Featuring new stories by Dave Eggers, Becky Hagenston, Jane Kalu, Diane Oliver, and Kate Tighe-Pigott.
Dave Eggers, “Keeper of the Ornaments”
His doorbell rang. Cole looked at the time: 6:46 a.m.
He opened the door to find his new neighbor. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, streaked with pink. Her eyes were wide set, her face round and unwrinkled. If he had to guess, he would have said she had one Asian parent, one Caucasian. She was slightly taller and heavier than Cole, wearing a long ribbed sweaterdress and a string of white pearls. She was very young, probably no more than thirty, he thought. Then she smiled—an easy and toothy and tired smile. “I know this sounds strange,” she said, “but I think our cat is in your cabinet.”
—
It took less time than you’d think for someone to discover the invisible lady’s body. A dog walker tripped over her; his dog stopped to sniff and then took off into the street, where it was nearly hit by an SUV driven by a sorority girl coming home at six-forty in the morning, still drunk from the previous night. The dog walker was now calling the police, the dog was in the middle of the street barking, the sorority girl was hyperventilating, and the invisible lady’s husband was waking up to discover his wife was gone.
—
Everything could trigger death, was how I came to think of it. And maybe it was this knowledge that placed the burden of her sickness on me. So that I was the one who listened when the doctor said, Give her paracetamol when the fever starts, and put a cold cloth on her head, and if she’s too hot, make her bathe, and mind you, she must drink lots of water, and if it persists for more than six hours, take her to the emergency room, okay? During those hospital visits, my father was often preoccupied with praying the crisis away, and my mother, well, followed his lead.
Ije turned her back to me now and went back to cooing at the pigeons.
“You’re so stubborn,” I mumbled.
“Did I beg you to follow me around like a fly?” she said, then threw more seeds in the air.
—
He was not the usual kind of customer and that was what disturbed her. There was something about him at first, something she just did not like. Her feelings must have showed as she carefully snipped the dead leaves from a pot of mums. He wanted “something very special”—all right—she would give him so many choices, he’d be nervous before he made up his mind. She opened and closed display cases so rapidly that he barely had a chance to glance at one flower before another was brought to his attention.
All of her actions he took very calmly until finally he spoke. “With a chance to look at one, I might be able to decide.”
The words were spoken without emotion, and before she could control herself, she blushed. For a moment her dislike was intense; and even now she still could not be certain he was colored. As long as those gray eyes watched her, she was uncomfortable. And a lot of them had such straight hair. They were like human chameleons disguised as normal people. Finally he decided on a dozen red roses in an exquisite cut-glass vase.
—
At this moment, a man passing them on the street, maybe ten or twelve years older, appraises them — young family, springtime, daffodils — and, in that deadpan New York way, says, “It gets worse.”
Does it? After labor, Libby held her broken vagina together with two hands in order to go number two. She spent half her sister’s wedding in the bathroom milking herself into the sink because her pump was broken and she had mastitis in three places. There was one time she’d been crying in a produce shop to Mike — (on their “grocery shopping date”) — about what it was like to lose your identity, when he interrupted her to wipe poop off her face.
It’s not that she doesn’t believe the man, her harbinger of doom. Things must get worse. Dying will be terrible, eclipsed by your child dying. And accidents are the leading cause of death for children, which means she lives in a register of constant, high frequency panic that leaves her exhausted and alienated from Mike, who carries himself like he’s always on a boating holiday. The friction between them is compounded by lack of sleep.
But, she chuckles into her daffodils, it gets worse!
—
ASF Issue 79 Cover Art by Vaune Trachtman.
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