Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I followed Darren along the pier to its rickety end. I looked to the waters edge, the black sucking sand, beach studded with cypress knees and beyond-a stretch of water poised deceptively as earth. I thought that whatever happened to me then had nothing to do with the slow boy filling in for Deb at the market and everything to do with the times that my vanity had come uncaged in some tavern, dancing with some strange thing, maneuvering her around the dance floor by her hipbones while Fran scrubbed kitchen tiles and tried not to think of that person she did not want to acknowledge I was capable of up and becoming.

“Take your clothes off,” said Darren. I did so without question because I was gone-off on that flight that took me frequently and far back in time: Yeah, but I always came home alone, I was saying to Fran, I never slept with any of them, just a little lip, some here-and-there tongue. Never once betrayed us like you did with him. She did not get to argue the meaning of the word betrayal. I did all the talking, and it took all the energy I would have expended on worrying about what I was being asked to do: take off my clothes for a man dressed like he was about to sell me some insurance.

Darren's driver arrived toting a gym bag from which he pulled a tangle of rope, some handcuffs, and greasy lengths of chain. He uncoiled the rope, surveyed my nakedness with scorn.

“I don’t relish getting wet over his bony ass,” he said to Darren.

“It doesn’t appear to be up to you,” I said.

This made Darren smile. But the driver, once he had me in the water and pushed hard against the piling at the end of the pier, wrenched the cuffs tight and lashed the ropes.

Above us Darren had fired up a cigar to ward off mosquitoes, but the smoke didn’t appear to be working; I heard him swear and slap himself. The driver bound me tighter to the splintery black piling, which smelled of creosote and rotting shellfish. Sound water lapped black and empty just above my shoulders.

“Wait for me in the car,” Darren told the driver, and when he was gone, he said, “You know, you brung this on yourself, chief. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t asked us to have supper with you.”

“No, actually it was the lottery ticket,” I said.

“Either way, you taking some crazy chances.”

I thought that this was a good thing, and almost said so, but I realized just before I spoke that I still did not know who Darren was, or what he planned to do with me. My situation seemed far worse, on the one hand, than it had just hours before, when I had left for the store. Yet there was this other hand. I could not say what it was. Nor was I even sure I wanted to know. Would it cure me, and would being cured mean that I would learn to live my life without loving her, wanting her?

There was a silence, then a puff of smoke arrived from above, seething through the space between the slats, clouding about my head.

“So she fucked you over, whoever she is. And now you get to go around feeling righteous, starving yourself, and beating up on grocery-store clerks?”

I had an answer to this, but he didn’t leave enough space.

“You know something about love, chief?” he said through the smoke. “It makes you scared of every damn thing, you all the time worrying about whether she's going to come back from the store or was I good enough and does her daddy like me and on and on. And at the same time it makes you feel free. That's what it does when it's really cooking, right?”

I waited for a puff of cigar smoke, but there was nothing, only mosquitoes feasting on my cheekbones, my bound hands straining against the rope.

“You saying you didn’t feel nothing like that?”

“I did.” I do, I thought to say, but I didn’t want to give Darren any more ammunition than he could divine by looking at me. He was picking up a lot just looking, and it unnerved me, the way he recognized himself in me, the way he described to the letter the way it felt to love Fran. I did feel scared the whole time I was with her, and yet I felt as free as I’d ever felt. But maybe I was loving her all wrong. Maybe what Darren had described was not love but some kind of copycat ailment with the same symptoms.

“Hell, man, why would you want to feel that way?” Darren said. “Far better to be cooped up in your own head than having to go around scared all the time.”

“Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Me? I’m that boy you broke bad on's uncle. I came down expecting excitement, I guess. Find you banging your head on a car and I know this motherfucker needs to be put out of his misery.”

“That's what this is?”

“This is whatever you want it to be.”

“I don’t think my desire is being considered here,” I said. In answer there came a snort, then footsteps tapping away up the pier. I might have called out, but not to Darren or his driver. Fran. Voit. My trucker, oddly quiet now, as if he’d found some end to his suffering, seen through the loneliness and longing to some sweet levitation.

In time I realized the water was creeping up my neck. I thought of what I knew of tides: They were controlled by the moon, and the moon this night was a pasty scythe's blade floating above a line of loblollies, and seemed too sickly to perform such a feat.

Sometime in the night I began the story of How We Met, and it began at the beginning, and wound its way around facts as stock and familiar as the items I purchased weekly from the market, until the moon moved lower toward the water and a hazy light appeared in the sky.

Watching the sky, water lapping at my chin, I remembered hearing how they’d discovered that the earth was round: A boat had sailed out to the horizon, kept on moving, out of sight, over the earth's curve. Inching my way up the barnacled piling, I saw how they could get behind such an idea.

from The Hudson Review

WHEN HE was five, Mat Feltner, like every other five-year-old who had lived in Port William until then, was still wearing dresses. In his own thoughts he was not yet sure whether he would turn out to be a girl or a boy, though instinct by then had prompted him to take his place near the tail end of the procession of Port William boys. His nearest predecessors in that so far immortal straggle had already taught him the small art of smoking cigars, along with the corollary small art of chewing coffee beans to take the smoke smell off his breath. And so in a rudimentary way he was an outlaw, though he did not know it, for none of his grown-ups had yet thought to forbid him to smoke.

His outgrown dresses he saw worn daily by a pretty neighbor named Margaret Finley, who to him might as well have been another boy too little to be of interest, or maybe even a girl, though it hardly mattered-and though, because of a different instinct, she would begin to matter to him a great deal in a dozen years, and after that she would matter to him all his life.

The town of Port William consisted of two rows of casually maintained dwellings and other buildings scattered along a thoroughfare that nobody had ever dignified by calling it a street; in wet times it hardly deserved to be called a road. Between the town's two ends the road was unevenly rocked but otherwise had not much distinguished itself from the buffalo trace it once had been. At one end of the town was the school, at the other the graveyard. In the center there were several stores, two saloons, a church, a bank, a hotel, and a blacksmith shop. The town was the product of its own becoming which, if not accidental exactly, had also been unplanned. It had no formal government or formal history. It was without pretense or ambition, for it was the sort of place that pretentious or ambitious people were inclined to leave. It had never declared an aspiration to become anything it was not. It did not thrive so much as it merely lived, doing the things it needed to do to stay alive. This tracked and rubbed little settlement had been built in a place of great natural abundance and beauty, which it had never valued highly enough or used well enough, had damaged, and yet had not destroyed. The town's several buildings, shaped less by art than by need and use, had suffered tellingly and even becomingly a hundred years of wear.