Your Repayment Eternal (Two Necks)
1.
The hangman arrived home two necks richer—one man sentenced for murder and the other for rustling—and heard a whistling in the air. It was the half-competent kind his father used to make in the mornings before the drunkard hollered at the wrong woman on the wrong porch and had half his teeth knocked out. When the hangman stuck his fingers behind the loose lath that the wind passed under to form the sound, his fingers met a foreign object instead of hollowness: a hidden sheath of papers held together with twine.
My desire for you is desperate, one of the letters read. But you have already chosen the wrong suitor. I wish I could let you go, but my heart remains a pesky traitor that clings to its want. I await the day when yours swings toward mine. The day you come into my arms.
The script was beautiful, each loop precise enough to pass for the product of a printing press. And most perfect of all were the enormous letters forming the signature of the man writing these messages to the hangman’s wife, the love-words shameful enough to end up hidden in her marital walls. The hangman knew the name, despised it: one of two bankers in town, this one arriving in the last year from his fancy home out on the coast.
The hangman recalled when he and his wife began sparking, the two walking side-by-side through town. It felt like a straight line from those fledgling days to the moment he asked for her hand and she gave it without question. He recalled the pride thrashing wild in his chest when he showed her the shanty he put together with his own hands, her squeal of ecstasy that gave reason to the world.
Fire raged through the hangman’s body, as if dry brush and a match had been dropped into his blood. When his wife agreed to be his wife and spoke the words I do, he hadn’t realized she meant I do until a banker comes along.
She arrived home as the sun grazed the horizon. “It gets chilly so fast these days.” She kissed the hangman on the cheek; winter sank into his blood. Through the haze of fury, a loving piece of him begged for a way out. Confess, his thoughts urged as his wife took a knife to potatoes and carrots. Tell me about the letters. Tell me how silly they are, how you hid them just so we could laugh at them.
“How was your day?” Her voice danced from word to word.
That’s what the hangman had first fallen in love with. He heard her speaking from the other side of the door to the general store and knew he needed to kiss the neck that produced such treasure.
“We had to switch the rope. It delayed us by an hour.”
“What was wrong with the first rope?”
The hangman took a seat in the corner, stared at the back of his wife’s head. “I thought you were going to watch today.”
“I had to drop off a letter. Maybe next time.”
When night fell and the two laid together in bed, the hangman whipped his thoughts until they frothed. His father always told him that the world was full of dogs, that a real man knows how to command their teeth, make them fetch and heel with nothing but a word.
Through the dark, the banker’s features glowed scarlet. A creaseless forehead. Thin lips, all teeth. Animal features passed down from old lords and barons. The wind whistled—through another opening, another crack—and the hangman clutched his wife close.
#
In the late evenings, everyone knew where to find the banker. He took his dinners at home before a winding walk through the dusty streets, a route that hadn’t changed since he first arrived in town like a burst of gold. Always nodding to passersby, always checking his gleaming watch.
His face cracked into a grin when he saw the hangman approach. “It’s good to see you, my friend.” The banker spoke as if constantly on the dissolve, a cloud sighing as it melts to rain.
“Evening.”
“Your next payment … is owed in two weeks? Do I have that right?”
The hangman nodded, sucked down the urge to punch this man in the teeth. If you make it that far.
They stood on the edge of the main street, the banker on the sidewalk and the hangman on dirt. Pinpoint stars poked through the night-fabric, just like they did when the men first met, when one mistook another’s hunger for kindness. How simple things were then. How comfortably the borrowed bills sat in the hangman’s pocket, only to be fretted away within months: funneled into bartenders’ pockets, into the building of a shanty when he could no longer allow his wife to live under a mud roof. Gone was the lavish loan; in its place rose the crushing interest.
“I was wondering,” the hangman said. “If we might delay this next payment, only for a week or two.”
“Hard times?”
“It’s always survival season.”
“People might start to think that I’m easy to take advantage of.”
“I’m only asking for a week or two, enough time to put some affairs in order.”
The banker turned his gaze upward, the performance of a man seriously considering an ask. He even kept his hands behind his back as if physically tied. “Things are tight all around, and I’m depending on your payment. A promise is a promise, after all.”
In secret, the hangman was glad. He had given the banker a chance, one final opportunity to earn his mercy. And the dog had bared his teeth.
A tip of the beast’s hat, a wave. “Give your wife my regards, friend.”
The hangman wanted to laugh as the banker returned to his unchanging path down the street. How sweet it was to hold the gavel for once, to bring it down without guilt. Under different circumstances, the hangman might have felt pity for the damned thing. This poor soul had no idea that every one of his cruelties was a kindness, each insult another bullet in the weapon of his own punishment.
#
The crowd at the banker’s hanging was nothing, a morsel compared to the hollering flock that gathered the first time the hangman tied a rope around a neck. That first man was nothing but fear. His throat quivered like the surface of a drum when the braid met his skin. If only the banker would react the same—and allow the hangman his rightfully earned satisfaction—but the man remained unmoved while the death-knot tightened under his chin.
Scraping together enough money to pay off a false witness had been no simple feat. Standing in front of his wife’s parents, hat in hand, the hangman had never felt so ashamed in his entire life. He had gone to the banker in the first place for a reason: anything to avoid crawling to his father-in-law and begging him not only for the loan, but to keep the binding shame a secret from his own daughter. It had since become clear that there existed worse beings to be indebted to. Better a father-in-law than a devil in yellow.
Much easier was paying off the killer. One of those petty criminals with a hole in their wallet and the itch for opium. All it took was a fistful of cash, a rusty blade, and a finger pointed in the direction of the home of the other banker in town. Little was known of this other banker’s history, a recluse of many years whose lips had never been spotted beneath a bush of a mustache, but a banker was a banker. How many honey-trapped loans had this man given out, how many wives stolen? When gifted the opportunity to not only rid this world of one scourge but a pair, it was a man’s duty to carry out justice. And what a pretty symmetry. How better to pay for one banker’s death than with another?
The banker stared above the crowd. In the dying light, his blonde hair nearly resembled a crown. The hangman briefly wondered if the banker knew that the man responsible for his framing and the man with his hand on the lever were one and the same. But men who walked so high in the world could never fathom the movements of those beneath.
“Any last words?”
The banker didn’t speak. It would be appropriate for this to end with silence. It had all been so simple: a scream tearing through town when a young lady spotted the body through a window, a false accusation—and a fable about the greed-infected banker driven to violence against his only competition in town—dripped into the sheriff’s ear, the judge handing out the sentence through a hacking dry cough. For all his wealth, this town of survival-scrapers held little love for a man of means so far from home. It would all end without a fuss—only the whimper men like this deserved.
Then the light changed, and the banker turned to his executioner. The rope seemed to extend forever, a frayed line connecting this man to the heavens.
“You should have stuck to what you know.” That dissolving-cloud quality again, an exhale of water. “You are an excellent hangman. But you are no banker, and you are no collector. You have not wiped your debt, but instead scattered it into many pieces, and it is now impossible to ever resolve them in full.” The banker smiled, a million suns for teeth. “You have made your repayment eternal, my friend. And a banker always collects.”
The lever pulled easy, an extension of the hangman’s arm. A gasp, a snap as the rope straightened to its vicious length. The crowd applauded.
The body turned in a lazy circle as the wind kicked up. Arms and legs dangled. Although there was no logic to it, the hangman stared at the body and watched for a twitch, a sign of life persisting. He had grown up on tales of monsters who had to be killed once, twice, three times for death to take, and the hangman was prepared to finish the job with his bare hands if necessary. In the stories, it sometimes even took a prayer. May your soul never find the peace of settlement, may you toss and turn and boil.
#
His wife was already seated on the bed when he returned home. The hangman wondered how the math of her affection had played out at the hanging, whether her grief at her near-lover’s death overwhelmed her relief at her husband’s freedom. He sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder—the formation they used to know so well when they were still learning each other’s give and take and would spend hours sitting on her family’s porch.
She opened her mouth as if to speak; a lump formed under the skin at her throat. The hangman studied the edges of that budding confession, waited for it to rise and spill into sound. But his wife was not made of gossamer. She swallowed the shape down whole, and the revelation disappeared into her folds. Yet where her mouth failed to let out the truth, her eyes succeeded. A dewy look, then wetness. Her skin was clear in one moment, and in the next, streaked with tears.
He put his arms around her, pulled his wife close. In that warmth, he forgave her for clinging to the secret of those letters, for any remaining affection still attached to the dead man. Although temptation called, he had struck down the beast for both of them. His wife’s unhappiness wet his shirt, and he was at peace. No husband could expect his wife to be strong where he was weak.
2.
CAST
LILY. A wife-to-be, Taiwanese, 26 years old.
ASHER. A husband-to-be, Caucasian, 33 years old.
BYRON. A golden retriever who has seen better days.
SETTING
A modest dining room, present day.
A kettle whistles. Its whine builds to a fever pitch, then dings to signal boiling point.
Lights up on LILY sitting at a dining table, a pile of papers spread in front of her. ASHER enters with a steaming mug. He takes the chair opposite of his wife-to-be and rips open a tea bag, which he steeps for thirty seconds before removing the used bag and wrapping it in a tissue. LILY watches with veiled disgust.
ASHER picks up one of the papers.
ASHER
How’s the little fucker?
LILY
He wants pizza. All meat, no vegetables. Thin crust, for some reason.
ASHER
Can he wait until all the restaurants open up for dinner?
LILY
I don’t know. Let me ask him.
LILY lifts her shirt to reveal a swollen stomach. She rubs it like a crystal ball. ASHER laughs.
LILY
He’ll allow it just this once.
BYRON enters. He shuffles toward the dining table and places his head in LILY’s lap
LILY
Aw, it’s okay. I’ll come in a second, Byron. I’ll be right there.
ASHER
He looks less tired today. Look at his eyes.
LILY
Good boy. Good boy.
ASHER
Doctors get these prognoses wrong all the time. My childhood dog was supposed to die in the summer, and by the time he finally kicked it, the roads were all iced over.
LILY
I just want our whole family to be together, just for a day. The husband, the wife, the baby, the dog—that’s the dream, right?
ASHER
Remember when he could still jump?
LILY
(laughing)
How many nightmares did I have about chocolate? My mom asked me what scares me the most when I was visiting her last weekend, and the first thing I thought was forgetting to put the Hershey’s on the top shelf.
BYRON gets bored. He shuffles offstage.
LILY
Won’t have to worry about that soon.
ASHER squints at the paper in his hand.
ASHER
I think we only have to decide about him now.
LILY
He might not even make it if we broke up tomorrow.
ASHER
I know, I know. We just have to write it down, honey.
LILY
Okay.
ASHER
Which one of us gets him.
LILY
Seems like you already have an idea.
ASHER
Well. Technically … I bought him.
LILY
So?
ASHER
(beat)
Remember how I was obsessed with cowboys as a kid? Well, the other kids were obsessed with cowboys, but I was obsessed with the world of cowboys. All that open land—lawless, godless. Whoever grabbed the land owned it. You put up a fence, stick a sign on the border, and it’s yours.
LILY
We’re supposed to take our cues from cowboys now? Maybe we should go all the way and get married like them: spurs, boots, cow shit. Halfway through, someone bursts through the saloon doors and shoots the officiant dead.
ASHER
I’m just saying—purely for this piece of paper—let’s keep it simple.
LILY
Didn’t I give you money for Byron? Since you were short on cash that day? And actually, I was supposed to go with you, but I had to do something at the last minute, remember? Groceries, or something?
ASHER
Honey, I don’t mean to be—I’m just saying my name’s on the adoption agreement.
LILY
I know that.
ASHER
Okay.
ASHER grabs his used tea bag and exits. .
LILY
Just throw it out.
ASHER is gone for thirty seconds, then a minute, then more. LILY remembers how lovestruck she was when she met ASHER at a party. She told all her friends that she liked the way he thought. The way he looked when he thought. Like there was an idea-cloud mushrooming in his head. It never got better than the day she proposed to him in this very room. When she dropped to one knee after dessert, that familiar buzz of thought clouded his eyes. Then his mouth dropped in a shock that transformed into joy, and that movement of epiphany was the most handsome he had ever been. A man so sturdy, so hellbent, only thrown off course by a single woman in the entire world.
But the speaking comes after the thinking. Sometimes still beautiful, sometimes not so much.
ASHER re-enters and takes his seat.
ASHER
I left it in the bottom drawer of the fridge. You won’t notice it.
LILY
Sure thing.
ASHER
Look, we’ve been at the prenup all day. I just wanted to make it easy—
LILY
Did we look at the mortgage already? We need to do that too, right?
ASHER
Let’s save that one for tomorrow.
LILY
I won’t be able to sleep if we don’t figure it out today. It’ll sit in me, physically. Whenever my dad told me not to go to sleep angry, my mom always said that it’s worse to go to sleep with an unopened bill in the kitchen. It just hangs there, like a guillotine, and you’re staring at its edge all night, and then suddenly it’s morning and you didn’t get any sleep. And all you had to do was pay the bill.
ASHER
You get used to it at some point.
LILY
But you pull all-nighters all the time.
ASHER
I meant the bills, honey.
LILY
Can we just agree to not decide about Byron? It won’t matter.
ASHER
But it might, it might. It’s for our peace of mind. We work through the logic now, and we never have to think about it again.
LILY
I just don’t think you’ll like the conclusion we come to.
ASHER
(beat)
Oh?
LILY
Who bought all of Byron’s toys? Whose money? Whose time?
ASHER
That’s not—
LILY
The cloth ropes, the squeaky balls, the plushies, the—
ASHER
You know that was after I got him some toys to start with, when I bought—when we first got him.
LILY
Two bones. Two.
ASHER
He doesn’t even need all those extra toys. They’re nice, but you can’t … you can’t …
LILY imagines that ASHER’s head is a ripe watermelon. This habit started when ASHER was late for LILY’s ultrasound and she had to sit in the waiting room alone, nothing but the wall to support her. She imagined taking a baseball bat to his seed-and-water face, his chunks falling to the floor and forming a sugary apology on the tile.
More recently, she has saved this image for the times ASHER wields poverty like a weapon, when he excuses his stingy habits by reminding LILY of the trailer he grew up in, his so-called parents who gave him beatings instead of an allowance. She tries to remind him that things have changed, but he won’t. He tells her that she’ll never quite understand the movements of those beneath, and sometimes he can hardly bring himself to pay for a car wash, and LILY watches his skin turn tropical green.
LILY
I know you don’t like spending money on anything. I know. You act like there’s a chastity belt on your wallet, like every dollar is a day off your life. And I get it; don’t start. But if Byron—our baby—has to go with one of us, which one do you think is going to give him the better life?
ASHER
We’ve both taken great care of him.
LILY
But we’re talking about which one of us would do better alone. That’s what this is. If it were up to you or me alone.
ASHER
So you should get the dog because you grew up with money and I didn’t.
LILY
You act like you have a disease. But the excuse doesn’t matter. What matters is who gives him his baths. Who takes him on walks? Scoops up his shit?
ASHER
Lily.
(beat)
If we broke up …
LILY
What?
ASHER
You know you wouldn’t have so much time to spend with him. You wouldn’t get to stay at home.
The world stops.
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—
LILY
Fuck off. Get to? You pushed for it. What do you think I’ll be doing at home all day? Taking salt baths and touching myself?
ASHER
I don’t think I pushed for it. I didn’t mean to start this, but that isn’t true.
LILY
What world do you live in? Thank God prenups don’t include babies. Seriously, how can you give me all the responsibility and want all the credit? When the baby comes out, fully formed inside me, will you rip him off the umbilical cord so you can carve your name on the bottom of his foot? Byron isn’t property to me, and I would take care of him and the baby and the whole planet on my own if I had to.
ASHER
Just don’t say that I chose for you; I couldn’t choose anything for you if I tried. That’s why we worked in the first place, but now you want it both ways. You can’t be this helpless wife-victim-thing and also this strong, independent dog-messiah—
LILY
Honestly, why write the prenup at all? It’s for all the stupid what-ifs, if everything goes wrong and we end up despising each other, right? So if there’s no if about it, then what’s the fucking point?
ASHER
See? See? You make everything an apocalypse. No detail about me is safe. No word, no joke, no silly habit.
LILY
Silly habits? Like the way you stuff our fridge with used teabags?
ASHER
(exploding)
If I don’t, they go to fucking waste!
LILY remembers something her mother said a week before she died. She told LILY of a common Taiwanese belief—LILY wasn’t sure if it really came from Taiwan or her mother’s imagination-soup—that the universe has a God, and its name is debt. According to this belief, when a person dies indebted to another, they are bound to them through repayment. In the next life, they will give birth to their creditor, or perhaps be birthed by them. Perhaps they will be brothers together, or else sisters. In some cases, they will marry each other. In one form or another, their lives converge, and through such convergence, all dues are settled.
LILY looks at her husband-to-be and wonders what they promised in another life to end up like this, which of them owes the other. She wonders if they will still love each other when there is nothing left to settle.
A clatter from offstage. LILY and ASHER look in the same direction and gasp.
ASHER
Byron, no!
LILY
Asher!
BYRON shuffles onstage with a Hershey’s chocolate bar wrapper in his mouth. He drops it at LILY’s feet like a gift, chocolate smeared all over his mouth.
ASHER rushes offstage.
LILY
What did you do? What did you do, baby? The whole bar? All of it? No no no …
ASHER
(offstage)
Bottom shelf?
LILY
Top! Top right!
ASHER re-enters with a dark bottle and kneels next to LILY and BYRON.
ASHER
Honey.
LILY
Got it.
ASHER hands the bottle to LILY, who twists off the lid with a violent jerk. ASHER places his hands between BYRON’s teeth.
ASHER
One, two—
ASHER pries BYRON’s mouth open. He thrashes, howls, and LILY empties the contents of the bottle into his mouth. She places her hands on ASHER’s, and they force BYRON’s mouth shut together. As he flails, saliva and dissolved chocolate splatter everywhere. LILY and ASHER press their foreheads against BYRON’s. The three rock back and forth together, ASHER and LILY’s whispers melting together.
LILY
It’s okay. We just have to get it out of you.
ASHER
Good boy. Good, good boy.
LILY
We’re with you, baby. I know, I know.
ASHER
Shh, it’s alright. Good boy. I’m so sorry.
LILY
I love you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
ASHER
It’s okay. I know, honey. Let it out. Let it go.
The lights fade. LILY and ASHER’s whispers become indecipherable. They stroke BYRON’s fur together, their faces buried in his golden coat. When he whines, LILY and ASHER hold him in their arms.
Mini-interview with Andrew Zhou
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
AZ: Maybe around fourth grade, I was given a creative writing assignment in school to write a short story over the weekend. Just a few pages. I ended up writing non-stop through all my free time and showed up to school with such a ridiculous number of pages that my teacher gave up on the stapler and used a three-hole punch to fit the story into a binder. When we got our grades back, he clearly only ended up reading the front page of my odyssey before moving on. Fair. These days, getting into a flow state with my writing often seems impossible, but it’s comforting to think I still have it in me somewhere, that I found the perfect process once. No second-guessing or coffee shops or special software or constant stop-starting—just a school laptop and endless words coming out of me at the dinner table.
HFR: What are you reading?
AZ: The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I’ll be starting Bliss Montage by Ling Ma next.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Your Repayment Eternal (Two Necks)”?
AZ: I’ve been thinking about how much the ways we interact with the world and other people are governed by debt, ownership. How possible is it to love each other beyond the terms and conditions set out for us by the world, beyond the constraints that hang over the rest of our lives? When my mom visited my new apartment in Boston and told me the belief at the center of this story—how repayment might take the form of proximity—then proceeded to save a used teabag in her purse while the song Tyrant from Beyoncé’s new album played through my ear buds, this story appeared in my mind nearly fully-formed.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
AZ: I’m finishing a queer body-horror story about a high school wrestler. I’m also kicking around a few ideas for future stories including one about a cowboy (I’m not particularly into Westerns, but cowboy-adjacent imagery has really captured me as of late). Hopefully, I’ll also get serious about a full-length novel soon. We’ll see!
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
AZ: Free Palestine.
Andrew Zhou is a queer Chinese writer and medical device engineer who grew up in the Minneapolis area but currently resides in Boston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Foglifter, Faultline, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. Find him at zhouandrew.com.
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