The Best American Short Stories 2015 (59 page)

M
AILE
M
ELOY
is the author of two novels, two story collections, and a young adult trilogy. Her story collection
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
was one of the
New York Times Book Review
's Ten Best Books of the year. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award, the E. B. White Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was named one of
Granta
's Best Young American Novelists. Her stories have been published in
The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story
, and
Paris Review
. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and lives in Los Angeles.

• There are sometimes elements floating in the back of my mind that I want to use, long before I ever figure out how to do it. The story from the past in “Madame Lazarus” was one of those: I wanted to write about the strangeness of life in postwar France, where those who survived, whether they had resisted the German occupiers or collaborated, stayed out of the way or hunted the resisters down, were all living alongside one another. But I hadn't found a way in; it was too big and uncontrollable a subject. Then I started writing the story of a man trying to resuscitate a small dog, and I realized that there was space inside it for the other story, and they each made the other possible.

I also learn things about stories after they're finished. As soon as “Madame Lazarus” was published, I started getting letters and e-mails from friends and strangers about the deaths of beloved dogs. They were beautiful, heartbreaking stories, and I hadn't expected them. I thought the story was about human illness and aging, the breakdown and betrayal of the body (and, in the past, of a country). I thought those were the things people would respond to, but I was wrong. In the outpouring of grief, I realized that people's love for their dogs is very pure, when there's little in love that is pure. The responsibility for a dog is total, and the sense of failure when they die is enormous. Other loves are guarded—the character's love for his children, his ex-wife, his partner, the boy in the past, the housekeeper—but the love for the dog isn't, and his inability to save that one pure thing is at the heart of the story. Readers knew it when I didn't.

S
HOBHA
R
AO
is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories
An Unrestored Woman
. Her work has appeared in
Nimrod International Journal, Water~Stone Review, PoemMemoirStory
, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Hedgebrook and is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.

• This story is part of a collection that focuses on the Partition of India and Pakistan. I had been working on the collection for some time when I was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. While there—housed in a lovely cabin overlooking Useless Bay—I knew I wanted to explore a moment of terrifying conflict, and the choices we are forced to make during such moments. I also knew I wanted to write it in the guise of a relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young boy. I wanted the relationship between them to be platonic, yet intense. While walking along the shores of Useless Bay, the sentence “I was widowed long ago” occurred to me. I'm not sure why, or how, perhaps the wind, the shimmering water, the clouded glimpses of a faraway island. Still, it stayed with me, and I thought of all the marriages I have known, and of how, in so many of them, widowhood comes long before a death. It didn't seem sad to me, certainly not tragic: we mourn the people we have been, we mourn the people we are with, we mourn what the years have made us. It is life; it is the basic machinery of life. Once that aspect was decided, to put the woman and the boy on a train, to have that train attacked, to have the woman choose the boy over the husband, and then to have the train burned to the ground, all came relatively quickly. Violence, after all, is not difficult. Humanizing that violence is what is difficult.

J
OAN
S
ILBER
is the author of seven books of fiction, including
Fools
, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award;
The Size of the World
, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction; and
Ideas of Heaven
, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She's also the author of
The Art of Time in Fiction
. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.

• When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, I heard a radio report about older residents of housing projects who impressed volunteers with how well they managed without electricity or water. (My neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was in the dark zone, so I knew what they dealt with.) I began to think about self-reliance and the situations that call it forth, and the character of Kiki started to form. I had wanted for a while to get Turkey—a place I've happily visited a few times—into a story. And I wanted Kiki viewed by a younger female character, with her own ideas about risk and frontiers. Once I'd given Reyna a boyfriend at Rikers Island, I saw the story heightening. I wanted the two women to understand each other just fine but view each other across a great divide, where neither envies the other. I assumed “About My Aunt” was done when I finished it, but it has become the first chapter of a novel.

A
RIA
B
ETH
S
LOSS
is the author of
Autobiography of Us
, a novel. Her short fiction has been published in
Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Harvard Review
, and
One Story
, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in New York City.

• I am not a natural storyteller. By which I mean narrative—the spine around which a story is built—does not come easily to me. Construction is slow, laborious, feasible only after I've scored some image or scrap of dialogue with a thousand tiny lines, trying to see if it will bleed.

In this case, I got lucky. A few weeks after my daughter was born, I picked up Alec Wilkinson's
The Ice Balloon
, an account of the nineteenth-century inventor S. A. Andrée's ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole via hot air balloon. I was bone-tired, half-drunk on hormones and joy. In other words, primed. For days, that image dogged me: a balloon fueled by ambition, sailing over Arctic tundra.

Not long after, my husband went back to work. My days retained their strange new softness, the baggy shape of time delineated by feeding, washing, and soothing. Men leave, I told a friend, incredulous. Women can't. Patently false, but I had my blood. Not long after, I sat down and began to write.

L
AURA
L
EE
S
MITH
is the author of the novel
Heart of Palm
. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best
, as well as
New England Review
, the
Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou
, and other journals. She lives in Florida and works as an advertising copywriter.

• I really like cars. I don't know much about them, but I grew up in a family where most of the men loved and worked on cars, and I married a man who shares that passion. I wanted to write a story about a car, and I remembered that when I was much younger—twenty-one? twenty-two?—I almost bought a used Corvair. I had money down on it and everything, but my father talked me out of it, citing the instability of the car's rear-engine design. We argued about it. It was a beautiful old car, white with a red-leather interior, and I wanted it even though I knew it might be unsafe. In the end I lost the argument, and the kind lady who had taken my deposit gave me back my $200. I ended up buying a Dodge Challenger (what a name!—another car story one day, perhaps), but I never forgot that Corvair. So when I started playing with ideas for a car story I decided to give that latent desire for a Corvair to a character and see what would happen. Once I had Theo on the road, moving southward through the Florida heat on a quest for this car that he unreasonably, irrationally wants, the story started to tell itself. In reading up on some of the car's details, I stumbled across the infamous Ralph Nader judgment that the Corvair was “unsafe at any speed.” I thought it would make a great title.

J
ESS
W
ALTER
is the author of eight books, most recently the novels
Beautiful Ruins
(2012) and
The Financial Lives of the Poets
(2009) and the story collection
We Live in Water
(2013). He was a National Book Award finalist for
The Zero
(2006) and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for
Citizen Vince
(2005). His fiction has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney's, Esquire
, and many others. He lives with his family in Spokane, Washington.

• “Mr. Voice” grew out of that first line:
Mother was a stunner
. Sometimes a line just pops into your head, like a song lyric. You know it's right, so for once in your life, you don't tinker with it. You stare at it, try different second lines, walk around wondering,
Who said that?
Then the characters start to come into focus: a girl, her beautiful mom, Claude. I'd wanted to write a story for a while set in the early to mid '70s: home intercoms,
Wild Kingdom
, waterbed stores, and the 1974 Spokane World's Fair. It was one of those stories that kept surprising me as I discovered a bit more of it every day—
Oh, so she turns out to be . . . Ah, then he is . . . Right, so they are . . 
. I have two daughters and when I got to the end of the first draft and wrote Tanya's line (“Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are”) I realized that's what I wanted to tell my own daughters and, sentimental goof that I am, I started crying.

A
CEVEDO
, C
HANTEL

Strange and Lovely.
Ecotone
, no. 17

A
CKERMAN
, E
LLIOT

A Hunting Trip.
Salamander
, no. 39

A
HMAD
, A
AMINA

Punjab: The Land of Five Rivers.
Normal School
, vol. 7, issue 2

B
ASSINGTHWAITE
, I
AN

Reichelt's Parachute.
The Common
, issue 8

B
AXTER
, C
HARLES

Sloth.
New England Review
, vol. 34, nos. 3–4

B
AZZETT
, L
ESLIE

Studies in Composition.
New England Review
, vol. 34, nos. 3–4

B
ELLOWS
, S
IERRA

Buffalo Cactus.
Gulf Coast
, issue 2

B
ERGMAN
, M
EGAN
M
AYHEW

Romaine Remains.
Agni
, issue 79

B
RAZAITIS
, M
ARK

The Rink Girl.
Ploughshares
, vol. 40, no. 1

B
ROCKMEIER
, K
EVIN

The Invention of Separate People.
Unstuck

B
ROOKS
, K
IM

Hialeah.
Glimmer Train
, issue 91

B
RUNT
, C
HRISTOPHER

Next Year in Juarez.
Ploughshares
, vol. 40, no. 4

B
YERS
, M
ICHAEL

Boarders.
American Short Fiction
, vol. 17, issue 58

C
ARLSON
, R
ON

One Quarrel.
zyzzyva
, no. 100

C
ASTELLANI
, C
HRISTOPHER

The Living.
Ploughshares: Solos Omnibus

C
HAON
, D
AN

What Happened to Us?
Ploughshares
, vol. 40, no. 1

C
LARE
, O
LIVIA

Quiet! Quiet!
Yale Review
, vol. 102, no. 4

C
ROSS
, E
UGENE

Miss Me Forever.
Glimmer Train
, issue 91

D
IAMOND
, J
ULIE

Debt.
narrative

D
OBOZY
, T
AMAS

The Tire Swing of Death.
Able Muse
, no. 18

D
UPREE
, A
NDREA

New Brother.
Ploughshares
, vol. 40, nos. 2 & 3

D
URDEN
, E
A

The Orange Parka.
Glimmer Train
, issue 91

E
VENSON
, B
RIAN

Maternity.
Ploughshares
, vol. 40, nos. 2 & 3

F
REEMAN
, R
U

The Irish Girl.
StoryQuarterly
, 46/47

F
RIED
, S
ETH

Hello Again.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 3

G
ILBERT
, D
AVID

Here's the Story.
The New Yorker
, June 9 & 16

G
OODMAN
, A
LLEGRA

Apple Cake.
The New Yorker
, July 7 & 14