Debut Prize in Fiction Winner: "Una cosa incognoscible" by Cory Austin Knudson
Congratulations to Cory Austin Knudson—our 2020 Debut Prize in Fiction winner! Knudson’s story marks Touchstone’s first fiction publication since we moved online. The following note is from Alyssa Freeman-Moser, our fiction editor:
“Knudson's language is strong and exacting. We're with the boy as he inevitably engages with the only living creature to acknowledge his humanity, even to the boy's own peril. The stakes are high for this inconvenient child whose hierarchal position is less than the feral dog he hopes to connect with. Knudson's story is worrying and moving --- indicators of a story well told.”
This is Knudson’s first fiction publication, and the prize comes with a $50 cash award and a broadside, designed by our consulting editor and art editor: Mawi Sonna.
The Airstream shone like some oversized toaster, alone among the wastes that stretch between Las Cruces and the Mexican border where only creosote, cacti, and things with sharp fangs seem to belong. When the boy climbed out of the truck, he hoped he wouldn’t have to live long in that chrome box. He was young, but he knew tight quarters when he saw them—and his father hadn’t yet left him somewhere this tight. Of course, his father never left him with anybody more than a few weeks, except that one time he didn’t come back for a month. Things went south was all he’d said about it. The boy didn’t really know what that meant but he’d learned not to ask what things meant all the time. His father had to work, and the boy couldn’t come along or even really ask about the work, and that was the way it was.
He shouldered the limp, army-green sea bag that held his change of clothes, towel, toothbrush, and the Gameboy he didn’t want to throw out even though the screen busted a year ago. He told himself time would pass, and his father would come back to get him soon. And they’d move on again.
Standing some yards apart—like strangers, the boy thought—the adults exchanged a few words in the cold of the morning. Then the man who the boy had been told was his uncle stepped close and knelt to look the boy in the eye. He said that things were going to be different for a while, as if conveying some hard truth the boy wasn’t quite ready for. It seemed like the man expected that “while” to be a long one and, pausing, he looked at the boy as if waiting for him to cry. But the boy hadn’t cried about anything for a long time, so the man started talking again.
The boy didn’t really pay attention at first. Wringing the strap of his sea bag, he watched his father climb back into the truck and head back toward the dead-level horizon. After what seemed like too short a time for the taillights to soften around the edges and, finally, merge into a single red blur, the man’s voice dropped into that hard-truth-telling rhythm again. The boy figured he should start to listen.
“I need you to understand a few things about the dog,” the man was saying. He said “the dog” instead of “my dog,” as if talking about something he didn’t really have any say over, like the sky or the desert.
In a lingering moment marked by one long breath, drawn, with a faint rustle, through the man’s push-broom mustache, the boy saw himself twinned in the man’s eyes, distorted and ashen like some apparition just beginning to fade against the paling air. Then all at once the man said the dog wouldn’t want the boy around, that she wouldn’t change her life one bit given the fact that he was around, and that if he got in her way, she’d make sure he never came around again.
“It’ll be best,” the man concluded, “If you just keep an eye on her and stay out of the way.” He drew up and turned, not waiting to see if the boy was going to cry this time.
With a clatter of metal on metal, the trailer door shut behind the boy. One bare light bulb swayed over the kitchenette, radiating a harsh yellow that sent stars into the boy’s eyes as they adjusted from the morning half-light.
When he could see again, the only thing the boy could register was the welter of magazines. Piles of them, here and there, made stalagmites as tall as the boy himself all through the trailer’s already cramped interior, and a carpet that might once have been white struggled to peek through a pavement of National Geographic, Soldier of Fortune, Good Housekeeping, and uncountable others. The boy remembered when he had to stay with his grandfather, slotted among the old man’s own heaps and boxes of things he said he “collected.” Maybe, the boy thought, this man was his uncle after all.
The man pointed around several tottering piles. In a valley among the peaks of multihued spines lay the unsheeted cot the boy was supposed to sleep on; as usual, then, he was to be treated as another addition to the objects that already crowded his grudging host’s world. He looked back at his uncle, but the man was already moving toward the kitchen table where, behind a single, gleaming knife that didn’t look to be made for cookery, a stack of Styrofoam takeout boxes stood. The man inspected these like he was trying to remember what each contained.
There was the rustle of another long breath.
With all the solemnity of a priest raising the host, the man took up one of the boxes, turned, and motioned for the boy to follow him back outside.
Gnarled ground vines creeping out from under the trailer crunched in time with their footfalls. Rounding the trailer’s far end, the boy’s uncle stopped before a hubcap long stripped of its chrome that sat upturned in the dirt.
Past his uncle’s hip, the boy saw her for the first time.
She was hunched over the makeshift dish like she’d been waiting there a thousand years. Her lips curled over spoiled-cream fangs couched in dripping and mottled gums, and she stood with her fur all roached, legs spread, as if ready to protect something precious that the man wanted to take away. The boy felt himself step back and he crouched lower behind his uncle’s legs. His eyes burned and he realized he wasn’t blinking but couldn’t bring himself to do so. He watched the dog’s breath billow out in ghostly jets against the vanishing cold—she snapped at the air, making little eddies swirl and coruscate against the light of a sun now edging over the horizon. With the considered movements of a mendicant lighting a votive candle at the shrine of some nameless divinity, the man leant over, opened the takeout box, and dumped its contents into the hubcap. Above, the last fading stars wheeled in the painted sky. But wherever he turned, the boy couldn’t distract himself from the sounds of the dog eating.
—
Day by day, the earth of the trailer lot wrinkled under a sun that hung longer and longer overhead, and the boy tried his best to stay clear of Shadow. Most of the time it wasn’t too hard. The dog would lope off into the desert after her morning feed, returning only when the day was hottest to laze in the hollows she’d dug under the Airstream. After a few hours’ siesta she’d emerge and putter around for a while. Then she’d trot back out into the desert until it got dark.
By the time the boy had arrived at his uncle’s it was already too hot to stay inside long past morning, so the boy spent his days in a folding chair set up in the shade of the single yucca that grew in the otherwise parched lot. From there, he could watch the dog’s comings and goings over the tops of magazines fished off those piles that made his uncle’s trailer a recombinant maze whose walls rose up and fell down, joined and split seemingly of their own will. Sometimes Shadow would dig, fill, and re-dig her holes. Often, she’d sniff around the hubcap where the boy’s uncle left her offerings at matins and vespers. In between articles, the boy’s eyes traced geoglyphs that Shadow padded out in the dust of the lot.
When whatever occult magnetism that compelled her drew Shadow near the boy, a rumble started deep in her throat. The boy always felt it his own rib cage before he actually heard it. When that happened he’d clamp his magazine under an armpit and drag the folding chair around the yucca until the rumbling stopped. Sometimes that meant he had to sit in the sun—but that was better than whatever Shadow could do to him. When next he’d look up from his reading and peer around the shrub, as often as not, Shadow would have moved far off. As if all she wanted to do was remind the boy that the world he existed in belonged, always and already, to her. He had no say over it—like he had no say over the sky or the desert.
When the dog finished her afternoon ablutions and ambled back out into the wastes, the boy put down whatever he was reading and watched her dissolve into the heat that made the rust-red mountains of Mexico look underwater. Going south, he thought, wondering when his father might come back and what his work really was. He stayed that way until the yucca’s shade touched the border of the lot. Around then his uncle would come home from work, carrying the Styrofoam boxes that held their—and the dog’s—supper.
After that first morning his uncle never brought the boy out to witness the dog’s feeding. The boy nearly loved him for that.
—
One day the boy woke and turned over. He’d grown used to the squeal of the cot springs greeting him as he stretched himself into consciousness. This morning, though, an unfamiliar rustle near his feet caught him unawares. Squinting down, he noticed a magazine tented over one of his legs. He dug a knuckle into an eye socket to rub away what sleep remained there and reached for the magazine with his other hand.
Wheels, the cover read. Under the title, a woman wearing nothing but an unbuttoned flannel men’s shirt and a pair of the tiniest underwear the boy had ever seen was draped across a shining motorcycle.
The boy’s breath went in, but he didn’t hear it come out. Sitting up, all sleep’s lingering dregs drained from him and a kind of heat started to lick around his cheeks and ears. The shine of the cover warped as the boy grasped the magazine with both hands; he held it, and he didn’t know why, like someone was about to take it away. Those lines of flexing light led his eyes around the curves of the woman’s body, and he followed their movement like he followed Shadow’s dusty radii out in the lot. Her splayed shirt managed to cover only her breasts so a soft rift could be seen running down her middle—the boy thought it looked like the line down the middle of a peach. He’d never seen a woman’s stomach before. He wondered, and again he didn’t know why, if she’d once been divided in two and only assembled there in the moment before her picture was taken—bolted up and polished for the camera like the motorcycle underneath her. The woman seemed to look at him in a way that said she knew what silly thoughts he was thinking. The warmth in his cheeks and ears turned to fire.
The boy’s breath caught. That familiar rumble, he realized, was echoing through his chest.
His eyes snapped up and he leaned around the pile of magazines at the end of the cot. He paused before he looked.
She couldn’t have gotten inside.
He looked.
Shadow wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t. The man never let her into the trailer—or she didn’t care to go inside in the first place, which was more likely.
But the rumble was only getting worse, shaking through his ribs as if the dog were just a few feet away, creeping closer, slavering and snapping at the air. The boy knew something was there at the far end of the trailer—where the man slept.
Through the bars of light swirling with dust that cut through the single window’s blinds, he squinted into the semi-dark beyond—and the boy saw his uncle. Spread over his sunken mattress like something yet unformed, the man gazed at him with the same lurid and knowing eyes as the woman on Wheels.
The boy’s fingernails made little divots in the waxy cover of the magazine.
Inch by inch, the man’s mouth began to part. Lips stretched over jagged teeth the color of spoiled cream; speckled, inhuman gums glistened through the dun air and his tongue fell over his chin, flat and dripping and hanging lower than a man’s tongue was supposed to go. The boy’s mouth opened but nothing came out.
Just outside the window, Shadow barked. The boy’s head jerked toward the sound—Shadow never barked. Or at least he’d never heard her do any more than growl. At once the rumble stopped and the boy looked back toward the mattress at the far end of the trailer.
The covers were piled in a heap that faintly resembled the shape of a person. The man wasn’t there—of course, he’d gone to work hours before, the day being Friday and not yet Saturday, when the man would go back to bed after Shadow’s morning feed and only wake again long after the boy did. The timpani beating in the boy’s ears slowed, and he found he could breathe again. He shook his head, trying to knock loose the chimera conjured from some stratum of his mind he hoped would never push back to the surface again. He went to rub his eyes and realized he was still gripping Wheels.
With a grunt, the boy hurled the magazine against the door. It hit with a smack and fluttered to the ground, landing face down on the carpet with its cover splayed.
Why, the boy thought, did his uncle leave that for him to find?
Did he?
The boy looked at how the magazine landed. In fact, it looked like how he’d found it on his leg when he woke up. But—he was rubbing sleep out of his eye and not really paying attention after all—did he really remember how it looked before he picked it up? The boy couldn’t conjure a clear enough picture to decide. And, wondering whether Wheels found its way to him by accident or design, he realized he didn’t even know which answer he preferred. On the one hand his uncle wanted him to wake up to the kind of magazine they hide behind opaque plastic at gas stations, the kind the boy’s father told him was only for men—for what reason, the boy had some idea, but he shut his eyes at the thought. On the other hand, the boy was no different than the kitchen table or the floor, just some inert surface where his uncle could toss his half-read rags.
The boy stared at the magazine. He knew the answer, even though he didn’t want to. It wasn’t any sort of message, any initiation, any invitation; the boy, as always, was just a thing among things. He wasn’t worth troubling over any more than somebody might trouble over a table, or any kind of object that takes up space without doing much else. That’s just the way it was—in the truck with his father, at his grandfather’s house and his older cousin’s place in Arizona and at any of the other boxes he’d been stuffed into in the course of his father’s “work.” The boy bent double over the edge of the cot and hugged his thighs, trying to make sure there was something of him more than just matter in space. For the first time since he could remember, he let himself cry.
—
When the man returned, the boy was ready. He had arranged everything, down to the half-innocent, half-knowing look he would wear when his uncle walked in.
The boy heard the engine cut. He sat on the cot and directed himself toward the door, still sweating from his labor and the gauzy heat in the trailer that was only just starting to abate now that the sun was setting. The car door slammed, and the boy wiped his forehead dry. The latch on the trailer door clicked and released.
The man smelled like engine grease and the outside air when he came in. He was looking down, so he didn’t notice anything at first. But seeming to sense the boy’s studied gaze, the man’s eyes met his nephew’s and, as the trailer door swung shut behind him, he stopped dead.
His look betrayed a question that had yet to be formed into words. The boy waited for his uncle to ask why he was looking at him like that, but he didn’t—so the boy cast his gaze around the spotless trailer, hoping his uncle’s would follow. It would be hard not to be impressed, the boy thought: once an unrectored chaos, now his uncle’s magazines were neatly stacked and arranged against the wall, organized first by topic then, within each topic, by alphabetical order. Every one of them was accounted for. Even Wheels, down in the dark near the man’s mattress.
The Airstream, before so cluttered and suffocating, now seemed three times as big.
The boy looked back at his uncle, smiling.
The man’s eyes didn’t seem to have left the boy for a second. But the look on his face had changed. His mouth was closed tight behind his mustache, and he breathed slowly through his nose like he did when things were very serious. The boy had seen this look. It was the one the man wore that first night, when he knelt before the boy and told him about how things were going to be different and about the dog. Never before, though, did the boy associate that expression with the exact one his grandfather had worn when the boy threw away a stack of the old man’s empty peanut tins. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed the resemblance before—and for a moment, the boy wondered if his uncle was going to slap him like his grandfather did, and scream, and lock him out of the house for the night.
But he didn’t. The man just sighed, stepped across the now-bare carpet, and hoisted his takeout boxes onto the kitchen table. As he set them down, the shimmering knife rattled against the Formica.
For the second time that day, the boy felt something warm spread across his face and around his ears—this time, though, he knew exactly what it was. Feeling the ghostly fingers of his grandfather’s hand tingle across his cheek, he knew what he wanted to do.
—
The boy waited until morning. He listened to his uncle return to bed after feeding Shadow, staying still until he heard the man’s breath settle into a steady rhythm. Even then he waited another minute, and another, until he heard faint snoring through the dark. Then the boy steeled himself and grasped the edge of his cot.
No matter how careful he was, he knew the springs would squeal. He strained his ears over the muffled anguish of his ancient camp-bed to make sure his uncle’s snoring was holding steady. It was, and soon the boy was standing.
He walked like a cartoon robber, taking exaggerated, tip-toed steps, elbows against his sides, forearms forward, wrists limp. The boy had never really snuck around before, so he didn’t know any other way to do it. He thought it would help, but he could still feel the slight shudder under his feet as the trailer’s decrepit shocks responded to his footfalls.
The man suddenly snorted and the boy crouched, opening his eyes as far as they’d go, hoping to see something of the man through the slats of dusty moonlight scoring the Airstream’s interior. The trailer settled. He heard the man turn over and, in a moment, he was snoring again. The boy tore his eyes away from the churning dark at the far end of the trailer and searched out his object. Striped in the pitch and near-pitch that fell through the blinds, the boy no sooner saw the knife than it was in his hand. He looked back into the dark and stepped away from the kitchen table.
—
The knife didn’t work as well as the boy imagined it would. It might have been the cleanest thing in the trailer, but it was chipped, dull, and probably useful only when wielded with the kind of strength the boy did not have. So instead of pruning the ground vines around the trailer with the knife, as he had intended, the boy started to pull them out with his hands.
The weeds had vicious barbs and were furred with a spiny substance that sloughed off and made the boy itch. But, however much it hurt, the boy bore it with the resolve to prove to his uncle—whether the man liked it or not—that he could be useful, that he could contribute something to the man’s world rather than just take up space in it. He clenched his palms together for a moment and strained to hold back a whimper. He didn’t want to wake the man up before his work was done.
As the pile of dismembered vines grew, the boy’s eyes burned with sweat and stifled tears and his hands looked like they had been held under boiling water.
The more he pulled, the more he bled, the more he blinked back tears, the more the boy felt that fiery sensation he’d felt twice the day before it spread down his spine. He thought of the woman on the magazine and the line on her stomach that made her look like her natural state was in pieces. He thought of the dog-headed aberration he had made manifest at the dark end of the trailer where his uncle slept. He thought of all the people he had been made to live with, and all the times his father had left him without saying goodbye, and all the times he came back without apologizing for being gone or just telling the boy what his goddamn work was in the first place. His eyes blurred over, and the boy could hardly see what he was doing.
He didn’t know how long he’d been tugging on the same vine. The weed stung his palms and rasped his wrists like the writhing tentacle of some subterranean monstrosity batting off an intruder not worth more concerted attention. The boy knelt down in the dust and reached both arms under the trailer for leverage. He pulled and nearly screamed when his hands slipped. A cobweb of blood, viscous and shining black in the moonlight, spread across the boy’s raw palms; he clenched his fists and went down on hands and elbows, crawling under the trailer to find where the vine met the dirt so he could rip it out by the root. His whole body was on fire, and he pulled himself along by the vine until he felt it disappear into a nexus of the shattered earth. Banging his head against the bottom of the trailer, the boy wrestled his knees under him. He grasped the base of the vine with both hands.
And then he froze.
Shadow lay a foot and a half from the boy, in one of the hollows where she napped in the heat of the day. Her great black eyes shifted from the vine in the boy’s hands to his red and swollen face, as if trying to puzzle out what Gordian knot he was trying to pull loose. The boy felt no rumble in his chest—not even the hint of one—and wondered why. He’d never been this close to the dog before without her warning him off. Not even his uncle got this close to Shadow.
Blood pounded in the boy’s ears as fitful sunlight crept into the space underneath the trailer. The dog’s shimmering eyes settled on the boy’s own, and for a moment it seemed that there was some elemental agreement between them—each knew what the other was about, even if neither could have known why. For that moment, each seemed to run through the other like water running through water. The boy let go of the vine. Knuckles settling in the dirt, he leant forward toward Shadow, studying his faint reflection in the dog’s eyes, tracing the lineaments of his own face.
By the time the man wrestled on one pant leg and slammed open the trailer door, Shadow had already dragged the boy halfway to the yucca bush. Vodka-bleared and barely awake, the man couldn’t say if it was the boy’s screams or Shadow’s wet and merciless snarling that first woke him. His jeans dragged in the dirt by one ankle as he sprinted to the hunched animal and the shrieking, flailing prey whose neck and shoulder were already a torn mess under the dog’s jaws. The last stars smoldered in the limpid sky and, the man saw, the boy’s eyes were staring upward as if searching for something.
—
He woke in the chill of that Sunday morning and shook out his jeans, still smattered with dirt and blood from the day before. When he tapped the boy’s chest, the boy didn’t wake up right away. He didn’t know if the boy was faking or dead tired or—hell, maybe—just dead. The man took him by his uninjured shoulder and shook, and the boy’s eyes opened into cloudy slits that betrayed the tears of the day before.
The man said he needed to show the boy something really important.
The boy’s swollen eyes opened wider and he stole a glance toward a stack of magazines down in the dark by the man’s bed.
“Get up,” the man said.
The boy wore only his own dirt- and blood-smeared jeans, apart from the makeshift bandage of Kleenexes and electrical tape that the man rigged up when the boy had grown still enough to bandage. The man would clean the wound and change the dressing when they had done what needed doing.
As the boy rubbed his sleep away, wincing at the pain of lifting his mangled arm, the man chose the morning’s takeaway box and held it out for the boy. The scrawny, sun-weathered creature looked from the box to his uncle and back to the box. He stiffened and started to back away.
“Take it,” the man said.
“No,” said the boy, but his voice betrayed more fear than resolution. The man didn’t respond. He held the box, still and implacable, until the boy took it.
No ground vines crunched under their feet, but the rusted hubcap was where it always had been. The boy tried to back away again, but the man was behind him, and he put his hand on the boy’s unbloodied shoulder and squeezed.
“No,” the boy said again. It was louder this time, but the terror of something inevitable still shook through the word.
The man himself had learned—in his own way, of course, but he learned as much as any boy anywhere had to learn. His fingertips made slight hollows in the skin of the boy’s shoulder. He jerked the half-naked acolyte toward that bent God, slavering over his contrived altar, whose gnashing of teeth augured the outer darkness in which the boy had to learn to walk. The boy shook, and the box crunched under his clenching fingers.
“No,” the boy begged. The man didn’t hear him. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The man pressed his nephew’s shoulder once more and eased him toward Shadow.
***
Cory Austin Knudson was born in Vacaville, California, but is a Philadelphian by choice and temperament. He is currently a graduate student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. While making his way through the collected works of Samuel R. Delany over the past year, he was moved to try writing fiction in addition to studying it, and he is delighted that his first short story has found a home at Touchstone. Cory's translations have appeared in Viewpoint and Doublespeak, and his co-translation of Georges Bataille's preliminary manuscript to The Accursed Share is forthcoming from MIT Press under the title of The Limit of the Useful. His occasional essays, as well as regular reviews of academic titles and books in translation, appear in Full Stop. Cory is indebted to Nancy Roane and Ivy Smyth for their thoughtful comments on an early draft of "Una cosa incognoscible."