Rise Read online

  Rise

  L. Annette Binder

  WINNER OF THE 2011 MARY MCCARTHY PRIZE IN SHORT FICTION SELECTED BY LAURA KASISCHKE

  © 2012 by L. Annette Binder

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Managing Editor

  Sarabande Books, Inc.

  2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200

  Louisville, KY 40205

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Binder, L. Annette, 1967–

  Rise : stories / by L. Annette Binder ; foreword by Laura Kasischke.

  p. cm.

  “Winner of the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction.”

  ISBN 978-1-936747-39-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Fairy tales. I. Title.

  PS3602.I5245R57 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2011041615

  Cover photograph: “Starlings” by Danny Green, an award-winning natural history photographer based in the UK. www.dannygreenphotography.com.

  Cover and text design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For my parents and for David and Georgia Lee

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword by Laura Kasischke

  Nephilim

  Galatea

  Nod

  Wrecking Ball

  Shelter

  Tremble

  Dead Languages

  Rise

  Halo

  Sea of Tranquility

  Weights and Measures

  Mourning the Departed

  Sidewinder

  Lay My Head

  The Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These stories, sometimes in slightly different form, appeared in the following publications:

  One Story and The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses: “Nephilim”

  Third Coast: “Galatea”

  Beloit Fiction Journal: “Nod”

  Bellingham Review: “Wrecking Ball”

  Short Story: “Shelter”

  Quarterly West: “Tremble”

  The Southern Review: “Dead Languages”

  Crab Orchard Review: “Rise”

  Green Mountains Review: “Halo”

  American Short Fiction: “Sea of Tranquility”

  Avery Anthology: “Weights and Measures”

  Carve: “Mourning the Departed”

  Indiana Review: “Sidewinder”

  Fairy Tale Review: “Lay My Head”

  Thank you to everyone who read these stories and helped me improve them:

  My teachers Ron Carlson, Andrew Sean Greer, Christine Schutt, Jayne Lewis, and especially Michelle Latiolais.

  The editors who published and helped improve these stories, especially Jeanne Leiby, Pei-Ling Lue, and Hannah Tinti.

  John Reed and his band of midnight pirates.

  My writer and reader friends—Raisa Tolchinsky, Karen Bryan, and Cat Robson.

  Laura Kasischke, who saw something in these stories.

  A million thanks to Sarah Gorham, Kirby Gann, Caroline Casey, and all the folks at Sarabande Books for their support of this book and for all the great work they do.

  My father, Gerd, who shared with me his love of books and history, and my mother, Helena, who has told me since I was seven that I have a very good vocabulary. I could wish for no more loving and supportive parents.

  And David Kahn, my favorite blacksmith, and our daughter, Georgia Lee—my two greatest blessings.

  Foreword

  It occurred to me, while reading L. Annette Binder’s collection Rise, that perhaps the most magical skill a true storyteller possesses is the ability to restore to the reader the sense of what a strange voyage we’re on, this life. It seems that this strangeness of life would be evident at all times, but the fact is that, except during moments of heightened awareness, the edges get dull, the awe boils down. Things are what they are, and they fail to astonish.

  But, while reading Rise, each time I put it down, I found the colors brighter, the objects around me more intriguing, the dialogue overheard more full of portent, and the whole idea of story—how it can be both a craft and just the weirdness of what happens—more alive.

  What a heroic feat!

  L. Annette Binder has gone so deeply, and with such mystical brilliance and loyalty, into her own world that she has brought mine to me in high relief. Or, she has climbed a rickety ladder to get the view from up there in order to share it with me. Or, she has spent the night out in the orchard, listening in on what the worms in the apples have to say. Or, she has risked a fortune on a number, and, lucky for me, has won.

  This feeling that she was helping me, via her stories, to see differently caused me to recall an anecdote told by the anthropologist Richard Grossinger in his book The Night Sky. He writes of an experience he had while doing research on people who believed they had been abducted by aliens:

  At a UFO meeeting that I attended in the basement of a bank in Hamtramck, Michigan, the gathering was told that it was honored by visitors from Venus and Saturn. I looked around the room, and suddenly everyone appeared strange and extraterrestrial. Everyone was a candidate.

  There are moments like this in life—bright flashes of intensity. Some kind of defamiliarization has taken place. We see it all differently, however briefly. But there aren’t very many of them. Rise reminds us that real storytellers exist to bring these experiences to us.

  To everything she sets her fabulist eye on, L. Annette Binder brings this intensity. Like all of our best storytellers, she reacquaints us with our world. Borges would have recognized this genius, as would have Poe, O’Connor, and Mann. Like these writers (and others whose writing she recalls—Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Steven Millhauser, the Brothers Grimm), L. Annette Binder brings word to us from beyond the quotidian of what is always there. She both casts a spell and breaks it. To experience Rise is as much to experience wonder (again, and as if for the first time) as it is to read a collection of wonderful stories.

  RISE

  Nephilim

  Freda weighed eighteen pounds when she was born. Her feet were each six inches long. At ten she was taller than her father. Five foot eleven and one half inches standing in her socks. I can’t keep you in shoes, her mother would say, and they went to Woolworth’s for men’s cloth slippers. Her mother cut them open up front to leave room for Freda’s toes. She’d stitch flowers in the fabric to pretty up the seams, forget-me-nots and daisies and yellow bushel roses. Some of your daddy’s people are tall, she’d say. Your Aunt Mary had hands like a butcher. By God her grip was strong, and they sat beside the radio while her mother worked the needle. They listened to The Doctor’s Wife and Tales of the Texas Rangers.

  Sometimes she felt her bones growing while she lay in bed. This was when the sensation was still new. Before it became as familiar as the pounding of her heart. The house was quiet except for the planes out by the base and Tishko behind the Weavers’ house, who barked at the moon and stars. That dog’s got a streak in him, Mr. Weaver always said. I bet he’s part wolf on his momma’s side, and Tishko was out there howling and the summer air was sweet and her bones were pushing their way outward. Stretching her from socket to socket. There’s nothing wrong with you, her mother said. You’re pretty as a Gibson Girl. You just had your growth spurt early, but Freda knew better. She knew it when she
was only ten.

  •

  God was a blacksmith and her bones were the iron. He was drawing them out with the hammer. God was a spinner working the wheel and she was his silken thread. Seven foot even by the time she was sixteen and she knew all the names they called her. Tripod and eel and swizzle stick. Stork and bones and Merkel like the triple-jointed Ragdoll who fought against the Flash. Red for the redwoods out in California. Socket like a wrench and Malibu like the car, and she took those names. She held her book bag against her chest and took them as her own.

  Her house had been her parents’ house. They’d bought it new when Freda was nine. A split-level built in 1951 that cost seven thousand dollars even. She was thirty-seven now and sleeping in their bedroom. It had low ceilings and low doorways, and she knew all the places she needed to stoop. Every three weeks she cleaned the upstairs windows by standing on the lawn. She used a bucket with hot vinegar water, and she didn’t mind the smell. There was a blue jay nest in the eaves up there, and they really fouled the panes.

  “Lady what’s your problem.” A little boy was standing on the sidewalk with his bike. He had a shoe box strapped to the rack behind the seat. “I never saw a person big as you.”

  “These blue jays are my problem,” she said. “Look at the mess they’re making.”

  “I bet they got a nest up there. My momma says they’re pests.”

  “Where’s your house?”

  “We’re new,” he said. He pointed four doors up to where the Clevelands used to live. “We’re in the yellow house but my momma she’s gonna paint it because it’s much too bright. But she can’t right now because of the fumes. In September I’m starting at the Bristol School. That’s when I’m getting a brother.”

  “How do you know it won’t be a girl?”

  “No way,” he said. “I asked my mom for a brother. And she can tell anyhow. She gets sick in the mornings and not at night and she says only boys do that. Sometimes she’s in there for hours.”

  Freda set her bucket down and wiped her wet hands down the front of her pants. It was May, but the air still had some bite and this boy was wearing only a pair of thin cotton shorts. She pointed to the back of his bike. “What do you have in that box?”

  “I’m looking for crickets,” he said. “My lizard Freddy he’s got a condition.”

  “I’ve got plenty of those,” she said. “They’re eating up my flowers.” The waterlily tulips were done for the year, but her lady tulips were just getting started. They were red on the outside but their insides were yellow and orange and it was like having two different gardens when they finally opened.

  “You got some nice ones,” he said. “You got more than Mrs. Dillman and she’s out there every day.” He rubbed his thumb against his jaw like somebody much older. He was wearing a T-shirt from the Freedom Train. She could see it now that she was closer. She could see his collar bones and the hollow beneath his ribs and how his legs were knobby as drumsticks and brown already from the sun.

  “You want to see those birds? You want to see the babies sitting in the nest?” She held out her arms, and he came to her. He should have been afraid, but he leaned his bike against her maple and walked across her lawn. She hoisted him upward and toward the eaves and he was all bones, this little boy. Her hands fit perfectly around his waist.

  The nephilim were the children of fallen angels and ordinary women. Her mother had told her this years ago. Her mother who was so tiny when they laid her out because she shrank as she got older. I’m five foot two and one half, she always said, and she was angry if the doctors tried to round the number down, but she knew about the nephilim. She’d read about them in books. How they were giants on the earth before the coming of the floods and how they left their bones behind. That part wasn’t in the Bible, but her mother said it was true. Enormous piles of bones and the sun bleached them and they turned to rock and that’s why we have the mountains. Look, she’d say, we can see them from our window, and she’d point to Pikes Peak and it looked like skin, that mountain. Pink as skin when the sun hit it and not just piled-up bones.

  •

  His name was Teddy Fitz. His baby sister was born that September, and every morning he walked past Freda’s house on his way to school. He didn’t close his jacket, not even when the wind started to blow. He wore tennis shoes in the snow. She paid him five dollars to shovel her walk. She bought him knit caps at Walgreens and thick fleece gloves, and he looked so serious while he worked. She could see in his face the man he’d become, in the set of his jaw and how his eyes slanted downward.

  Five dollars to shovel the walk and seven fifty when summer came because she couldn’t push the mower. Another five to help with the bulbs the following September. She told him where to plant them so she wouldn’t have to bend. Her knees were starting to go. Pretty soon she’d need a walker.

  “This looks like an onion,” he said, holding up one of the bulbs. “How’s it gonna grow a flower?” He made holes with the dibber and set the bulbs inside and he was careful when he patted down the dirt so they wouldn’t turn.

  “Just wait,” she said. “You’ll see in April how it works.” The plant was inside. It was only sleeping. It was waiting for springtime when the dirt would get warm.

  He shook his head at the wheelbarrow she’d filled with bulbs. “You sure bought a lot. It’ll take days to get these planted.”

  “I’ll give you five dollars extra if you do them all today.”

  She sat in a mesh lawn chair and let him work. Her bones were burning again. She’d be on crutches in a few years, and the wheelchair would come next. Her internist Dr. Spielman was bringing up options at every visit. There was an operation they could try. He knew a pituitary specialist who’d had good luck with a patient in Tulsa, a man who was almost eight feet tall and the operation took out his tumor and stopped his bones from growing. Her tumor might be too big by now. Surgery might not be an option, but only the experts would know for sure. Her spine would begin to curve if they didn’t do something. She’d get diabetes or high blood pressure, and eventually her heart would stop. The radiation therapy was better than it used to be. Surgeons were more precise now than they’d ever been before, and she needed to be brave.

  She leaned back in her chair and watched this perfect boy. He held the bulbs like they were porcelain cups, and he gently laid them down. The wind was still warm when it blew and it ruffled up his blond hair. He wiped his forehead against the inside of his elbow, but he kept working because those five dollars were waiting and they’d bring him that much closer to the skateboard he wanted. She’d give him ten when he finished and not just five. She’d buy him the skateboard herself, but his mother wouldn’t like it.

  Anna Haining Bates was seven foot five and one half inches at her tallest. She died the day before she would have turned forty-two. Her heart stopped while she was sleeping. Jane Bunford was another giantess. She was perfectly normal until she was eleven and took a fall from her bike. She cracked her skull against the pavement and then she started growing. Things turn in an instant, this was the lesson. Hit your head and everything changes. The tallest man in modern days was Robert Pershing Wadlow. He was eight foot eleven inches just before he died, and when he was nine he carried his father up the stairs just to show he could. She knew this from the Guinness Book of World Records. She bought a new copy every year. How strange it would be to stand next to a man and to look him in the eye. To feel the smallness of her hands when he took them in his.

  “My dad says I’m gonna be short like my mom.” He sat on the bag of leaves like it was a beanbag chair. He sat right beside her and took a rest, and his nose was smudged from the dust. He’d filled five bags already just from the maple tree. “He says my sister will be taller than me when she’s done growing.”

  Freda leaned across her mesh chair and wiped the smudge away with her thumb. “My momma was a tiny lady. Her waist was smaller than my neck.” There’s no knowing how things would go, she wanted to tell him.
He could be a giant when he grew up. One day he might walk on the moon. She stroked his cheek with her thumb, too, but he shook himself free.

  “What about your dad? He must have been pretty big.”

  “My dad was about as tall as yours. That just goes to show you. And how can your daddy know how big your sister’ll be? She isn’t even three.”

  “He says she’s got those monkey arms.”

  “We’re all monkeys,” she said. “We all come from the same place.”

  “I’m no monkey.” He shook his head. “Those are very dirty animals. I went to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo last year and they were throwing poop.” He got back up and finished her front yard and then started on the back. He fished the elm leaves out from her beds and all the ponderosa needles, and she followed him on her canes and stood there for a while. The canes were only temporary. Some days she didn’t even need them. The canes were for when the pressure changed or when the winds started blowing. As soon as summer came, she’d walk without any problems. She just needed that dry air.

  According to the Book of Enoch, the nephilim were three hundred cubits tall. Four hundred fifty feet, give or take. That’s three times higher than the Holly Sugar Building on Cascade, which was only fourteen stories. They were bigger than Barkayal and Samyaza and Akibeel and all their angel fathers, and they were always hungry. Nothing could fill them up. Not the birds or the fish or the grains in the fields, not the sand snakes or the lizards. They stripped the forests and ate the bark from the trees. They turned against ordinary men when the last food was gone. They went after the newborn babies.

  Teddy bought himself a skateboard with some of the money he’d earned. A cheap one from Target and then a nicer one from the Acme Pawnshop down on Fountain. He bought himself a bike, too. One of those Speedsters and the paint was gray and dull from the sun, but he waxed it anyway. Just wait till I’m old enough to get my learner’s permit, he’d say. I’ve already got six hundred and thirty-four dollars, and his car fund was growing every day. His parents shouted almost every evening. Freda could hear them four doors down. Sometimes his mother went away for a few days at a time, and Teddy never said anything about it, not even when Freda asked.