never noticed the same face twice. School had begun, but the boy didn’t go back, and neither of us mentioned it. We talked instead about the concrete, which stretched farther than we could see, about the buildings that made up our horizon, and he described everything we looked at as we walked: the boarded-up stores that we passed, the cars that sat empty in rows and the ones that dragged themselves down the middle of the street, the difference between the color of the sidewalk—where it existed—and the road. I told him that the pillars holding up the highway were full of bones, that they had been filled by the president himself, but the boy didn’t ask who the president was, or whose bones they were, he just nodded and kept walking.

  Some nights we returned late, and I would sleep a deep and dreamless sleep while the boy sat on the floor and drew. Other nights he would continue walking and I would come back to the room alone, waking in the morning to find him seated in the chair, watching the reflection of the sunrise in the windows of the building across the courtyard. When people began to appear in those windows he would turn away, wait for me as I dressed, then put on his shoes, and we would leave. I asked him once where he slept on those nights, but he shook his head, and finally after a long silence he said—not turning around, a few steps ahead of me—that he slept as he walked, he crossed the city in his sleep. Like a man who navigates the rooms of his home in the dark, without reaching for the light, he said, and though I knew that the boy’s answer should unnerve me, that my skin should rise and shiver, the truth is I felt at ease, I was relieved, and I took a breath and asked him if he dreamt while he walked, too, but he was silent, and though I could only see the back of his head I knew that his eyes were shut, that he was awake but his eyes were closed tight as if he were sleeping, and I knew also, though he didn’t make a sound, that he was laughing.