The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (52 page)

B
RET
A
NTHONY
J
OHNSTON
holds degrees from Texas A&M Corpus Christi, Miami University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of
Corpus Christi: Stories
and the editor of
Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.
He's on the core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he's the director of creative writing at Harvard University. More information can be found online at
www.bretanthonyjohn-ston.com
.

▪ In an ideal world, I would have the composed restraint to lay out, in a pithy and revelatory paragraph, how "Soldier of Fortune" came to be written. I would also position myself as totally unaffected by the story's inclusion in this anthology; I would have you believe I'm jaded to this kind of thing, maybe even a little resentful of having been asked to write such a paragraph because doing so would be a distraction from my Very Important Real Work. I would come off as serious and enigmatic, intimidatingly so. Brooding, too. I would definitely be a brooder. Or I would leave you with the impression that I don't much care for this story—"That old thing? I wrote it in an hour! I had one hand tied behind my back and both eyes closed!"—and you, in turn, would be struck by my aloofness, my authenticity and smarts, so struck that you'd buy multiple copies of my books. (You'd want spares lying around for folks who visited, but you'd also be worried about thieves and fires. You'd keep extra copies of the books at your office and in your car, just in case.) The problem, though, is how embarrassingly excited I am about this news, and how my embarrassing excitement has pretty much wiped from my memory every piece of data relating to this story except, of course, that it's been selected for the anthology. Honestly, right now, I hardly remember writing it. I know I wrote it when I was, to quote Flannery O'Connor, "on vacation" from writing a novel, and I know the whole story came from a chunk of the first line, the chunk about Holly's family having lived across the street from the narrator's for all but two years. I have no clue about the origin of that line; I'd been walking around with the sentence in my head for as long as I could remember. But then, on my vacation from the novel, those missing two years really started to needle me, and because they were so conspicuous in the sentence, I suspected I'd find a story if I went digging around in that pocket of lost time. So I did. Then, once the narrator's friend revealed himself to be an aficionado of camouflage pants, I bid on and won (!) a copy of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine from eBay. The magazine was from 1986, so that became the year the story takes place. And the year got me thinking about Reagan, et al. And somewhere in here I remembered this horrible thing that happened to an elementary school friend's younger brother, an accident involving water and a microwave oven. The name Hensley comes from the skateboarding legend Matt Hensley, although the fact that the name Matt also appears in the story didn't register with me until much later, after the thing was published. There's also an embedded reference to a song by the band Tool in the story. Would it be weird or ill-advised to admit I'm not nearly as convinced about the geology teacher's relationship to Sam as other folks seem to be? If you've never been to a truck stop in Texas, you should know that hats like the one Holly buys Sam for his birthday do exist. I lived, for much of my youth, across the street from a very nice family with a collie and an aboveground pool, and I went to the high school with a mustang for a mascot; I tried to get a joke about the statue's staggering anatomical correctness into that scene, but couldn't make it work. The story was revised upwards of ten or twelve times, and it's severely indebted to Linda B. Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown over at
Glimmer Train.
I'm also deeply indebted to them, and to Heidi Pitlor and Geraldine Brooks, and to eBay seller Guntimes007, for whom I should have obviously left much better feedback.

C
LAIRE
K
EEGAN
was raised in Ireland. Her first collection,
Antarctica
(1999), a
Los Angeles Times
Book of the Year, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize.
Walk the Blue Fields
(2007) was published to huge critical acclaim and won the Edge Hill Prize. "Foster" won the Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford. The story was abridged for
The New Yorker
and published in its original form by Faber & Faber. Keegan lives in rural Ireland.

▪ The story began with the image of the girl's hand reaching over the water. That stayed in the back of my mind for a long time. And then I started thinking about the well we used at home. People always said that the water from the well made better tea. The well wasn't on our land but down from us in a field called Byrne's Lawn. Remembering how it felt to go down there to fetch water, I made a start. Then I was given a deadline, switched, and finished another story. Winter came and I went for a walk on the strand in Wexford with a friend of mine. There were two lights on the water when we came up across the dunes. By the time we were leaving, he noticed three. I went back to the story in the new year, wrote the walk into the text, and found the character of Kinsella. Maybe I wanted to write about a man who has lost his son. I knew little except that it needed to be written from a child's point of view and, later, that it would have to take place in summer. At no point in the writing of the story did I have clear feelings about where the story was going, much less how it would conclude.

S
AM
L
IPSYTE
is the author of the story collection
Venus Drive
and three novels:
The Ask
, a
New York Times
Notable Book for 2010,
The Subject Steve
, and
Home Land
, a
New York Times
Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Open City, The Paris Review, n
+
1, The Quarterly, Tin House, Noon
, and many other places. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Lipsyte lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

▪ This was one of those stories that took twenty years but also happened very quickly. I tried to write a version of it when I was right out of college. It was unbelievably awful. All the fiction I wrote then was awful, but I recall being especially disappointed because I could feel the charge of this piece, hear the rhythms, see the images. I just wasn't ready to transmit. I tried several drafts and showed it to some people, even though I knew already it was dead on the page. The story remained a stern reminder of how much of writing is failure. The percentages don't necessarily improve.

But somehow I got lucky with this one. Two decades later I was sitting at the computer wrestling with a new story, although
wrestling
is probably too macho and romantic a description of what I was doing. What I was doing was more like grooming a corpse for visitors. Eventually I shut off the machine and sat there in disgust. What I usually do in this situation is stand and pace, or distract myself with music or coffee or books, or else just lurk at a window and mutter obscenities. Instead I clicked open a new blank document and, without thinking about it, typed a first sentence. The words were different, but I knew exactly what I had written. My old story had returned to me. I want to say it came rushing out but it was more like a calm, steady stream. I can only think of the long life cycles of certain cicadas, the way they spend most of their seventeen years buried. "The Dungeon Master" just needed to gestate.

R
EBECCA
M
AKKAI'S
debut novel,
The Borrower
, was published in June. This is her fourth consecutive appearance in
The Best American Short Stories
, and her short fiction appears regularly in journals including
Tin House, Ploughshares
, and
New England Review.
She lives north of Chicago with her husband and daughters.

▪ This story was five years in the writing, and it changed more in that time than anything else I've done. (Suffice it to say that at one point it was called "Frost" and was about, among other things, buying babies at the supermarket.) Two elements stayed constant throughout its long and painful genesis, however: the character of poor Peter, who had forgotten how to act, and the sense of aching loss.

When I started the story, I was at that point in my twenties when I realized that the adult world to which I had worked so hard to acclimate myself was in fact changing and disappearing. I felt this transformation around me in Chicago: two local icons, Marshall Fields and the Berghoff, went up in smoke at around the same time (although the Berghoff has since reinvented and reopened), while the Art Institute hid its armor upstairs and put its crown jewel, Marc Chagall's
America Windows
, in storage. And I felt it in those people whose entire lives and personalities changed before my eyes, just when I thought I had them all figured out. (As I write this note in March, I'm saddened that even Drew's NPR is now fighting for its life.) I wanted to write about the metamorphosis of one person—someone around whom the narrator's adult personality had grown like a vine—whose existential crisis would seem, to his friend, like a crumbling of the entire known world.

It should be noted that Rob Spillman of
Tin House
edited this story under the most heroic of circumstances. Shortly after his hand was badly injured when a water-filled light fixture fell on it, I e-mailed him to say (rather hormonally, I fear) that my C-section was scheduled in a week, and if he wanted anything changed, he'd better act fast. Between the two of us—he typing one-handed, I separated from my desk by an enormous belly—we managed to get it done.

And speaking of miracles of artistic collaboration ... I realize that the event Drew coordinates would be impractical and even financially irresponsible, but nevertheless I hereby challenge the Art Institute of Chicago: make it happen, and I'll be your first volunteer.

E
LIZABETH
M
C
C
RACKEN
is the author of
Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry
(stories),
The Giant's House
and
Niagara Falls All Over Again
(novels), and
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
(memoir). She is at work at another novel and is currently the James A. Michener Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

▪ "Property" happened.

The characters are entirely made up, but the house isn't, and neither is the plot. I'd been living in Europe; I was supposed to come back to the States for a job; someone died; my husband and I delayed our arrival by several months; when we arrived, the house was in a bad state. The picture of Pablo Picasso was of another famous twentieth-century figure, in a field relevant to the actual landlord, but the mess: that's true, from Teddy Gra-hams to condom wrappers to disgusting bathmat. Nearly a year later, we moved out and went away for the weekend and received a series of phone calls from the landlords, who were genuinely bewildered that we'd thrown out their old spices. Suddenly the insult of the filthy house months back was fresh again, and in a fury I began to write this story.

Not till I got to the end did I realize the truth: Our landlords loved their house. They loved their broken things. They even loved their sticky elderly grocery store spices. It was incomprehensible to them that we did not love these things too. I don't think I would have realized that had I not written the story; even now, I would still be muttering about the salad spinner.

As a younger person I wrote nearly nothing that was particularly autobiographical. This is, I think now, not because I was philosophically opposed to it nor because I lacked material. What I lacked was the ability to work myself into a tizzy about everyday things: my passionate feelings were reserved for things deserving of passion, most of which were enormous and abstract and therefore hard to make into interesting fiction. Though there's a buzz of grief behind this story (as there was everywhere at that moment in my life), what prompted the actual writing of it was a landlord-tenant dispute. Not a love affair, not a death, not a birth. I suppose I'm grateful that the story helped me understand them, but still, I would like to make it clear: my motivation was not connection, but revenge.

S
TEVEN
M
ILLHAUSER
is the author of twelve works of fiction, most recently
We Others: New and Selected Stories
(2011). His stories have appeared in
Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's
, and other publications. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

▪ For a long while I wanted to write a story about a phantom woman. It never came to fruition, for reasons I can only guess at. One day, unexpectedly, a different kind of phantom story appeared to me and dared me to write it. The story "Phantoms" is the result of that dare.

R
ICARDO
N
UILA
is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, where he works as a primary-care doctor, a hospitalist, and an educator. His first published story appeared in the
Indiana Review
and was listed as "notable" in
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010.

▪ After this story was published, some colleagues, friends, my dad, asked me, "The main character's name is Ricky and he's a doctor: is this autobiographical?" The most autobiographical aspect of this story is that I concussed myself while playing Wiffle ball. I had come off a difficult call where I'd spent the night dealing with a septic patient. I got home and drove immediately to my friend's bachelor party and joined in a game of Wiffle ball. I played first base. Someone hit what amounted to a bunt, the pitcher fielded it, tossed it my way, and I caught it, only my head was in the path of the runner. I didn't lose consciousness.