The Best American Short Stories 2021 by Jesmyn Ward

Author:Jesmyn Ward [Ward, Jesmyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328483416
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

II.

The night before your wedding, the last night I would have with you, I surrendered my pride on the altar of desperation and asked you why in all eighteen hells you were doing this.

“I want to have a child,” you said.

“Wait,” I said, “seriously? Since when?”

“Since Xiangyang, maybe,” you said. “It’s hard to tell, these things.”

Back then we didn’t think in terms of time. Our references were geography and action, places we had been, things we had done. In Xiangyang we had talked a jilted, impoverished artist out of jumping into the Hanshui River, and spun a pretext to give him a hundred taels of silver: we would ask him to paint our portrait. We wore our best dresses for it, you in white and I in green, tinted our cheeks and lips, put pins in our hair. We never collected the painting from him. We prided ourselves on traveling light, and anyway, we saw no use for it, a record of things that would never change.

Xiangyang was several Ming emperors past, a hundred stops ago in our travels through China. We looked for enchanted artifacts, analyzed and catalogued them, sought to understand the wondrous within the human realm. Until we stopped in at West Lake to follow up on rumors of a jade bracelet that could heal its wearer (a fake, it turned out) and you met the man you decided would do for a husband, I had never considered that we might not live like this always. For a moment I thought that I must not know you at all.

You had been hoping it would pass, you said, like a thunderstorm, or an inept dynasty. “Also, children frighten me. They need so much, and they are so easy to lose.”

I placed my palm on your stomach, between the twin ridges of your hips. “All right,” I said. “A child.” I imagined your belly swelling the way those of human women did, the creature that would tear its way out. Yours; and not yours. “You don’t have to marry him for that.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to the child.”

“What about to me?” This was why I hadn’t wanted to ask. I’d known I would succumb to self-pity, and that it would make no difference.

You told me you had calculated the fate of the man who would be your husband based on the ten stems and twelve branches of his birth. He had a delicate constitution. He would pass in twenty-four years, before his fiftieth birthday.

I didn’t say anything.

You said, “What is twenty-four years to you?”

I said, “What will twenty-four years be to you?” I wasn’t thinking twenty-four. I was thinking fifty, sixty, your skin drying to parchment, your hair thinning and graying, your frame stooping ever closer to the ground in which you would—if you did this—someday rot.

You touched my face. I waited for you to ask if I would give up my own immortality, if I was willing to step with you out of the wilderness of myth and into the terraced rice fields and tiled roofs of history.

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