House Gone Quiet

by Kelsey Norris

Genres: African American; Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Horror

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence

An eerie, irresistible debut story collection about the bonds and bounds of community and what it means to call a place home, “perfect for readers of Margaret Atwood and Carmen Maria Machado” (Booklist).

“A writer to watch if there ever was one.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

“A playful, far-ranging, and unruly collection from a writer whose keen eye and joy in language leap out on every page.” —C Pam Zhang, author of Land of Milk and Honey

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

As in the very best collections, each of these stories is a world all its own, with a novel’s emotional heft and a poem’s laser focus on the most achingly resonant details of its characters’ lives. Captivating from start to finish, House Gone Quiet announces the arrival of a thrilling literary talent.

Release date: October 17, 2023

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 208

Sample

THE SOUND OF WOMEN WAITING

ANA STOOD IN THE COURTYARD of our compound one afternoon, announcing to all the world her intentions for her husband. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said to the air around her, to all of us. “I’m killing him tonight.”

Ana was not a pretty woman, but just then, in the strip of sun that came through the tattered awning to wrap her in heat and light—which caught her in such a way that you might forget the watery nature of her eyes and the way her chin sunk in—she was almost beautiful.

“He deserves it. They all do,” she said with the finality of someone leaving, someone unconcerned with what she left behind. In that light, you could almost miss the stain of bruising on her arms, or the desperate way her lip quivered forward. The pockmarks in her cheeks and forehead seemed suddenly purposeful. “We could do it, easy,” she said. “Soon.”

We had to break the spell. We dragged her away from that beam of light, back into the shadows where we shushed and soothed her. “You couldn’t. We couldn’t do that,” we whispered into her hair. “Enough now.” Softly, the way our mothers had with us. And then, “Remember home? Tell us about your brother. Saulus? Tell us about the garden.” We knew that this would calm her. We held her and listened until she was still. Then we left her there to gather herself, to go on with the life that was left for us.

Her husband was a brute, it was true. He liked to place his hands wherever, however he pleased. Something in his life had made him mean and rotten, or else he simply was—perhaps preferred himself—that way. The women in our building avoided him as best we could. He was the sort of man who made us happy to have our own husbands—who were too tall, too fat; who were meek or unhandsome; who chewed with their mouths wide open and slapped our asses in front of company. Paulo, who couldn’t sing and shouted more often than not. Slow, simple Frank who could only run errands for the other guards. Ana’s husband made us grateful for every one of them.

We did not choose to live this way—to keep peace with our open legs. The war had finished. Our country had lost so many, so quickly, that it was decimated. Our government threw up its hands, stepped out of the enemy’s way. You’ve won, they said. Take what you will; let us live. And so we were permitted to live, just barely. First they took what fruits our land could offer up, our freedoms. When this country held out their hands once more, we women were the prize.

The young women of my country are largely considered beautiful. We are thin—slender in a way their women are not. We have seen them, these women, in the photos our husbands show us—their mothers and sisters, the lovers they had before. Where they are padded and soft, we are all sharp edges and corners. It is said that if our women turn sideways, we will disappear entirely, and this is what draws their men to us like ants. We are what they cannot have; or could not. Our country trucked loads of us across the border—as peace offerings, as wives—and what could we do but go?

---

I refused to leave with the first three waves of women.

“You must,” my father told me. “What will we make of you here?”

Though the war began far from us—in cities I never saw before they were only rubble and stone—it radiated outward, until our land was not far from its border. Once the fight was more than rumor, more than young men leaving home to search for glory somewhere at its center, it was the rumble of tanks and torched fields and those young men staying gone.

When we found the bodies of two of our goats twisted and strewn bloody in the garden one morning, my father grew more fervent. “You will leave, Satya,” he said, that night and every other night after. He was a hard man whom I had never grown to love. I had a sister, once. A flu took Katarina when we were young, and watching his oldest grow pale and wasted had turned my father mean. Mama told me of the stories he would whisper into my crib—how he moved his hands through the air as he spoke, how she would sneak away and fall asleep, smiling at the tender heart of her husband. But I can only remember him cold.

“Next time they call, you’re gone.”

What’s left for you here? I imagined him saying instead, We cannot keep you safe.

He fell asleep by the door most evenings while Mama bustled about, preparing for the coming cold. I stayed up with her, boiling jars clean for canning. We cut okra and beets for pickling, halved pears to pack and cover with syrup. Mama and I didn’t speak as we worked but moved around each other in an easy rhythm, maybe hummed as we repeated the familiar steps. That year, a quarter of the jars would go unfilled, as if the earth, too, had been picked dry.

The government recruiter came knocking just before the rest of the goats would go missing. “Your daughter will be happy there,” he said. The man sat in our living room, grinning as he spoke, turning his words over so quickly that I knew he believed his own story. “It’s a new start for her. These men are not soldiers. They want peace, just as we do. Satya can give us that.” He had a bronzed cap over one incisor, which he licked before the start of each sentence. It gave his words a slick, wet sound. “We all have our duty,” he said. I remember him winking here, but perhaps he did not.

In the end, I left for my mother. The recruiter said that our country was no longer asking. Paused on our threshold on his way out, he said that each household in the region was required to send half its women. My mother would be finished there, and so the choice was easy. I loved her more than I loved myself.

The government truck that would carry us across the border was so full that the other women and I were made to stand. If we had thought of it then, we might have sat in shifts, some women scooting closer so that the others could rest until the time to trade positions came. Instead, we leaned with the curves and bumps of a broken road we could not see, swaying like one weeping mass of sea grass. Most of the women were my age, though some were young enough to feel chosen, and others were the ages of their brokenhearted mothers.

Later, in the compound, our trip there would not be something we discussed. Pain or shame at the way we were transported like cargo rendered mentioning it taboo. We were simply in one country and then another. But still, I wondered: Had the memory slipped away from the others? Did it haunt them? Was Ana’s journey there like mine?

The perfume of the women in the transport and the stink of those who had forsaken any mingled into the same sugary, noxious scent before it became indistinguishable from the air around us. We were strangers and we were all we had.

After some time, when the sniffling of the women had worn down, I felt a sharp pain rip across my scalp. I turned and caught the glint of silver before it disappeared, tucked into another woman’s shirt. My mother’s barrette, hastily fastened into my hair before the truck pulled away. The barrette now nestled into the fabric cup beneath a stranger’s sweating breast. My mother, long hair swirling about her face unchecked as she waved goodbye.

The thief smiled at me. She closed her eyes as if to sleep. She was an arm’s length away, and she was safe. There were too many between us for me to reach her. Her nose was bent—crushed and healed crooked sometime before—and I hated her.

I must’ve cried then. The memory brings a choked, strained feeling to the front of my throat, and yet I cannot remember the tears themselves: how they must have blurred the faces of the women around me and run into the neck of my dress. In that memory there is only the closeness of bodies and the heat and the fear we had all packed into that space with us, the pain at my scalp already fading to numb with every meter of road.

Then, a new pressure in my palm, a parcel tucked into it. A tea bag—the same, simple kind that my family drank most afternoons. A kind of consolation. I squeezed it, and the parched leaves inside rustled and snapped.

“Be strong,” a woman behind me whispered into my ear. I did not turn to thank her. I could not, in that cramped and lonely space. She could have been any one of them.

A thick, tinlike sound began to pepper the walls of the truck. Rain struck the caravan, drowning out any chance at conversation, though we had not tried much at all before. Perhaps, then, the men driving grew ashen and nervous. Perhaps, in the cab up front—where they carted us to new lives—their grips grew tighter, knuckles pale. It might’ve sounded like the racket of wartime. For those of us packed into the back, the sound held comfort. Ignorant as we were of the patter of bullets, we let that deluge fill the silence between us.

Our engagements were quick, efficient. The drivers unloaded us at the border, and we took in all that we could of our new home: smooth pavement without craters or decay, squat buildings, birds that chirped and cawed like ours. The streets packed in closer. Two soldiers in gray uniform led us onto a raised stage in a warehouse where we were made to walk in neat rows, taking turns to pause up front and center. When I was young, I begged my mother to put me into a pageant, but she had refused, citing money or frivolity. And to look at me then! Fit for a crown.

My marriage happened like this: fingertips, pressed into a palm. This is the way the men were told to pick us. They simply had to approach the woman of their choosing, reach up to take her hand, and we were theirs—the whole mess of courting and proposal and matrimony in one brief gesture. When my turn came, I did not immediately look down to see who had chosen me. Eva says that fights broke out over her hand, but I hardly would have noticed such a thing. I was looking for the thief with my mother’s barrette, convinced she’d be wearing it now to seem more beautiful. The man who would become my husband was forced to tug at me, to pull me off-balance and slightly out of line before I noticed him.

And even then, I saw only a part of him. My husband’s scalp was beautiful. There was a patch—a clearing at the top of his head that looked as if hair had always been absent from it. That smooth skin caught the room’s harsh lighting and threw it back to me, softened and newly complex. After, there were his dark, nervous eyes and his build, as if he had been pressed through tubing—slim shoulders and hips and the proportions squat and strange. But first, I had his scalp. One day, I might rub my thumb across that stretch of skull, tracing patterns, divining the measure of him. That a sensation so perfect could exist in a world like ours… it almost could have been enough.

---

How long does a sense of home take to build? How long until a life feels like your own, rather than something you’ve fallen into?

We tried. After the fear and the anger left us, and news of our country grew scarce, we tried to accept what had come to us. We unpacked our suitcases and stored them. We learned the parameters of our new world—the walk to the grocery, to our husbands’ posts. We wrapped handfuls of our skirts around the courtyard spigot to twist it, learned the order for laundry and for hanging clothes on the buckling wire lines that hemmed the compound. We heard nothing of our families but knew we were keeping them safe.

Before she learned of her husband’s preferences, the girl we called Baby unpacked the silk bag her mother had tucked into her suitcase. She clasped the hooks and elastic of those lacy underthings around herself one night and lay in wait for her husband’s return. When she opened her robe to show him, Baby said the look he gave her was something like pain. He leaned in and kissed her jawline, said, You’re beautiful. He closed her robe and left again, came home hours later, skin thick with smoke and booze. When he reached for her that night, Baby rolled to him, content at least to know the shape of the life they’d have together.

So there we were, in the courtyard with Ana. In our apartments. In those rooms that we worked to make smell like home, at least. Free for the day of the companions we did not choose but had to lie beside each night. There we were in those hallways, in that country that did not belong to us. Washing, cooking, laughing at times despite ourselves. And waiting, always. Waiting for a thing we couldn’t name, but craved.

Do you know what the waiting of three thousand women sounds like?

Nothing. Everything. I’m sure it’s something you’ve heard before.

---

The report came over the radio one evening: one of our women had killed her husband with a garden tool. The report talked about the blood, her body slumped over his. How spotless the kitchen was otherwise. It called them newlyweds: six months, too short. The authorities had classified it as unintentional. Out of grief over what she’d done, the poor young bride had taken her own life.

In the morning, we whispered that we’d felt our husbands shrink away from us. Their snorts and Poor bastards sounded forced, worried. We felt some hidden suspicion in the language of the report, too—the ambiguity of garden tool, a hesitance to name the weapon. We layered our attentions more thickly in the days to come—cooked their favorite foods, kneaded the dip between their necks and shoulder blades. Trust us, we meant. We worked a honeyed tone into the tenor of our voices and felt the dumb, blind affection of our husbands return.

We feared what the report would mean to Ana. Her declaration the month before felt like a cracked seal, like a desperate thing finally out in the open. I’m killing him tonight, she’d said, though she hadn’t. Wouldn’t. But now this other woman, this accident. We hoped it had not sounded like permission.

She had not always been this way. Ana, who brought a plate of sweets to my door that first week as housewarming and had done the same for each of us. Ana, who had arrived with the first wave, and whose eyes ricocheted around the spaces of our entryways until we invited her in.

“There’s something familiar about you,” she told me on that first meeting, sitting in my living room.

I had tried to hold my face still, tucked a lock of hair more tightly behind my ear. The other women shook their heads when they spoke of Ana. They warned me not to get too close. She was unlucky, they said, for sure. But weren’t we all?

“Where did you say you were from?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” I said. And then, feeling the harshness of that, “Olvyn. It’s very small. My family is still there—my mother and father.”

“My father is dead,” she told me, flatly, as if she might’ve said, instead, These curtains are the same pattern as mine. ...