The Best American Short Stories 2014 (54 page)

 

O. A. L
INDSEY'S
writing appears in
Iowa Review, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, Fourteen Hills, Columbia
, and
Yalobusha Review
. He holds an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in southern studies from the University of Mississippi. Lindsey lives in Nashville.

• I spent years trying to ignore my combat experience, and then years trying to write about it. I failed at both. For many of us, there's a catch with Operation Desert Storm, 1991: nothing much happened, perhaps, but whatever did happen still shades your thoughts most every day. (The best thing I ever read about Desert Storm was Aimee Bender's “The 20th-Century War Veterans Club.” I mean, she nailed it.) Ultimately, thankfully, I chose to pursue different war stories, such as the tectonic roles of female soldiers, or the impact of nonstop media. I also refocused on the mundane postwar assaults, e.g., what it was like to go from logging SCUD missile strikes to delivering Papa John's pizza—and being worried sick about screwing up the latter. So that's the gist of Evie's story: a nontraditional soldier faces the barrage of postwar pinpricks, and the anxiety related to each.

 

W
ILL
M
ACKIN
is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. His writing has appeared in
DIAGRAM, Tin House
, and
The New Yorker
. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children and is currently at work on a collection of short stories titled
Task Force Blue
, due out in 2015.

• I'd spent years trying to join this particular unit. Once I joined I never wanted to leave. It was everything I'd imagined: that rare place where I got to do my job with almost zero interference. Downsides were that failure was catastrophic, personally and professionally, and the pace. If I wasn't training to go on deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, then I was elsewhere in the Third World on an unrelated contingency. Regular deployments in support of big-name operations provided, paradoxically, opportunities to refocus and regroup. The deployment on which the events of this story are based was, however, the exception. I never really got my bearings. I made rookie mistakes. I dreaded calling home because I didn't know what to say. I couldn't sleep. Night after night became one long exercise in crisis management.

During one of those crises I fell asleep on my feet and somehow got into an argument. The body odor of the guy I was arguing with seeped into my dream the way a ringing phone will, and it woke me up. I remember looking at this guy, who despite lack of hygiene in other areas always used product in his hair. He was so mad his hair was jiggling. With hindsight I think of the rage I saw in his face as the thing that kept that unit, and its mission, going. But at the time I didn't know what to think. I excused myself, saying something like “I need to get back to work,” though I never really did. From that moment on, I wondered how much longer I could stay. Meanwhile packages arrived from the Netherlands at regular intervals, and Levi's disavowal of his childhood favorite struck a chord.

 

B
RENDAN
M
ATHEWS'S
stories have appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 2010
and in
Virginia Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Five Chapters, Glimmer Train
, and other magazines. He teaches at Bard College at Simon's Rock and in fall 2014 will be a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Cork, Ireland. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and their four children.

• This story may not be a love song, but it is a love letter of sorts to the city of Chicago, where I lived from 1992 to 2003. It's where I met my wife, where my oldest daughter was born, and where I started figuring out how to drag stories out of the margins of my notebooks and into the world. This one in particular lurked on my hard drive for years. In one draft, Kat and her brother were the central characters; their back-and-forth arguments filled fourteen pages. In another version, Kat and Milo were a couple (their arguments filled only eight pages). The story wasn't going anywhere. Then, late in 2011, I was invited to give a reading at Y Bar in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I was asked to talk about writing, and rather than lecturing a bar full of friends and strangers on the finer points of writerly craft, I decided to read a busted story and talk about why it wasn't working. With the reading approaching, I gutted and stitched up the draft du jour (then titled “Badges, Posters, Stickers & T-Shirts”) and gave it its first public airing. The draft was a mess, but I left that night knowing that the story had a chance. The breakthrough came when, in a mad rush, I wrote the scene where the narrator finds Kat sick in the bathroom. I finally knew what she was willing to do—and what I had to do—to make this story work. I had plenty more to figure out, but that scene gave me what I needed: a point of view. For the final sprint to the finish line, I give credit to Jon Parrish Peede at
VQR
, who asked all the right questions and pushed me to find the ending that had long eluded me.

 

M
OLLY
McN
ETT
lives on a farm in Oregon, Illinois, with her husband and children. Her book
One Dog Happy
won the 2008 John Simmons Award for short fiction from the University of Iowa Press, and her stories have appeared in
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New England Review, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Fifth Wednesday
, and many other journals. Thanks to the composer Robinson McClellan and the rogue pastor Mike Shea for their help on this story.

• I was writing a contemporary story in which a high school choir director falls in love with his student's beautiful voice, but I was a little anxious that it might seem like an episode of
Glee
. One day I found a textbook on singing, with a brief history of vocal instruction that mentioned Jerome of Moravia and his theory of
la pulchra nota
, or teaching from the perfect note. Why not set the story in a time when this theory might be applied? In my research I came across a diary of a man who lost his whole family within a month, and his trust in divine providence at each death was deeply touching to me. I wanted the voice teacher to have that kind of faith, though I can't claim to share it or even fully understand it.

 

B
ENJAMIN
N
UGENT
is the author of
Good Kids
, a novel, and
American Nerd
, a cultural history. His essays have appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
and on the op-ed page of the
New York Times
. An assistant professor at Southern New Hampshire University, he teaches creative writing at the undergraduate level and in the low-residency MFA program. He divides his time between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Brooklyn, New York.

• Last year, one of my best creative writing students, Megan Kidder, a well-mannered girl from rural Maine with dyed black hair, a silver nose ring, and a studded belt, dropped by my office. “I wrote a poem about how this one guy prematurely ejaculated,” she said, “and he told his frat brothers about the poem and now they call me God. They're like, ‘Hey, God.'” A few days later, I was pacing, whispering things, and the first sentence of “God” presented itself. It took the perspective of one of the boys. I didn't think about how that perspective might open or foreclose storytelling possibilities. I just liked the way it fell into iambic pentameter: “We called her God because she wrote a poem,” and so on.

I can write lyrically only by accident. Whenever I think “I'm going to sit down and write some poetic lines about my characters now,” the result is hideous. That's why I like to write about frat boys. I never expect their lives to lend themselves to lyricism.

In its plot, “God” is a bit like
The Sword in the Stone
, which was my favorite movie when I was seven. It's Disney's adaptation of T. H. White's novel
The Once and Future King
, itself an adaptation of
Le Morte d'Arthur
. At the time I didn't think of my debt to Malory but rather to Megan Kidder. It was as if she had stepped from a mist-crowned lake and handed me a sword.

 

J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES
is the author most recently of the novel
Carthage
and the story collections
High-Crime Area
and
Lovely, Dark & Deep
. A longtime faculty member at Princeton, she has been visiting professor at the University of California–Berkeley, at which time the story in this volume, “Mastiff,” was written, as well as visiting professor at NYU in 2014. In 2011, she was awarded the President's Medal in the Humanities and, in 2013, the Lifetime Achievement Award of PEN Center USA.

• “Mastiff” grew out of a protracted and arduous hike undertaken by my husband and me in Wild Cat Canyon near Berkeley, California, in March 2013. The relationship between the (initially unnamed) man and woman hikers is not unlike, but not fully identical with, the relationship between the actual hikers, on that actual hike. The scientist who is also a photographer—this is a type with whom I am intimately acquainted, though the individual in “Mastiff” is not in fact—not actually—my husband, a neuroscientist-photographer with hiking skills and a strong sense of what should, and should not, be done on the trail. And the giant, threatening dog that becomes the very emblem of death, against which some sort of human bond must be the protection, as thin woolen gloves are some sort of protection, however inadequate, against the freezing cold—this terrifying creature too sprang from that actual hike on Wild Cat Canyon Trail. So vivid was the experience, and so intense the emotions (felt by the writer/hiker), it was not difficult to find a language in which to “tell the story”—though it should be reiterated that “Mastiff” is fiction, whatever its wellsprings in actual life.

 

S
TEPHEN
O'C
ONNOR
is the author of two collections of short fiction,
Here Comes Another Lesson
and
Rescue
, and two works of nonfiction,
Will My Name Be Shouted Out?
, a memoir, and
Orphan Trains
, a biography/history. His fiction and poetry have appeared in
The New Yorker, Conjunctions, One Story, Missouri Review, Poetry, Electric Literature, Agni, Threepenny Review, The Quarterly
, and
Partisan Review
, among many other places. His story “Ziggurat” was read by Tim Curry on
Selected Shorts
in October 2011 and June 2013. His essays and journalism have been published in the
New York Times, DoubleTake, The Nation, Agni
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Boston Globe, New Labor Forum
, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence. For additional information, please visit
www.stephenoconnor.net
.

• In all likelihood “Next to Nothing” would never have been written if it weren't for Hurricane Irene. I spend weekends and vacations just under three hours northwest of New York City, in an area particularly hard hit by the storm. Our house was spared, fortunately, but on either side of the shoulder of land on which it is built, massively engorged streams of red water roared through culverts like spumes from gigantic fire hydrants. At the height of the storm, the entire valley we overlook became a red sea, with huge waves and frothing pink “whitecaps.” And I really did stock up in advance of Irene at a supermarket, from the parking lot of which one can look out across a valley big enough to hold an entire county—and, in fact, parts of two or three others. But the real inspiration for the story came from an image that just popped into my head of two sisters with black pageboys and eyes of such a pale blue that they were almost the color we sometimes imagine the moon to be. The image wasn't entirely static. I saw the sisters from the shoulders up, rocking slightly, as if they were walking—or, more likely, lumbering. I also understood, maybe as a function of their freakishly pale eyes, that this pair would be entirely lacking in what is sometimes called “fellow feeling.” They would be extremely intelligent and absolutely rational, but have no emotional attachment to any human being—not to their parents, their children, or each other, and not really even to themselves. I had probably gotten about a page and a half into my first draft when it occurred to me that there was a parallel between the sisters and nature—which is also consummately rational and absolutely indifferent to human concerns. And thus it was that I decided that my protagonists should confront Hurricane Irene.

I am an atheist and the child of atheists. For as long as I have been able to think in such terms, I have always tried to anchor my beliefs in reason and fact. Starting sometime in adolescence, however, it became clear to me that certain things I want desperately to believe simply cannot be justified by rational interpretations of fact. Is romantic love real, for example, or only a sentimental delusion? Does it make any sense at all to say that human life is sacred? As a result of this realization, I became aware of the paradox that, atheist though I may be, I too must live by faith—not in spiritual terms, but in the sense that in order to be a happy and decent human being, I must cherish “beliefs” that can never be verified. Much of my writing over the years has explored the absurd and possibly delusory nature of many of our most essential values. And when I decided to have the Soros sisters confront a hurricane that shared a name with one of them, I knew that I would be able to explore the significance of our absurd beliefs through negative means—that is, through a pair of protagonists in whom they are entirely lacking. Beyond that, I had no clear idea of what course the story would take, and I intentionally tried to keep myself off balance by making each new segment of the story go off in a direction I hadn't anticipated. While I knew for a long while that the Soros sisters would end up in floodwaters, I had no idea what would happen at the climax until I was actually writing it. And I still have no idea what happens at the very end of the story—or at least what would have happened in the two or three unwritten sentences that might have followed my final line.