Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Do you guys know any songs?” I asked the Aleuts.

“I know all of Hank Williams,” the elder Aleut said.

“How about Indian songs?”

“Hank Williams is Indian.”

“How about sacred songs?”

“Hank Williams is sacred.”

“I’m talking about ceremonial songs. You know, religious ones. The songs you sing back home when you’re wishing and hoping.”

“What are you wishing and hoping for?”

“I’m wishing my grandmother was still alive.”

“Every song I know is about that.”

“Well, sing me as many as you can.”

The Aleuts sang their strange and beautiful songs. I listened. They sang about my grandmother and about their grandmothers. They were lonesome for the cold and the snow. I was lonesome for everything.

After the Aleuts finished their last song, we sat in silence for a while. Indians are good at silence.

“Was that the last song?” I asked.

“We sang all the ones we could,” the elder Aleut said. “The others are just for our people.”

I understood. We Indians have to keep our secrets. And these Aleuts were so secretive they didn’t refer to themselves as Indians.

“Are you guys hungry?” I asked.

They looked at one another and communicated without talking.

“We could eat,” the elder Aleut said.

The Aleuts and I walked over to the Big Kitchen, a greasy diner in the International District. I knew they served homeless Indians who’d lucked into money.

“Four for breakfast?” the waitress asked when we stepped inside.

“Yes, we’re very hungry,” the elder Aleut said.

She took us to a booth near the kitchen. I could smell the food cooking. My stomach growled.

“You guys want separate checks?” the waitress asked.

“No, I’m paying,” I said.

“Aren’t you the generous one,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Don’t ask me rhetorical questions. They scare me.”

She looked puzzled, and then she laughed.

“O.K., Professor,” she said. “I’ll only ask you real questions from now on.”

“Thank you.”

“What do you guys want to eat?”

“That's the best question anybody can ask anybody,” I said. “What have you got?”

“How much money you got?” she asked.

“Another good question,” I said. “I’ve got twenty-five dollars I can spend. Bring us all the breakfast you can, plus your tip.”

She knew the math.

“All right, that's four specials and four coffees and fifteen percent for me.”

The Aleuts and I waited in silence. Soon enough, the waitress returned and poured us four coffees, and we sipped at them until she returned again, with four plates of food. Eggs, bacon, toast, hash-brown potatoes. It's amazing how much food you can buy for so little money.

Grateful, we feasted.

I said farewell to the Aleuts and walked toward the pawnshop. I heard later that the Aleuts had waded into the salt water near Dock 47 and disappeared. Some Indians swore they had walked on the water and headed north. Other Indians saw the Aleuts drown. I don’t know what happened to them.

I looked for the pawnshop and couldn’t find it. I swear it wasn’t in the place where it had been before. I walked twenty or thirty blocks looking for the pawnshop, turned corners and bisected intersections, and looked up its name in the phone books and asked people walking past me if they’d ever heard of it. But that pawnshop seemed to have sailed away like a ghost ship. I wanted to cry. And just when I’d given up, when I turned one last corner and thought I might die if I didn’t find that pawnshop, there it was, in a space I swear it hadn’t occupied a few minutes ago.

I walked inside and greeted the pawnbroker, who looked a little younger than he had before.

“It's you,” he said.

“Yes, it's me,” I said.

“Jackson Jackson.”

“That is my name.”

“Where are your friends?”

“They went traveling. But it's O.K. Indians are everywhere.”

“Do you have the money?”

“How much do you need again?” I asked, and hoped the price had changed.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

It was still the same price. Of course, it was the same price. Why would it change?

“I don’t have that,” I said.

“What do you have?”

“Five dollars.”

I set the crumpled Lincoln on the countertop. The pawnbroker studied it.

“Is that the same five dollars from yesterday?”

“No, it's different.”

He thought about the possibilities.

“Did you work hard for this money?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He closed his eyes and thought harder about the possibilities. Then he stepped into the back room and returned with my grandmother's regalia.

“Take it,” he said, and held it out to me.

“I don’t have the money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“But I wanted to win it.”

“You did win it. Now take it before I change my mind.”

Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!

I took my grandmother's regalia and walked outside. I knew that solitary yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother's regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother, dancing.

Each juror read all twenty stories without knowing who wrote them or where they were published.

Cristina García on “Refuge in London” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

It is a paradox that sometimes nothing seems as distant from us as the recent past, what has only just disappeared. What “Refuge in London” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala so beautifully evokes is the last days of a lost world, a world of a mere half century ago but one originating in a sensibility centuries older. In a shabby, postwar London boardinghouse crowded with a motley assortment of refugees (a lawyer, a businessman, and upstairs, an artist famous in prewar Germany and his wife), a sixteen-year-old girl recalls the parade of these characters and their influence on her formation. Through her finely drawn awareness, we see not only the disappearance of the old cultural order smashed by the forces of global war, but also the timeliness of the artistic struggle whatever the period, whatever the circumstances.

“Refuge in London” has several themes: the ruinous effect of time on youthful promise, the way genius attracts its own public attention, and perhaps, most of all, the demands and responsibility of an artist's life; all emerge in clean, well-crafted prose whose nuance and shading match the characters’ complex and, at least for now, unfathomable lives. The nature of refuge is often awkwardly managed (or outright bungled) in fiction, where the tendency can be to indulge in the drama of personal upheaval. Instead of hearing the noise of displacement, the reader experiences the routine of living that plays out afterward-and then after that-as the refugees struggle to reclaim their material and psychic footing. It is a smaller, more difficult story to tell, but it is also what makes “Refuge in London” all the more poignant and rewarding.

Cristina García is the author of the novels Dreaming in Cuban, The Aguero Sisters, and Monkey Hunting. She edited Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. García lives in California.

Ann Patchett on “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie