The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (47 page)

I owe a debt to Dan Machlin, since his poetry introduced me to the Old Norse word
vindauga
(
vindauge
in contemporary Norwegian), which translated literally means “wind-eye.” That word worked on me, haunted me, and slowly took on for me a life of its own. Over a month or two it somehow subconsciously cross-pollinated with games my younger siblings and I used to play when we were little, with my own fascination with the difference between childrens’ and adults’ perceptions, with problems I was having with shingles warping and cracking on my house, and with my own basic distrust about the nature of reality. All of that secretly gestated for a long time, but when I finally sat down to write it, it came out all in a rush, something that rarely happens for me.

Brian Evenson was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited-edition novella
Baby Leg
, and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. His novel
Last Days
won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Other books include the story collection
Fugue State
and a new collection of stories,
Windeye
, that will be published in 2011. His work has been included in
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
three times, and he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Evenson lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

The story began with a single image: a priest who longs to be a father holds an infant for baptism. It was this predicament, this public moment crowded with private feeling and detailed physical experience, that compelled my attention, and I wrote a few pages to try and get hold of it. This then was set aside, and it wasn’t until
Granta
commissioned me to produce something for their “Sex” issue that I returned to it and the story became more than this fraught tableau. I thought about sex as an urgent, risky, and difficult kind of intimacy, as procreation, and as something that structures an individual’s personality, determining what they notice and react to in the world. Peter’s character and wider situation unfolded with these thoughts.

Adam Foulds was born in London in 1974. He is the author of two novels,
The Truth About These Strange Times
and
The Quickening Maze
, as well as a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya in the 1950s,
The Broken Word
. In 2008 he was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and he has won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2010 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.

Perhaps it is the wildness itself of feral children that has always intrigued me. Or perhaps it is the very idea of life in a state of nature, beyond or before civilization. I don’t know. What I do
know is that the girl in this story, which was originally a failed attempt to begin a novel—several stories I have written have begun this way—has been with me always.

Lynn Freed was born in 1945 in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, receiving her MA and PhD in English literature from Columbia University. She has published six novels
(Friends of the Family, Home Ground, The Bungalow, The Mirror, House of Women, The Servants’ Quarters);
a collection of essays,
Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page
; and a collection of stories,
The Curse of the Appropriate Man
. Her short fiction, memoirs, and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House
, and
Southwest Review
, among others. In 2002 she received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Northern California.

In order to write “The Junction” I had to write another story first. That story—still in a rough draft—was about a kindly Pittsburgh doctor, during the Depression, tending to a patient in a flophouse who mysteriously disappeared—against all medical odds—and took to the rails, ending up at State Line Junction, where he saves the day by falling across a switch mechanism. I put the Pittsburgh story aside and began to write a new story, using a little bit of the background material—i.e., when he tells the story at the dinner table—and some of the same energy of the other version. I didn’t see the men in my story as drifters. They’re looking for something, on a quest of sorts, trying to pin down exactly where they need to be to find solace and hope. Part of what inspired me to write this story was the image of a fresh-cut piece of pie on a windowsill waiting for someone. The ideal sense of home is something we’ll never really find, but we keep wandering and changing our own stories in the hope that, at last, we’ll find ourselves in the perfect
place. Perhaps it’s hard to write about the search for home right now, in this culture, because the Internet has provided all of us a hyperlink into what might or might not feel like safety: the safety of drifting from site to site, following one link to the next as if we’re free. Setting the story back in the day before cell phones, before high-speed hookups, before Facebook and satellite hookups, back when all you had to do was take a few steps away from the campfire and find a complete solitude, allowed, I like to think, an access to a certain kind of situation, purified down, that allowed a certain pattern to be exposed. (The gibberish above is exactly why writers should, in most cases, avoid talking about their work. The truth is I just wanted to tell a good story and respect my characters and get the words right.) In any case, one other thing that informed this story was the fact that, when I was growing up in Michigan, my grandfather—a lovely man, a true self-made gentleman, who in many ways saved my life—often told me stories about surviving the Great Depression. He had a big cupboard in which he still stored canned goods in case the world crashed again and the food supply became short. Some of the cans actually dated back to the Depression, with labels that were so simple and beautiful and clear they seemed to be hand-painted. He vividly described the way men would come to the back door, knock, be invited in for dinner, and sit at the table with the entire family. There was an old coal yard up the road from his house, and it still had black mounds of coal left over from the days of steam. I paid careful attention to those old piles of coal—half-buried in the weeds, just glints of shiny dark coming through the green. Coal and steam engines weren’t that far in the past in the late sixties.

David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including
Assorted Fire Events, The Secret Goldfish
, and, most recently,
The Spot
. Means lives in Nyack, New York.

I began this story initially as a challenge to myself—to complete something. I’d not published a book—or a story for that matter—in a long time, and in the long years of working on what looked as if it was now turning out to be two novels, I wanted simply to finish something. So one winter I took a break from the book to write this story. I had spent some time in Kenya in the late ’90s, and imagining a tryst there was a way of revisiting a place I’d been intrigued by. In the writing of the story I also began to envision a collection of intertwined stories set in east Africa of which “
Pole
, Pole” would be a part. So that’s another book that now needs to be written, though I have its title already:
Fatina
.

Susan Minot was born in 1956 in Boston. She is the author of
Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture
, and a poetry collection,
Poems 4 A.M
. Her nonfiction has appeared in
McSweeney’s
and
The Paris Review
, among other publications. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Stealing Beauty
. The film
Evening
was the first adaptation of her fiction. Minot divides her time between New York City and an island in Maine.

The drummer tale is a staple of storytelling. To be kind, you’d call it well-worn; to be cruel, cliché. So many have done it so well: Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Malamud. Breathing life into the form seemed an impossible task, so I had to try. Sitting down to the desk, I wanted to see if I could outdo the established demigods of fiction. An act of hubris for sure, but what isn’t? I hope the reader judges me kindly.

The story, for me, always begins with an image. In college, my first love was geology. A group of us went down into a cave, and after what seemed like miles of dodging bats and slogging through mud, a professor showed us where the remains of an extinct bear
—Arctodus simus
, I think—had been discovered. I began with
the vision of a skull, and then I had to dream the characters to find it. The story unspooled from there. Other stray images found a home: twin boys working fence posts by the roadside; a high meadow drowning in beaver dams; a pair of dead foxes, one red, one gray. Also, the story gave me an opportunity to write one of my favorite landscapes in West Virginia, where the karst lands meet the mountains.

Most of my work is a variation on one theme: the crisis of people who love the land, but are faced with the prospect of selling or destroying some aspect of it to translate the landscape into dollars. This is West Virginia’s story. From timbering to coal mining to Marcellus shale fracturing, the ground has been sold again and again. Despite our common myths and party rhetoric, extractive industry has failed to improve the lot of West Virginians. For me, “Something You Can’t Live Without” is a middle chapter in a long, fraught history.

Matthew Neill Null was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in
Oxford American
and
Gray’s Sporting Journal
. He was the 2010–2011 Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Null lives in Iowa City.

In 1996 my partner and I moved to Malaysia, where we taught business communications at a college very much like the one in the story. There was a bed, for example, behind glass in the lobby, and we looked at an apartment in Nine-Story Building, which, at least then, was the tallest building in our town and was thus, sadly, attractive to jumpers. We found an apartment elsewhere, but during our stay, several people committed suicide by jumping from the building’s roof, and so we became familiar with the building through newspaper accounts and public lore as well as through a friend who lived there. What intrigued me was the way that people
sometimes spoke of the jumpers, with a detachment that allowed them to view the suicides as an irritation, an occurrence whose salient feature was its ability to make less pleasant the lives of those who lived in the complex. Yet, on another level, I understood how and why the tenants came to feel this way, and this understanding—of the way that others’ pain or suffering can become a minor and curious backdrop for the drama of our own lives—became the framework of my story.

Like the couple in the story, we stayed at a seedy hotel where the smoke alarms beeped every few minutes. After trying to explain that the batteries needed to be changed, to no avail, we spent an afternoon trying to buy replacement batteries—also to no avail. Finally, we were moved to the only beep-free room—outside of which lay a wounded, moaning man on a chaise longue. We never learned what had happened to him, which is ultimately for the best when it comes to writing fiction.

This story evolved slowly, over the course of ten years, beginning with images and scenes that I wrote down but did not necessarily regard as parts of the same story. Usually, especially with my first-person narrators, the narrator “arrives” first and starts telling the story, but this time the narrator came along later, a narrator who is nothing like me except for a shared navel phobia. As I recall, that narrator appeared one morning as I was reading through all these bits and pieces, wondering whether they would ever amount to anything; she began commenting on them, weaving these disparate parts together, and through her seemingly insightful and often cynical analysis, I began to see how ill-equipped she was for the world, how fragile her relationship was, and how incapable she was of extending compassion to another lost soul.

Lori Ostlund was born in 1965 in a town of 411 people in Minnesota. Her first collection of stories,
The Bigness of the World,
received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a 2009 Notable Book by The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in
The Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review
, and
The Georgia Review
, among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in San Francisco.

When I was a nerdy, Zoobooks-reading kid, my parents, tired of seeing me use their fancy ice tongs and expensive olive pitter to dissect my stuffed animals, sent me to a marine biology summer camp on Catalina Island. I learned many things there—how to breathe through a snorkel tube, the life cycle of a garibaldi—but what I remember most is shivering in my pup tent at night, listening to stories about the wild bison who’d been roaming the island since 1924. They’d been shipped out as “scenery” for a western movie, our counselor said, and afterward, when filming was done, they were—“Wait, what?” I sat up in my sleeping bag and blinked against the orange light of the mosquito lamp. “Just left there? Like … abandoned?” I wasn’t sure what was more astonishing—that the movie people could be so extravagant and indifferent, or that the herd had managed, despite its new environment, to adapt, flourish, and survive. As an adult, I had tried a few times to write about a soldier who’d lost his voice in World War I. However, I just couldn’t get any purchase on the character, so I put my notes away, frustrated and disappointed. A few days later I saw that
The Vanishing American
(hey, that buffalo movie!) was screening at the Silent Movie Theatre here in Los Angeles. I had a free night and so, perhaps nostalgic for the bygone days of peeing in my wet suit, I went. Afterward, as I emerged from the theater
and crossed Fairfax Avenue, these two ideas—the bison and the soldier—joined serendipitously in my mind. I went home and began to write.