The Best American Short Stories 2013 (51 page)

“No.”

“Huh. Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”

She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and
shush
into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of the cards and thinking, knowing that she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.

“How’s the job coming?”

“Not great.”

“Motivational issues?”

“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”

Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split into two distinct pieces. There was the part where Skyler was alive, where his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now there was this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that all of his life up to this very point existed only in the past, which meant that it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture, next to Skyler.

It was dark and cool in the barn, and August switched on the radio for company. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d risen early, before Lisa, even, and he hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. He could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.

The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms—tabbies, calicos, some night-black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spat, slightly awed, thinking about the night before and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish-white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked toward the rafters, where there was a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist, so that it dangled there like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.

He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked, the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.

Just think about it. All things considered, is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story
.

August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. As he worked he pushed the cats into the conveyor trough, and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look, but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow, or the next day, his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.

It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and, as he pounded, the last one was already stiffening. Dawn struck as August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom, he stopped and listened. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, but he knew that his father and Lisa would be up soon. He leaned the board against the coat rack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.

August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He’d never got the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch, he wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move, but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.

D
ANIEL
A
LARCÓN
is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and
Lost City Radio
, which won the 2009 International Literature Prize. He was named one of
The New Yorker
’s 20 Under 40 in 2010, and his new novel,
At Night We Walk in Circles
, will be published in October 2013.

•  I’ve spent the last seven or so years working on a novel, so most every story I’ve published in that time began the same way: it was meant to be part of the bigger book, but somehow outgrew its confines.

I think of these as sketches for the novel, and in the case of “The Provincials,” there’s quite a lot of overlap: this piece and the novel share a protagonist (Nelson), an obsession (acting), a troubled relationship, a father, an absent brother, a dreary coastal town. When the play began I knew it wouldn’t be part of the book, but I wanted to follow the story and see where it went.

C
HARLES
B
AXTER
is the author of five novels and five books of short stories, most recently
Gryphon: New and Selected Stories
. He has also written two books of literary essays,
Burning Down the House
and
The Art of Subtext
, published by Graywolf. He was the editor for the Library of America edition of Sherwood Anderson’s stories. He teaches at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis.

•  The city of Prague is haunted by the armies that have invaded it, by Catholicism, and by Franz Kafka, among other presences. I visited the city three years ago and in one of its chapels had a jolting experience that led directly to this story. That memory found itself grafted onto a scene I had already witnessed in downtown Palo Alto, where some teenage girls riding in a car were taunting some boys standing together at a street corner. But the core of the story grew out of a quarrel I had thirty-four years ago with my wife about who would feed the baby. I never forgot that quarrel because it seemed telling to me. Everything else in the story is the essential brick-and-mortar of invention, the imaginary, and the possible.

M
ICHAEL
B
YERS
is the author of a book of stories,
The Coast of Good Intentions
, and two novels,
Long for This World
and
Percival’s Planet
. He directs the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

•  As tends to be the way with my stories, I set out to write one thing and ended up with something seriously unrelated, which may be why “Malaria” didn’t quite come together for a long time. I had most of it in hand, including the ending, but was stymied by what should happen after George went crazy and before Orlando and Nora went back to visit him again. I tried a dozen avenues, none that went anywhere.

Sometimes when I’m late in a story that’s dead-ended like this, I’ll poke around in the story’s bag of emotions to see what I’ve got along with me—joy, envy, sorrow? Sometimes I can actually burrow under to the originating impulse of the material—the Platonic thing the story was before it got linted-up with particulars of character, setting, and so on—and tug something useful out into the light. In this case, I finally flashed that the story wasn’t about Orlando and Nora as a couple but about Orlando himself. Once I got him alone, then put him on the tennis court with a bunch of strangers, I knew I had it right. Like most simple things the fix seems stupidly obvious in retrospect, but it took forever to discover.

J
UNOT
D
ÍAZ
was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of
Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
—which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize—and
This Is How You Lose Her
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Díaz is a recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize. A Rutgers University graduate, he is the fiction editor at the
Boston Review
and a founding member of the Voices Writers Workshop (
http://voicesat vona.org/Home.html
). The Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he splits his time between Cambridge and New York City.

•  I’d been trying to write “Miss Lora” for nearly seven years. As is usually the case with me, the story just wouldn’t come together. I tried it in first person and in third person, as a journal, a series of letters, a confession, but nada. Nevertheless I stayed on it, producing lame draft after lame draft. What made the difference finally was a trip that I took with some of my boys, and one night in a club in Bayahibe some of them started opening up about how their first sexual relationships were with these older women in the neighborhood and that just broke the last pinion, gave me the permission I needed to get it done.

K
ARL
T
ARO
G
REENFELD
has written six books, including the novel
Triburbia
. His fiction has appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
, the
Paris Review, Ploughshares, Playboy, Commentary
, the
Southern Review, One Story
, PEN
/O. Henry Prize Stories
, and a previous edition of
The Best American Short Stories
. His nonfiction is widely published and anthologized. Follow him @karltaro or visit
karltarogreenfeld.com
.

•  When I was a freshman in college, our dormitory was what had once been a mansion, now subdivided into doubles. My roommate was digging around in the back of our closet one day, and in a narrow alcove behind a stud he found a small devil’s head sculpted from clay. We didn’t know what to make of this and after studying it, we left it where it had been. I don’t recall being frightened by it. We assumed it was something planted by previous students. But I obviously remembered the little totem and found it noteworthy.

I wrote “Horned Men” in the fall of 2009 and submitted it to about fifty journals over the next two years. It was turned down by every single journal you’ve ever heard of—including
Zyzzyva
—and many that you haven’t. Finally, hearing that
Zyzzyva
had changed editors, I re-sent it and this time it was accepted.

G
ISH
J
EN
’s new book, based on a series of lectures she gave about writing and culture, is titled
Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self
. She is also the author of four novels—
World and Town, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land
, and
The Love Wife
—as well as a collection of stories,
Who’s Irish?
Her short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic
, the
Paris Review, Granta
, and numerous anthologies, including
The Best American Short Stories of the Century
, edited by John Updike; she has also written nonfiction for the
New Republic
, the
New York Times
op-ed page, and other publications. Grant support has come from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other sources. She received a Lannan Award for Fiction in 1999 and a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. In 2009, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

•  The origins of stories are always murky for me. No doubt my own parents were on my mind when I wrote “The Third Dumpster.” They never viewed assisted living as an option for a million reasons, starting with the food; and it’s true that I felt that the older they got, the more clearly you could see how difficult it was to have come to America—what an opportunity it was, but what a price they had paid in terms of connection and community. How, though, did this feeling—a feeling that I’d had for at least a decade—suddenly become story material? How did it suddenly become funny? Painfully funny, of course, but nonetheless funny. Liberatingly funny.

I don’t know for sure. As it happens, though, I wrote a little about the writing of this story in my recent book,
Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self
, speculating that one day at my computer, I simply found myself in a more Asian frame of mind. There is evidence to support this idea. For example, the Chinese author Lin Yutang observed in his 1935 classic,
My Country and My People
, how the Chinese are given to a farcical view of life, with “Chinese humor . . . consist[ing] in compliance with outward form . . . and the total disregard of the substance in actuality,” and certainly this describes Morehouse’s approach to the problems he and his brother face. It is an approach Goodwin adopts too, from time to time, cloaking his desire for independence so transparently—“And the elevators! Didn’t they just make you want go up?”—that he, and we, find it funny. But probably the story behind the story was that I myself had hit some tipping point in dealing with my own real aging parents, where I needed to “throw off the too heavy burden imposed . . . by life,” as Freud puts it, “and win the high yield of pleasure afforded by humour.” That’s to say that I wrote this story because I myself needed to laugh and had somehow found a way to do that.