Cindy Phan

Wild Things is the winner of the 2023 Louis Begley Prize judged by Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow.

The month the world begins to end, your sister shows up holding a monkey’s tail.

“Come with me,” she says. “I think we should give it back. He must be missing it.”

It is six in the morning and too early to deal with this.

You’re half-convinced that she’s a mirage, some cruel trick of light and delirium, but when you blink, your sister is still standing there, every bit as blisteringly beautiful as she was ten seconds ago. Every bit as terrible, too. It has always been hard to look at your sister straight on.

You close the door on that beautiful, terrible face.

It doesn’t keep her out, of course. Locked doors never have. But, out of what you can only guess is politeness or maybe guilt, she waits long enough for you to think about whether or not you should tell your mother that her eldest daughter has come home, long enough for you to decide against it. Long enough for you to start thinking about breakfast.

By the time you emerge out of the refrigerator, breath chilled butter-thick in your throat and an egg in each hand, she’s sitting at the kitchen island. The monkey’s tail, you notice, is still twined in her fingers.

“I’m not going with you,” you tell her. You put the eggs down on the counter, and they wobble, sway back and forth like a pair of drunken old men. Only missing the slurred laughter, the sheen of sweat on their bald heads. “I mean it.”

“Okay,” your sister says. Her gaze stays steady on you, but out of sight you hear the eggs rattle to a standstill. “Can I ask why?”

 you want to bite back, just to be spiteful. Just to feel the acid-sting of it on your tongue. But you don’t have the stomach for it, so instead you clatter around the kitchen for a pan or maybe a spoon, make more noise than you need to. “I wanted to make an omelet.”

She says again, “Okay.” And then, “Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” you answer, uselessly. “There are two eggs. I just. I’ve always used three.”

“The world’s ending,” she points out. Her voice is kind. You think kind sisters are worse than cruel ones. “You can make an omelet with two eggs.”

Later, after you’ve cracked the two old men open and swallowed their yolky insides, yellow still sizzling against your throat on its way down, you take a good, long look at your sister. You manage to do it without dropping your eyes, without dipping your chin to slant her silhouette into your periphery.

There are some things in the world, like war and night skies and sadness so full you can’t hold it all in your mouth, that are easiest to understand in fragments. Your sister is one of those things. The last time you saw her, you were seven years younger, and she was walking out on you and your mother and the man who wanted you and your sister to call him 

. Sometimes, that is still the way you dream about her: the ink-black spill of her hair down her back, the steady line of her shoulders, the wistful flutter of her skirt. The way she got smaller, and smaller, until the horizon swallowed her whole and it was just you and the porch and your empty hands.

Her hair is a little different, now. Cut shorter so it feathers around her face, barely reaches past her shoulders. It looks impossible to tie back. Your mother would call it impractical.

You don’t know what you’d call it. Surreal, maybe. It’s always been hard to describe your sister, feels a little too much like trying to catch rain in your fists, but 

is as close an adjective as you’re going to get. Surreal, your sister in your mother’s smartly suburban kitchen—your sister with her dark eyes and birdwing hair and her clothes that move like water, like light. Surreal, almost wrong, like seeing a fish out of water or a sparrow on the ground.

“I think we’ll find him in Montana,” she muses. “Or Idaho. One of the two.”

“Oh,” you say. “Okay.” You’d forgotten about the tail and its implied owner, but now that she’s brought them up again, you wonder how you could have thought about anything else. “Have fun in Montana. Or Idaho. Did you want breakfast?”

To her credit she hardly seems thrown, except for the slightest downturn of her lips at the corners. You take a childish sort of pleasure in it anyway, the ripple of that frown disturbing the still lake of her face.

Your omelet-sodden plate is already in the sink. There’s a part of you that wants to grab it and drop it on the tile floor, just to hear something shatter.

“Why?” you ask instead. Not even to be difficult. It is less, you reflect, a question about why she is inviting you along now, more a question on why the offer comes seven years late. 

 Your sister is impossible to read until she isn’t. The tenderness of it catches you like a punch to the throat, like a hook in a fish’s mouth, spools you out until all the beautiful, terrible love you have for her is spilling over the counter. “Because I’m trying to be better. Because the world is ending, and I am trying to be better. Is that enough?”

You say neither and hold out your hand. “Can I?” Wordlessly she passes you the monkey’s tail. It’s heavier than you would have guessed, has the meat of your palm dipping against its warm, solid weight. Some of the shorter furs bristle, but mostly the length of it is soft like felt. You wonder how anyone could lose such a thing.

“I’d want it back, if it were me,” you say.

Somewhere in the house, one floor or maybe a whole world away, your mother and her husband are still sleeping. He’s a sprawler, will have his arms and legs thrown out like he’s trying to hold the whole bed hostage, and your mother will be curled up on her side, hair dark against the mattress. She will be facing away from him.

In an hour and a half, she’ll wake up to meet the sun. Uncurl her spine, slip her cold feet into waiting slippers, make her sensible way downstairs to the kitchen. The world is ending and she will make breakfast, something sensible and loveless: bacon brittle and not-yet-browned toast and bitter, resentful coffee. Maybe she’ll see the chair where you usually sit, now left empty, and the absence will itch at her like a lost tooth and she’ll miss you. Or maybe she won’t. Before your mother was sensible she was your mother.

Right now, though, your mother and her husband are both asleep. You think of them only vaguely, the way you remember a shirt you haven’t seen for a long time or a childhood friend. It is early in the morning, not quite seven yet, and in this dawn-shrouded kitchen there is just you and the sister who left you behind. The sister who is trying to be better.

“I’d want it back,” you repeat. The monkey’s tail lies warm and docile in your hands. “And. I guess Montana isn’t that far away.”

“It’s not,” your sister agrees. “Neither is Idaho.”

“Okay,” you say. The world is ending, and worse things could have shown up on your doorstep than your sister. “Okay. I’ll come with.”

Your sister used to tell you whenever she dreamt about your father. In one dream, the moon dropped into his mouth and swelled, swelled, until it split him open at the seams. A reverse metamorphosis, man turned god turned chrysalis.

In another, the tide lapped at his ankles like an eager dog. He followed it, walked right into the ocean. Left no footprints behind.

You can’t remember your father’s name—only remember him as the man who ate a moon, as the man who was eaten by an ocean. If you were to ask your sister, you know she would be able to tell you, but it feels wrong, somehow, to name your father. Like naming the wind, or the first animal to break your heart. Names conjure the illusion that something is yours to keep, and if you name your father you don’t know what you’d do with the ghost of him after.

It happened like this: your father was here, and then one day he wasn’t. The rest of it, as far as you know, is moon and water.

His absence would not stop haunting your sister for months afterwards, left her shaking awake in the middle of the night with her fingers outstretched, closing around nothing. Your sister, her wet cheeks and her empty hands. You didn’t understand until you did. Until those empty hands were yours.

As do most things involving your sister, the drive begins quietly. She has always liked to wait for things to come to her. But seven years is a long distance to bridge, and some distances you don’t know how to cross on foot. The monkey’s tail sits between the two of you like an anchor.

Outside the window is a slow blur of suburbia, neat green lawns and neat white houses, oozing into one another thick and formless like syrup. You’re on the road long enough for the sun to wake up, peek his round face past the horizon and cast everything in gold. You count the cars you see on your two hands and still have fingers left over.

Eventually, you unclick your seatbelt without asking for permission beforehand. Fold your knees up to your chest. The world is ending, and you’ve always wanted to go on a car ride with your seatbelt off, at least once.

Your sister looks over briefly before she returns her gaze to the road. “Just this once,” she says, in warning.

“Just this once,” you agree. Outside your window, the houses melt into the background. You’re seeing more trees, now. The occasional billboard too, its lights dim and flickering. Every now and again a convenience store, never with a name you recognize.

Your sister drives with an easy, languid confidence. Fingers light on the steering wheel, window rolled down to let the breeze kiss your offered faces. She has never owned a phone and as far as you know has never been outside of California, but somehow you’re certain—in the intuitive way you’re certain of your own name, and how many lives you’ve lived, and the fact that the world was always going to come to this—that your sister will be fine. If she wants to get you to Montana, she will get you to Montana.

You blink. “No. I had an omelet, remember?”

“Two eggs.” Her voice is mild and you can’t tell if it’s an acknowledgement or a correction. You graciously assume it’s the former.

You remember offering your sister breakfast, the question more distraction than sincerity. It’s not as if you were going to refuse her if she had said yes, but for as long as the two of you have been apart, some part of you still knows your sister. Will always know your sister. And you had known, even as you asked, that she came home for you, that she wouldn’t have accepted breakfast until you agreed to come along first.

“A little,” she admits. She drums her fingers against the dashboard. “Do you think McDonald’s sounds okay?”

You almost ask her where she thinks she’s going to find a McDonald’s out here, in this sleepy little town with a name no one knows, but before you can, you see the unmistakable silhouette of those golden arches break the horizon. Like magic, almost.

Except it’s your sister, and she has always been harder to stomach than magic.

Your sister turns into the drive-through, which is empty of cars except for yours. You can’t tell if there’s anyone at the window. Even when you crane your head, you can’t tell if there’s anyone inside the building at all.

The car rolls to a tentative stop. Your sister leans her head out the window, says, “Hello?” in the direction of the intercom. Silence is the only thing either of you hear. She tries again, louder. “Hello?”

It takes so long for the intercom to crackle to life that you almost tell her to leave it.

a voice says. Tinny from the feedback, out-of-breath like they’ve been running. 

“Didn’t notice you there. I’m the only one on shift right now. Usually there’d be someone to tell me if I zone out, but. Not today. Or not right now, at least. I’m hoping someone else will come in later, so I’m not alone.”

“No worries,” your sister says. “Are you good to take an order? We can go somewhere else, though, if it’s just you.”

There’s silence for a moment, as if your sister doesn’t know how to respond. You don’t know how to, either.

“Yeah,” your sister ends up saying. She orders the first two things she sees on the menu, then asks you if you want anything. You ask for an apple pie because you know it comes ready in a box. You’ve been craving something sweet, anyway.

The tinny, disembodied voice repeats your order back to you, 

big-mac-ten-piece-chicken-mcnuggets-apple-pie-do-I-have-that-right?

 After your sister confirms yes, that’s right, it tells you your food will be ready at the next window.

it says, as if remembering something, right before your sister pulls away from the curb. 

“Oh, almost forgot. Can I have your names?”

 “Our names?” your sister echoes. “We’re the only ones here, aren’t we?”

“No—I mean, well, yes, you are the only ones here— but no, not for the food. I don’t need to ask your names for that, we have a whole process, and everything. I just—I want to start collecting people’s names, you know? With the world ending and all. It’s. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking. Some people might not have anyone to remember their name, is all.”

a pursing of the lips, the tongue. When she introduces herself, the tinny voice has to repeat it three times before it gets it right.

“Miley,” you interrupt hastily, a correction with less teeth than you mean for it to have. Less teeth because you know your sister intends no malice by it, but no one has called you 

 in a long time, that name like stones. Heavy in the throat, in the chest. You say again, “Miley. I’m Miley.”

“Yes,” you confirm. You don’t look at your sister’s face. “Miley. That’s right.”

You don’t know what your sister was going to say, or if she was going to say anything at all, but when she pulls forward to the next window, the owner of the tinny voice leans forward to greet you. In their hand they have a brown paper bag, yellow arches splashed across the front of it.

“and Miley. It’s nice to see your faces. Here’s your food, I hope you enjoy it.” Their voice is significantly less tinny when you hear it from the source, not distorted through a spiderweb of metal and wires. It’s a nice voice, you think. Warm and clear, like tea with no honey.

“Thank you,” your sister says, and passes the bag to you. You rearrange your legs so it nestles comfortably into your lap. The warmth of the food bleeds through the thin paper, through your pants. You imagine it flushing the soft skin of your thighs pink.

“Those are lovely,” you say, before you can stop yourself. You point to the antlers sprouting from either side of their head—fawn brown, downy with softness. Smaller than you would have expected, but when you take a closer look, you notice the soft velvet hanging from the whorls of their horns. “Are they still growing in?”

“I think so,” the no-longer-tinny-voice says. They absent-mindedly reach up, touch the tip of an antler. The motion makes the fledgling silk brush against the back of their hand. “I can’t tell you for sure. I don’t know a lot about deer, I guess. But I’ve made my peace with it. There are worse things to be.”

“Of course,” your sister agrees, always easier with strangers than you. “Deer are lovely. Someone I knew turned into a beetle.”

By the time you think to ask the no-longer-tinny-voice their name, your sister has already pulled away from the drive-through. By the time you think about the no-longer-tinny voice again, there are no chicken nuggets left, all of them having long gone to warm both your stomachs. The cardboard boxes are hollow and grease-stained. Behind you, the sleepy little town grows smaller and smaller, smudges into obscurity with the distance.

You think about the stranger. You wonder if they’re still manning the McDonald’s alone: their still-soft antlers, the names they collect like coins behind their teeth.

The end of the world, as it turns out, comes with neither a bang nor a whimper. Just the slow, gentle slide of everything returning back to the earth. 

When people talk about dying, they make it out to be something ravenous and gasping, the way a fish thrashes on the shore or a gazelle strains against teeth. That livewire thrum of blood, of pulse. Of every breath buffeting on the tongue to make it out alive. But you think death is not always hungry, that sometimes it comes holding more love in its mouth than blood.

How the end of the world happened for you was this: one day you woke up, and when you went to get the mail, like you did every day when you were the first one awake, you bumped into Mrs. Liu from the house across the street. She was getting on in years, had been for a while. There was no novelty to the silvery sheen of her hair or the graceful lines in her face. She greeted you, and when she turned to go back to her house, the sun glinted off the skin behind her ears.

“Auntie,” you found yourself asking. “Are those scales?”

Cindy Phan

Cindy Phan

Fiction

Summer 2023

Wild Things