The Best American Short Stories 2014 (53 page)

 

T. C. B
OYLE
is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including his collected stories,
T. C. Boyle Stories
(1998) and
T. C. Boyle Stories II
(2013), as well as the forthcoming novel
The Harder They Come
. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is writer in residence at the University of Southern California, where he founded the undergraduate program in creative writing.

• As if we didn't have enough to worry about in a world ruled by chance and festering with terrorists, Walmart outlets, and mutating diseases (and the scaremongers of the press to keep it all fresh for us, 24/7)—now we have to look to the sky as well. I wrote “The Night of the Satellite” while wearing a crash helmet and flame-retardant suit, certain that the decaying NASA weather satellite adduced in the story was going to defy all odds and come hurtling through the roof of my house to pin me like an insect to the concrete slab in the basement. Again, what next? We are kept in a state of perpetual anxiety along the information highway, and I wonder, really, how much good it's doing us.

That said, this is a story, like many of mine, that slams two scenarios together in order to see what the result will be. As a student at Iowa I was the guy on that country road while the “lovers' quarrel” played out before me, and I've wrestled for many years with the notion of personal responsibility—mores—in view of the larger picture. Chance brought Paul and Mallory to that road on that day and to the darkened field at night. There is cosmic debris out there (as in my earlier story “Chicxulub,” which deals with the comet that resulted in the mass extinctions of 65 million years ago) and manmade junk too, and the most we can hope for is to duck it, or, to quote Calvino: “You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.” Still, we are grounded and we live our tribal lives in a state veering from placidity to agitation, everything personal and interactive, and the earth is our home. Woe to those bleeding sheep, woe to our relationships, woe to us all! Indeed, you never can tell what's going to come down next.

 

P
ETER
C
AMERON
is the author of six novels, including
The City of Your Final Destination
and
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
, and three collections of stories. His fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Yale Review, Rolling Stone, The Paris Review
, and
Subtropics
. He has worked for the Trust for Public Land and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, and the New School. He lives in New York City, where he runs Shrinking Violet Press, a small private press that publishes limited-edition chapbooks.

• I rarely write short stories these days and so go about it differently from when I was a young writer and ideas for short stories came to me frequently and unbidden. Now I have to set myself some kind of assignment or problem to solve in order to call forth or jump-start a story, and hope that this forced inception won't adversely affect the finished piece—that the story will transcend its deliberateness. After all (I tell myself), some arranged marriages are happier and more successful than those unions formed by passion or romance.

In the case of “After the Flood,” I set out to write a story based upon the not-very-original notion of a home or a family being disturbed or altered by the sudden presence of strangers. A story about what happens when people who aren't meant to live together live together. And it occurs to me now that perhaps all the stories I write are about that.

 

N
ICOLE
C
ULLEN
was raised in Salmon, Idaho, and earned an MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas–Austin in 2011. She was the 2011–2012 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2012–2014 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Boise, Idaho.

• I wrote the first draft of “Long Tom Lookout” in 2010 during the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That summer I drove from Texas to Idaho, but the news coverage of the oil spill made it hard to leave the Gulf of Mexico in the rearview. I was researching wildfires when I came across two stories: a bit of folklore about the drowned miner Long Tom, who was too tall for his casket, and a 1993
Post Register
article about a woman working as a fire lookout on Long Tom Mountain with her two young sons. A few weeks later, while visiting the Lochsa Historical Ranger Station, I was able to get my hands on an old Osborne Firefinder, and the story started from there.

 

C
RAIG
D
AVIDSON
is the writer of
Rust and Bone, The Fighter, Sarah Court, Cataract City
, and a forthcoming collection of stories that will include “Medium Tough.” He also writes horror fiction under the name Nick Cutter. He lives in Toronto with his fiancée and their son.

• I've always been interested in broken characters. Mine are often physically broken, in addition to their attendant emotional pains (I like 'em good and beaten down!): boxers with chronically brittle hands, whale trainers with gnawed-off legs, that kind of deal. Dr. Railsback falls into that tradition. But I also like characters—really, I like
people
—who just keep on trucking despite whatever cosmic belittlements and mockeries life throws at them. There's that Hemingway line about bones being strongest at their broken point . . . I don't buy that. I'm sure it's true in a physical sense, but the whole “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger” jazz doesn't carry water with me. I think what doesn't kill you can make you weaker and more frail and fearful, but despite that fact most of us still summon the will to carry on after life breaks us in the little ways life tends to—carry on to do good things, to tamp down those weaknesses when we can, and in our best moments, do right for others. Jasper Railsback and Penny Tolliver and the other broken people in this story are the kind of characters I find myself drawn to over and over. I can't say why. A therapist probably could, but I can't afford one.

 

J
OSHUA
F
ERRIS
is the author of three novels, including
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
, published in 2014. His first novel,
Then We Came to the End
, has been translated into twenty-four languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ferris was chosen for
The New Yorker
's 20 Under 40 list in 2010. He lives in New York City.

• A lot of people don't understand how I could have written this story, or any story, or anything at all, on my phone. The phone is cumbersome and represents, in the life of the mind best exemplified by the writing of short stories, pretty much everything that's soulless and antagonistic. There's the prevailing notion that if a story (or a novel) can be written on a phone, it must not have been very hard to write, and so can't possibly merit the attentions of the reader. Some people are threatened by it, because the written story is already no competition for the smartphone, which makes the smartphone the unintegratable enemy; and if just anyone can use the phone to doodle away, how far are we from the elevation of texts and tweets into high literature? That would be a galling attack on a conservative tradition. But I did use my phone to write this story, which means I sat hunched over its torture screen and tiny little keyboard for however long it took—two or three weeks of steady work—and when I was done had the knotted shoulder, the crimped neck, and the carpel tunnel to prove it. Writing fiction on the phone, compared to the tranquility of computer-composing or the gentlemanly custom of pen and paper, is a full-contact blood sport. Why do I write under these conditions? Do I not have a desk, and a comfortable chair to sit in, and several empty notebooks waiting? I must like the pain. I must find it fitting. But the real answer is this: I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you why I write at all.

 

N
ELL
F
REUDENBERGER
is the author of the novels
The Newlyweds
and
The Dissident
, as well as the story collection
Lucky Girls
. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of
Granta
's Best of Young American Novelists and one of
The New Yorker
's 20 Under 40. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

• I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school when I had an idea about a mother who could fly. By “fly,” I mean occasionally lift off the ground in an awkward, unplanned way, a miraculous skill that would be absolutely useless to her. That's what motherhood often feels like to me. I've never written a story with a supernatural element before, and I found that it allowed for a certain distance from the details of daily life that made them flexible enough for fiction. There was also a very compelling boy in my daughter's class, by the name of Jack, with a strong attachment to a bag of white flour.

 

D
AVID
G
ATES
is the author of the novels
Jernigan
and
Preston Falls
, and
The Wonders of the Invisible World
, a collection of stories. “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me” is the title story of a new collection, to be published in 2015. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars.

• This story came out of an image I don't remember myself: a friend with whom I played in a band for many years told me he first saw me onstage in a coffeehouse in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1965, playing mandolin while wearing a full-length cast on my leg. I was a high school kid then. The mandolin player in the story has some superficial resemblances to me—the cast, the day job as a writer at
Newsweek
—but I've never been much of a mandolin player: improbable legends would hardly have accrued around me as they did around him. His TR-6, by the way, actually belonged to a fellow student of mine at Bard College, who played in a rock-and-roll band with me; I've never forgotten riding with him once from New York City up the Taconic State Parkway. The mandolin player's death shares some details with the death of my father, and like the story's hero-worshiping narrator, I kept chickens at one point. The rest of the story is invented—that is, patched together from this and that bit of memory and fantasy. Like my narrator, I'm over-immersed in nineteenth-century British novels, but I've been to Yorkshire only by way of Google, and I've never aspired to write about
Wuthering Heights;
any proper nineteenth-century scholar is welcome to take the title of his book,
Cathy's Caliban
, and run with it. In a passage I cut from the story's final version, the narrator is at work on a second book, about
Mansfield Park
and
Bleak House
, to be called
Castles of Indolence
. That is a project I can imagine taking on—though perhaps in another life.

 

L
AUREN
G
ROFF
is the author of a short story collection,
Delicate Edible Birds
, and two novels,
The Monsters of Templeton
and
Arcadia
, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Her stories have won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Prize and have appeared in magazines, including
The New Yorker
,
The
Atlantic, Tin House, One Story
, and
Ploughshares
, and in the 2007 and 2010 editions of
The
Best American Short Stories
. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

• A story arrives in me either as a flash or as a slow underground confluence of separate fixations. This story was of the second type. I have lived in north-central Florida for eight years and have struggled with the place the whole time: my overwhelming love for aspects of Florida is balanced with an equal and opposite dread. I believe, also, that fiction writers should read as much poetry as they read fiction, and this story showed itself at a time when I was reading John Donne's (astonishing) “Holy Sonnet 7” every morning. This is a poem capable of wrecking a writing day or filling it with light. Thanks to John Donne's long-moldering bones, there is no copyright, so here it is:

 

At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow

Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise

From death, you numberless infinities

Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;

All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,

Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes

Shall behold God and never taste death's woe.

But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,

For if above all these my sins abound,

'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace

When we are there; here on this lowly ground

Teach me how to repent; for that's as good

As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon with thy blood.

 

R
UTH
P
RAWER
J
HABVALA
was a German-born screenwriter and novelist. She was the author of twelve novels, eight short story collections, and twenty-three screenplays. Known for her work with Merchant Ivory Productions on such films as
Room with a View
and
Howards End
, she is the only author to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. Jhabvala died at the age of eighty-five on April 3, 2013.