The Best American Short Stories 2017 Page 4

  The effect was instantaneous: the dog dropped my arm and let out a yelp, backing off to hover at the edge of the lawn and eye me warily, as if now, all at once, the rules of the game had changed. In the next moment, just as I realized that I was, in fact, bleeding, a voice cried out behind me, “Hey, I saw that!”

  A girl was striding across the lawn toward me, a preternaturally tall girl whom I at first took to be a teenager but who was actually a child of eleven or twelve. She marched directly up to me, glaring, and said, “You hit my dog.”

  I was in no mood. “I’m bleeding,” I said, holding out my arm in evidence. “You see this? Your dog bit me. You ought to keep him chained up.”

  “That’s not true—Ruby would never bite anybody. She was just . . . playing, is all.”

  I wasn’t about to debate her. This was my property, my arm, and that lump of flesh lying there bleeding into the grass was Allison’s dead pet. I pointed to it.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice dropping. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t . . . Is it yours?”

  “My neighbor’s.” I gestured to the house just visible over the hedge. “She’s going to be devastated. This pig”—I wanted to call it by name, personalize it, but couldn’t for the life of me summon up its name—“is all she has. And it wasn’t cheap, either.” I glanced at the dog, its pinkish gaze and incarnadine flanks. “As I’m sure you can appreciate.”

  The girl, who stood three or four inches taller than me and whose own eyes were an almost iridescent shade of violet that didn’t exist in nature, or at least hadn’t until recently, gave me an unflinching look. “Maybe she doesn’t have to know.”

  “What do you mean she doesn’t have to know? The thing’s dead—look at it.”

  “Maybe it was run over by a car.”

  “You want me to lie to her?”

  The girl shrugged. “I already said I’m sorry. Ruby got out the front gate when my mother went to work, and I came right after her. You saw me—”

  “What about this?” I demanded, holding up my arm, which wasn’t so much punctured as abraded, since most of the new breeds had had their canines and carnassials genetically modified to prevent any real damage in situations like this. “It has its shots, right?”

  “She’s a Cherry Pit,” the girl said, giving me a look of disgust. “Germline immunity comes with the package. I mean, everybody knows that.”

  It was a Tuesday and I was working from home, as I did every Tuesday and Thursday. I worked in IT, like practically everybody else on the planet, and I found I actually got more done at home than when I went into the office. My coworkers were a trial, what with their moods, opinions, facial tics, and all the rest. Not that I didn’t like them—it was just that they always seemed to manage to get in the way at crunch time. Or maybe I didn’t like them—maybe that was it. At any rate, after the little contretemps with the girl and her dog, I went back in the house, smeared an antibiotic ointment on my forearm, took my tea and a handful of protein wafers to my desk, and sat down at the computer. If I gave the dead pig a thought, it was only in relation to Allison, who’d want to see the corpse, I supposed, which brought up the question of what to do with it—let it lie where it was or stuff it in a trash bag and refrigerate it till she got home from the office? I thought of calling my wife—Connie was regional manager of Bank U.S.A., by necessity a master of interpersonal relations, and she would know what to do—but in the end I did nothing.

  It was past three by the time I thought to take a lunch break, and, because it was such a fine day, I took my sandwich and a glass of iced tea out onto the front porch. By this juncture, I’d forgotten all about the pig, the dog, and the grief that was brewing for Allison, but as soon as I stepped out the door it all came back to me: the trees were alive with crowparrots variously screeching, cawing, and chattering among themselves, and they were there for a very specific reason. (I don’t know if you have crowparrots in your neighborhood yet, but, believe me, they’re coming. They were the inspiration of one of the molecular embryologists at the university here, who thought that inserting genes from the common crow into the invasive parrot population would put an end to the parrots’ raids on our orchards and vineyards, by giving them a taste for garbage and carrion instead of fruit on the vine. The only problem was the noise factor—something in the mix seemed to have redoubled not only the volume but the fury of the birds’ calls, so that you needed earplugs if you wanted to enjoy pretty much any outdoor activity.)

  Which was the case now. The birds were everywhere, cursing fluidly (“Bad bird! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”) and flapping their spangled wings in one another’s faces. Alarmed, I came down off the porch and for the second time that day scrambled across the lawn to the flower bed, where a scrum of birds had settled on the remains of Allison’s pet. I flailed my arms, and they lifted off reluctantly into the sky, screeching, “Turd-bird!” and the fractured call that awakened me practically every morning: “Cock-k-k-k-sucker!” As for the pig (which I should have dragged into the garage, I realized that now), its eyes were gone and its faintly bluish hide was striped with bright-red gashes. Truthfully? I didn’t want to touch the thing. It was filthy. The birds were filthy. Who knew what zoonoses they were carrying? So I was just standing there, in a quandary, when Allison’s car pulled into the driveway next door.

  Allison was in her early thirties, with a top-heavy figure and a barely tamed kink of ginger hair she kept wrapped up in various scarves, which gave her an exotic look, as if she were displaced here in the suburbs. She was sad-faced and sweet, the victim of one catastrophic relationship after another, and I couldn’t help feeling protective toward her, a single woman alone in the big house her mother had left her when she died. So when she came across the lawn, already tearing up, I felt I’d somehow let her down and, before I could think, I stripped off my shirt and draped it over the corpse.

  “Is that her?” she asked, looking down at the hastily covered bundle at my feet. “No,” she said, “don’t tell me,” and then her eyes jumped to mine and she was repeating my name, “Roy, Roy, Roy,” as if wringing it in her throat. “Fuck you!” the crowparrots cried from the trees. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” In the next moment Allison flung herself into my arms, clutching me to her so desperately I could hardly breathe.

  “I don’t want to see,” she said in a small voice, each syllable a hot puff of breath on the bare skin of my chest. I could smell her hair, the shampoo she used, the taint of sweat under her arms. “The poor thing,” she murmured, and lifted her face so I could see the tears blurring her eyes. “I loved her, Roy. I really loved her.”

  This called up a scene from the past, a dinner party at Allison’s—Connie and me, another couple, and Allison and her last inamorato, a big-headed boor who worked for Animal Control, incinerating strays and transgenic misfits. Allison had kept the pig in her lap throughout the meal, feeding it from her plate, and afterward, while we sat around the living room cradling brandies and Bénédictine, she propped the thing up at the piano, where it picked out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with its modified hooves.

  “It was a dog, right? That’s what”—and here she had to break off a moment to gather herself. “That’s what Terry Wolfson said when she called me at work—”

  I was going to offer up some platitude about how the animal hadn’t suffered, though for all I knew the dog had gummed it relentlessly, the way it had gummed my arm, when a voice called “Hello?” from the street behind us and we broke awkwardly apart. Coming up the walk was the tall girl, tottering on a pair of platform heels, and she had the dog with her, this time on a leash. I felt a stab of annoyance—hadn’t she caused enough trouble already?—and embarrassment, too. It wasn’t like me to go shirtless in public—or to be caught in a full-body embrace with my unmarried next-door neighbor, either, for that matter.

  If the girl could read my face, she gave no indication of it. She came right up to us, the dog trotting along docilely at her side. Her violet gaze swept from me to the lump on
the ground beneath the bloodied T-shirt and finally to Allison. “Je suis désolée, madame,” she said. “Pardonnez-moi. Mon chien ne savait pas ce qu’il faisait—il est un bon chien, vraiment.”

  This girl, this child, loomed over us, her features animated. She was wearing eyeliner, lipstick, and blush, as if she were ten years older and on her way to a nightclub, and her hair—blond, with a natural curl—spread like a tent over her shoulders and dangled all the way down to the small of her back. “What are you saying?” I demanded. “And why are you speaking French?”

  “Because I can. My IQ is 162 and I can run the hundred meters in 9.58 seconds.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, exchanging a look with Allison. “Terrific. Really. But what are you doing here, what do you want?”

  “Your mother!” the birds cried. “Up yours!”

  The girl shifted from one foot to the other, suddenly looking awkward, like the child she was. “I just wanted to please, please beg you not to report Ruby to Animal Control, because my father says they’ll come and put her down. She’s a good dog, she really is, and she never did anything like this before. It was just a—”

  “Freak occurrence?” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “An anomaly. An accident.”

  Allison’s jaw tightened. The dog looked tranquilly up at us out of its pink eyes, as if none of this were its concern. A bugless breeze rustled the trees along the street. “And what am I supposed to say?” Allison put in. “How am I supposed to feel? What do you want, forgiveness?” She gave the girl a fierce look. “You love your dog?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Well, I love—loved—Shushawna, too.” She choked up. “More than anything in the world.”

  We all took a minute to gaze down on the carcass, and then the girl lifted her eyes. “My father says we’ll pay all damages. Here,” she said, digging into her purse and producing a pair of business cards, one of which she handed to me and the other to Allison. “Any medical treatment you may need, we’ll take care of, one hundred per cent,” she assured me, eyeing my arm doubtfully before turning to Allison. “And replace your pet, too, if you want, madame. It was a micropig, right, from Recombicorp?”

  It was a painful moment. I could feel for Allison and for the girl, too, though Connie and I didn’t have any pets, not even one of the new hypoallergenic breeds. There was a larger sadness at play here, the sadness of attachment and loss and the way the world wreaks its changes whether we’re ready for them or not. We would have got through the moment, I think, coming to some sort of understanding—Allison wasn’t vindictive, and I wasn’t about to raise a fuss—but that same breeze swept across the lawn to flip back the edge of the T-shirt and expose the eyeless head of the pig, and that was all it took. Allison let out a gasp, and the dog—that crimson freak—jerked the leash out of the girl’s hand and went right for it.

  When Connie came home, I was in the kitchen mixing a drink. The front door slammed. (Connie was always in a hurry, no wasted motion, and though I’d asked her a hundred times not to slam the door she was constitutionally incapable of taking the extra two seconds to ease it shut.) An instant later, her briefcase slapped down on the hallway table with the force of a thunderclap, her heels drilled the parquet floor—tat-tat-tat-tat—and then she was there in the kitchen, saying, “Make me one, too, would you, honey? Or no: wine. Do we have any wine?”

  I didn’t ask her how her day had gone—all her days were the same, pedal to the metal, one situation after another, all of which she dealt with like a five-star general driving the enemy into the sea. I didn’t give her a hug or blow her a kiss, either. We weren’t that sort of couple—to her mind (and mine, too, to be honest), it would have been just more wasted motion. Wordlessly, I poured her a glass of the Sancerre she liked and handed it to her.

  “Allison’s pet pig was killed today,” I said. “Right out on our front lawn. By one of those transgenic pit bulls, one of the crimson ones they’re always pushing on TV?”

  Her eyebrows lifted. She swirled the wine in her glass, took a sip.

  “And I got bit,” I added, holding up my arm, where a deep-purplish bruise had wrapped itself around the skin just below the elbow.

  What she said next didn’t follow, but then we often talked in non sequiturs, she conducting a kind of call-and-response conversation in her head and I in mine, the responses never quite matching up. She didn’t comment on my injury or the dog or Allison or the turmoil I’d gone through. She just set her glass down on the counter, patted her lips where the wine had moistened them, and said, “I want a baby.”

  I suppose I should back up here a moment to give you an idea of where this was coming from. We’d been married twelve years now, and we’d agreed that at some point we’d like to start a family, but we kept putting it off for one reason or another—our careers, finances, fear of the way a child would impact our lifestyle, the usual kind of thing. But with a twist. What sort of child—that was the question. Previous generations had only to fret over whether the expectant mother would bear a boy or a girl or if the child would inherit Aunt Bethany’s nose or Uncle Yuri’s unibrow, but that wasn’t the case anymore, not since CRISPR gene-editing technology had hit the ground running twenty years back. Now not only could you choose the sex of the child at conception; you could choose its other features, too, as if having a child were like going to the car dealership and picking which options to add onto the basic model. The sole function of sex these days was recreational; babies were conceived in the laboratory. That was the way it was and that was the way it would be, until, as a species, we evolved into something else. The result was a nation—a world—of children like the tall girl with the bright-red dog.

  To my way of thinking, this was intrusive and unnatural, but to Connie’s it was a no-brainer. “Are you out of your mind?” she’d say. “You really want your kid—our kid—to be the bonehead of the class? Or what, take career training, cosmetology, auto mechanics, for Christ’s sake?”

  Now, tipping back her glass and downing the wine in a single belligerent gulp, she announced, “I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m putting my foot down. I’ve made an appointment at GenLab for ten a.m. Thursday. Either you come with me”—she was glaring at me now—“or I swear I’m going to go out and get a sperm donor.”

  Nobody likes an ultimatum. Especially when you’re talking about a major life-changing event, the kind of thing both people involved have to enter into in absolute harmony. It didn’t go well. She thought she could bully me as if I were one of her underlings at work; I thought she couldn’t. She thought she’d had the final word on the subject; I thought different. I said some things I wound up regretting later, snatched up my drink, and slammed through the kitchen door and out into the backyard, where for once no birds were cursing from the trees and even the bees seemed muted as they went about their business. If it weren’t for that silence, I never would have heard the soft heartsick keening of Allison working through the stations of her grief. The sound was low and intermittent, a stunted release of air followed by a sodden gargling that might have been the wheeze and rattle of the sprinklers starting up, and it took me a minute to realize what it was. In the instant, I forgot all about what had just transpired in my own kitchen and thought of Allison, struck all over again by the intensity of her emotion.

  We’d managed to get the dog off the carcass, all three of us shouting at once while the girl grabbed for the leash and I delivered two or three sharp kicks to the animal’s hindquarters, but Allison’s dead pig was none the better for it. The girl, red-faced and embarrassed despite her IQ and whatever other attributes she might have possessed, slouched across the lawn and down the street, the dog mincing beside her, while I offered to do the only sensible thing and bury what was left of the remains. I dug a hole out back of Allison’s potting shed, Allison read a passage I vaguely remembered from school (“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”), I held her in my arms
for the second time that day, then filled the hole and went home to make my drink and have Connie slam the front door and lay her demands on me.

  Now, as if I were being tugged on invisible wires, I moved toward the low hedge that separated our properties and stepped across it. Allison was hunched over the picnic table on her patio. She was still dressed in the taupe blouse and black skirt she’d worn to work, and she had her head down, her scarf bunched under one cheek, and that got to me in a way I can’t explain, so that before I knew what I was doing I’d fallen down a long dark tunnel and found myself consoling her in a way that seemed—how can I put this?—so very natural at the time.

  It was dark when I got home. Connie was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV with the sound muted. “Hi,” I said, feeling sheepish, feeling guilty (I’d never strayed before and didn’t know why I’d done it now, except that I’d been so furious with my wife and so strangely moved by Allison in her grief, though I know that’s no excuse), but trying, like all amateurs, to act as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Connie looked up. I couldn’t read her face, but I thought, at least by the flickering light of the TV, that she looked softer, contrite even, as if she’d reconsidered her position, or at least the way she’d laid it on me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I was upset, okay? I just went for a walk. To clear my head.”

  She had nothing to say to this.

  “You eat yet?” I asked, to change the subject.

  She shook her head.

  “Me, either,” I said, feeling the weight lift, as if ritual could get us through this. “You want to go out?”

  “No, I don’t want to go out,” she said. “I want a baby.”

  And what did I say, from the shallow grave of my guilt, which was no deeper than the layer of earth I’d flung over the shrunken and lacerated corpse of Allison’s pet? I said, “Okay, we’ll talk about it.”