The Best American Short Stories 2015 (58 page)

• For most of the fighters I know, the period following a loss is its own little identity crisis. If you're the winner, the fight doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know, which is that you're a great fighter, a fighter of destiny, possibly the best ever. The loser has to choose between finding some way to continue believing those things, or else confronting a reality where those things are not and never will be true. This is a choice that can be put off indefinitely, in one way or another.

There's an added layer of difficulty for fighters who've been knocked out. They often don't remember how the fight ended. Sometimes the whole fight—even that whole day—is wiped from their memory. It's a chunk of time that is incredibly important, that exists for everyone else who saw it and who will treat them with the appropriate amount of sympathy or pity or contempt, and yet for them it's gone, lifted straight out of their brains, retrievable only via video replay. Particularly when it's one single blow that does it, a part of them feels like it didn't really happen. There's this sense of injustice. They know this isn't the right result. It can't be.

For this story, I started with that character in mind—a fighter on the downslope of his career, confronting a changing reality, a changing body, a life where a lot of doors have been closed that can't be reopened. From there I added the familiar mix of self-pity and self-medication, followed by a situation that almost invites violence. The awful thing for fighters is that they're so adept at and familiar with violence, they recognize how unfair it is for them to use it on regular people. It's like being a wizard, but being forbidden to use your powers to resolve your personal problems. It's terrible, really. For someone already at a certain point, it might feel like there's nothing worse.

A
RNA
B
ONTEMPS
H
EMENWAY
is the author of
Elegy on Kinderklavier
, winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award and finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His short fiction has appeared in
A Public Space, Ecotone, Five Chapters
, and
Missouri Review
, among other venues. He's been the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently assistant professor of English in creative writing at Baylor University.

• I am a little embarrassed to admit that I don't remember actually writing this story. During the mild and rainy October of 2011, my daughter, Bluma, was born. For the first month of her life she had extreme difficulty eating, and I had to wake up every hour and forty-five minutes to feed her with a syringe. The ensuing sleep deprivation was unlike anything I've ever experienced. I remember being incapable of contiguous thought. I remember feeling like, once the border between sleep and waking had dissolved, time was collapsing into itself, until I was somehow inhabiting the past and the present at once. Somewhere in there, I knew I had a story due to my graduate workshop, or I risked failing.

At the time, I was doing intensive primary-source research into the Iraq War (and specifically, the experiences of those soldiers allegedly involved in atrocities). In the dissociated hallucinations of my sleepless state, my research, my memories, dreams, and present reality became somewhat indistinguishable from one another. It was just then that I learned about the U.S. military's strategy of re-creating whole Iraqi villages in the Mojave and elsewhere, and hiring real Iraqi expatriates to play out complex psycho-behavioral profiles faked by various intelligence training units. I started going on long walks, even as I watched a soldier explain that his memory of the After Action Report had somehow replaced his memory of the actual events, even as I was trying to get my daughter to take the syringe. Somewhere in there, I must've been writing too, because on the day it was due, I showed up to class with this story, more or less in its current form, in hand.

But the deeper truth is that this story exists purely via the superhuman grace of my wife, the love of my life, Marissa. The real wonder here is of course her, who managed to juggle a newborn and a husband who was slowly losing his mind, with enough strength left over to somehow, somehow, in the midst of all this, point to my office and say,
I'll stay up, I know you can do it, I believe in you: now get to work
.

D
ENIS
J
OHNSON
is the author of several novels and plays, as well as a volume of stories and one of nonfiction articles and two books of verse. He lives in North Idaho.

• I ran across the phrase “the largesse of the sea maiden” in an English translation of a Persian folktale some years back. The words seemed mysteriously linked to a moment from my youth, when a woman sang a song to me—just me—in a bar in Seattle. In 2007 I asked a class I was teaching to write a story in two pages or less, and the first section of this tale was my own attempt at the assignment. Over the next several years I tinkered with other such vignettes, and one day they came together in a sort of arrangement.

S
ARAH
K
OKERNOT
was born and raised in Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in
Crazyhorse, Front Porch, West Branch
,
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
,
decomP magazinE
, and
PANK
. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the writer Juan Martinez, and their son. Sarah is the program coordinator at 826CHI, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center. She is currently at work on a novel.

• I was living in rural Pennsylvania, reading a lot of late Chekhov, and I wanted to try my hand at something tender and subtle. I was concerned with the unpredictable and even darkly comical situations that can arise from past trauma. But the story didn't begin there. It began with the ending—a man picking up a woman's dress shoes as he followed her into the woods at the edge of a field. I wrote my way backward from those woods. Also, ever since meeting Izzy the camel in Waitsburg, Washington, I was determined to include a camel in a story.

V
ICTOR
L
ODATO
is the author of the novel
Mathilda Savitch
(2010), which won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His stories and poems have appeared in
The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review
, and
Southern Review
. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new novel,
Edgar and Lucy
, is forthcoming.

• “Jack, July” started with body language as much as with voice. I could absolutely picture Jack's way of moving down the street—and I realized pretty quickly that I was dealing with a person reeling from some kind of intoxicant. In Tucson, where I lived for many years, you'll often see someone marching down the road or standing at a bus stop with this very odd, twitchy behavior. Of course, meth is everywhere in Arizona. The neighborhood in which I lived slid quickly from working class to something a little more provisional. Coming from a working-class family, I find myself drawn to these sorts of characters: characters who appear to have less armor and artifice. Somehow their exhaustion seems to unmask them.

I never know where I'm going when I begin a piece, and in this story, since I'd stumbled upon a character who also had no idea where he was going, both physically and mentally, his state perfectly mirrored my own. Because of Jack's heightened state of mind, I felt free to go a little crazy, to edit myself less as I wrote—and in doing so, I ended up in some unlikely places.

The beginning of this piece rides on an absurd, almost comic wave. Then the past enters the picture, and the story opens to its true intentions. Jack's intoxication and eventual crash mirror the story's journey from a kind of aching zaniness to a deeper heartbreak. I always knew that something unhappy was near, but like Jack, I circled it, hovered above it for as long as I could, until the weight of it had to intrude.

C
OLUM
McC
ANN
is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the 2009 National Book Award for his novel
Let the Great World Spin
. “Sh'khol” is featured in his new collection,
Thirteen Ways of Looking
.

• We sometimes forget that the construction of a house, or a cottage, or a hut, or even a cathedral, begins with the smashing up of rocks. There's so much between the original sledge blow and the placement of the very last brick. It's the same with stories, of course. Now that “Sh'khol” is in place, I find it hard to remember when I first started swinging the hammer.

One can find beginnings in numerous places, of course, but I recall being at a reading in 2010 and a woman in the audience asking me why I was so obsessed with parents losing their children. I had no good answer for her. I have never lost a child and, at that stage, never even lost a parent. But it struck me that the language of my attempted reply was hampered by the fact that there was no single word for a parent who had lost a child. Odd, given that the English language has (depending on how you classify a word) anywhere from a quarter-million to a million words, and the fact of losing a child is such a deeply traumatic event. Do we not have a specific word precisely because it is so harrowing? This lack of a proper word seemed like an almost hymn-singing absence.

I began to ask people if they knew of an exact word that might work. Most languages failed. There was a phrase in Sanskrit and I learned later that there were words in Arabic as well, but I thought the Hebrew word
sh'khol
was the closest. It was so deeply onomatopoeic as well, with the
sh
implying silence and the
khol
having a distressing sharpness. I hungered to build a story around it.

There were other things I wanted to explore as well. I have long wanted to write about Ireland's dwindling Jewish community, especially in the context of the collapse of the economy there. Also, I had begun to hear a lot of stories about autistic children and the difficulties parents were having with adopted children. What fascinated me was the unknown history: how whole lives get absorbed into new landscapes and indeed new mythologies. I also wanted to sneak in a few references to other countries, so while the story was to unfold in the West of Ireland, it also takes place in Russia and the Middle East, all stories funneling themselves into one story.

So, all of these things became a collision of obsessions.

Still, the trouble with fiction is that it often makes too much sense, and we allow our obsessions to narrow themselves. Characters with their conscious actions, plotlines unrolling themselves in inexorably stable ways, everything neat, ordered, controlled. You always want to keep the critical heckler alive in yourself. I found myself wanting to write a story that would be grounded in action, but still elusive, tenebrous, and certainly unfilmable. Nothing is ever, eventually, found out.

Funnily enough I think it's one of the first times I've put a mobile phone in a story. I wanted to see how I could get rid of the furniture of the modern world.

E
LIZABETH
McC
RACKEN
is the author of five books, the most recent of which,
Thunderstruck & Other Stories
, won the 2014 Story Prize. She teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

• Years ago, I was noodling around on a novel about a woman who disappeared from a suburban street, and I wondered where she might have gone to. This was the kind of idle wondering that is really procrastination:
maybe I'll come up with something more interesting than the book I'm working on now
. One of the possibilities: a cult in Canada, centered around a girl who'd sustained a traumatic brain injury, whose mother declared her a saint.

That idea stayed in my head, faint but persistent, a song I couldn't quite remember. More than ten years later, I was on leave from my teaching job, trying to finish a collection of stories. I was writing at a great rate, story after story. Not since I'd been in graduate school had I had the thought
Need to work on the next thing, but what, what?
Toward the end of the semester, I remembered the brain-injured girl, but now—having become a parent myself in the years that had passed—I was interested in the parents. Generally I know the shape of a story when I begin it, but this one I didn't, which is possibly why it's so long. It was the last story I wrote in the collection.

Also, I once had a French personal trainer named Didier who did take an inexplicable dislike to me, and I am delighted to have my revenge in these pages.

T
HOMAS
McG
UANE
is a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters, a National Book Award finalist, and the recipient of numerous writing awards. His stories and essays have appeared in
The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays
, and
The Best American Sports Writing
. The author of fifteen books, he lives with his family on a ranch in Montana.

• I started out with some vague ideas about the energy industry, about a more pastoral version of the West, and about the skills learned through agriculture, and how they would finally clash. This was in danger of remaining pretty abstract, pretty ideological, not to mention uninteresting until occupied by human beings, characters I had on hand; and my feeling for the country I was talking about. The energy industry and its taxation on the earth is concentrated in specific places. The extraction of oil from shale through fracking has befallen parts of North Dakota and Montana. Its profits are astronomical. Few dare to stand up in the face of this tidal wave of money. The arrival of hookers, drug gangs, and gunmen in guileless prairie towns and their credulous boosters has been unspeakable. You need to see such broad things through the eyes of individuals in order to make plausible fiction. As usual, this often calls upon a writer's capacity for finding voices for the voiceless. Nothing new about that, but it can be a challenge when, as in the case of “Motherlode,” there is such extraordinary distance between these lives and the forces that rule them.