Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

She pulled the quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain, because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”

August was fairly certain that his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”

“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names, the world is just populated by spooks and monsters.”

“Giving something a name doesn’t change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”

“What about it?”

“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”

“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating a concept of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, owing to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will someday come to a grinding halt, because nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“Huh. Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”

She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and shush into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of the cards and thinking, knowing that she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.

“How’s the job coming?”

“Not great.”

“Motivational issues?”

“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”

Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split into two distinct pieces. There was the part where Skyler was alive, where his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now there was this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that all of his life up to this very point existed only in the past, which meant that it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture, next to Skyler.

It was dark and cool in the barn, and August switched on the radio for company. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d risen early, before Lisa, even, and he hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. He could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.

The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms—tabbies, calicos, some night-black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spat, slightly awed, thinking about the night before and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish-white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked toward the rafters, where there was a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist, so that it dangled there like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.

He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked, the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.

Just think about it. All things considered, is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story .

August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. As he worked he pushed the cats into the conveyor trough, and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look, but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow, or the next day, his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.

It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and, as he pounded, the last one was already stiffening. Dawn struck as August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom, he stopped and listened. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, but he knew that his father and Lisa would be up soon. He leaned the board against the coat rack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.

August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He’d never got the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch, he wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move, but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.

DANIEL ALARCÓN is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio , which won the 2009 International Literature Prize. He was named one of The New Yorker ’s 20 Under 40 in 2010, and his new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles , will be published in October 2013.

• I’ve spent the last seven or so years working on a novel, so most every story I’ve published in that time began the same way: it was meant to be part of the bigger book, but somehow outgrew its confines.

I think of these as sketches for the novel, and in the case of “The Provincials,” there’s quite a lot of overlap: this piece and the novel share a protagonist (Nelson), an obsession (acting), a troubled relationship, a father, an absent brother, a dreary coastal town. When the play began I knew it wouldn’t be part of the book, but I wanted to follow the story and see where it went.