Peter Orner - Esther Stories

Bernice watches the February sun retreat from the bay window that looks out upon the slope of the ravine and the skeletal winter trees. The new house so huge and still around her, she can’t help feeling like an intruder in its silence. And what kind of house is this if her mother doesn’t live upstairs?

The vision appears slowly in the gray doom of the enormous window. It’s a kitchen in Arkansas. A room she saw for less than an hour, so long ago now it happened to someone else, when she went to retrieve the papers, the photographs, the little furniture left to salvage. The sad black man who answered the door and didn’t move his head when she told him the news. The dirty kitchen walls and the chair by the soiled bed. The filth. The filth is what startled her the most, that her mother had let it all go—

In the window her mother, barefoot and in a loose house-dress, hovers over the bed. Her father is so shriveled under the blankets, his body is nothing more than a small lump. He’s wearing a hat, a brown derby, that swallows his head. Bernice can’t see his face. She watches her mother lean closer and sees everything. Her mother’s bare feet, the grease-smudged walls, the cloudy window above the stove with its crack, a yellow fissure in the upper right corner. The lump that is her father, that hat. Feels her father’s soft wheeze in the hollow of her mother’s throat. Tell me something, Louie, a lie, a bamboozle. Anything. Her mother waits.

The author wishes to thank the James Michener — Copernicus Society of America and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for a generous fellowship, as well as Rhoda Pierce, Rob Preskill, and Dantia MacDonald for immeasurable faith and support.

In 2013: Thanks to two legends of publishing, agent Ellen Levine and editor Pat Strachan, for, among so many other things, helping this book to see the light of day, again.

And to Ricardo Duranti, great Italian translator and dear friend. Il prossimo anno a Mompeo.

Peter Orner is the author of the acclaimed books Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Orner is also the editor of two books of oral history, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner was born in Chicago and now lives in San Francisco.