The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (48 page)

Leslie Parry was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. “The Vanishing American” is her first published story. She lives in Los Angeles.

“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” began as many of my stories begin lately—with my browsing around endlessly in an utterly nerdy and bizarre subject and then finding my imagination caught by a particular moment that resonates with me emotionally in unexpected ways. In this case I was reading about the history of the science of avalanches—I know, I know; imagine how my wife feels—and I was struck by the notion that a skier or hiker might cross a given area with no effect and then the next skier or hiker might, when doing the same thing, start an avalanche that carried away any number of those in his group. That desire that must follow to penetrate the capriciousness of such an event—as in, I
must
have done
something
different,
something
to cause such a catastrophe—seemed to me to have all sorts of crucially useful analogues, in emotional terms. I imagined someone at the very dawn of avalanche science who found himself wondering about his responsibility for the fate of someone he loved. And the story proceeded from there.

Jim Shepard was born in 1956 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently
Project X
, and four story collections, including
You Think That’s Bad
. His third collection,
Like You’d Understand, Anyway
, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize.
Project X
won the
2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines,
Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story
, and
Playboy
, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine
The Believer
. Four of his stories have been chosen for
The Best American Short Stories
and one has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. He’s won an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

It’s always fun when you’re writing to zoom in on what’s uncomfortable—on what causes a silence to fall—and one such touchy subject now is whether we ought to cut back on our rate of consumption for the sake of the future. This suggestion never fails to annoy. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could make interesting fiction from climate change. It’s an undeniably important subject—it’s the elephant on the horizon—but it’s also undeniably difficult, boring (for the nonscientists among us), and horrifying to contemplate. Yes, I thought, that would be really difficult to do, make climate change interesting. Still, I like a challenge, and I went at it from different angles for my fifth story collection,
In-Flight Entertainment
, treating it as a love story, a dramatic monologue, a satirical comedy, a sales pitch and—the story included here—a dystopian diary. Having said this, I ought to add that I’m not interested in writing polemic. As a reader, I resent fiction that has designs on me. I think the only duty of a writer is to resist writing about what they think they ought to write about—and to write about what stimulates their imagination. Oddly, the subject of climate change did this for me. I sensed dark rich comic pickings, and I wasn’t wrong.

Helen Simpson was born in Bristol, England, in 1956 and grew up near Croydon. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from Oxford with two degrees. She is the author of five collections of stories and a recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. Her collection
In-Flight Entertainment
will be published in the United States in 2012. She lives in London.

Mark Slouka, “Crossing”

“Crossing” emerged, after a fifteen-year dormancy period, from an act of near-biblical stupidity on my part: in 1994, while crossing a river in the Pacific Northwest with my five-year-old son on my back, I found myself, very quickly, in serious trouble. It didn’t matter that I’d forded the same river many times before without incident; this time, for whatever reason, was different. Even now I don’t like to think about it. There are few things more excruciating than realizing you’ve put your child’s life in danger.

Over the years that followed, I thought about the incident more than once; I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note—often dissonant, almost always unexpected—that brings a story to life. Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert. So I let it be.

It wasn’t until I came across the anecdote about the medieval priest that flashes through the father’s mind on the story’s last page that I felt the tumblers fall. Of course! I had to leave him midstream, tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.

On some level, it feels almost ungrateful; I made it out, after all, and today my son could carry me across that river a good deal more easily than I could him. But fiction, I remind myself, is an
act of trespass on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn’t play.

Both are equally true: We made it. And we’re still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.

Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. He is the author of a collection of stories,
Lost Lake;
two novels,
God’s Fool
and
The Visible World
, which have been translated into sixteen languages; and
Essays from the Nick of Time
. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships and is a contributing editor at
Harper’s Magazine
. His short fiction has appeared there as well as in
The Paris Review
and
Granta
, among other publications, and his essays and stories have been anthologized in
The Best American Essays
and
The Best American Short Stories
. He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, and lives outside New York City.

The deep background of this story—which may not make itself felt very much in this final draft—are the changes confronting my hometown on the Mendocino coast: old ways of making a living have vanished, and with them the certainties they fostered, so there’s a sense in which people are free to start from scratch but also bewildered by the prevailing scriptlessness. In “Never Come Back” I wanted to write about a young mother who leaves her child and how the grandparents left to care for the child handle an absence they can’t understand but which they inevitably judge. My secret ambition in this story was to kindle empathy for characters whose actions are, on the face of it, indefensible, but which make the deepest kind of sense to them.

Elizabeth Tallent was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her work includes the story collections
Honey
and
Time with Children
and the novel
Museum Pieces
. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives in California.

My husband and I did take a cruise to Antarctica, and since I am both a pessimist and a contrarian, I imagined the worst: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, my husband falling overboard, drowning. As it turned out we had a very happy time and, except for the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that was neatly stacked on our nightstand falling pell-mell to the cabin floor and the obnoxious fellow passenger whose goal it was to drive a golf ball in every country of the world, nothing bad happened. Antarctica is stark and desolate, and despite the presence of birds, penguins, and seals as well as the unexpected beautiful blues of the icebergs, one cannot help but be struck by how insignificant and intrusive the appearance of human beings is in that predominantly white landscape, and I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.

Lily Tuck was born in France in 1939 and lived in South America as a child. She is the author of four novels—
Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam
(a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), and
The News from Paraguay
(winner of the 2004 National Book Award)—a collection of stories,
Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived
, and a biography,
Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante
. Her essay “Group Grief” was included in
The Best American Essays 2006
. Her novel
Probability or I Married You for Happiness
will be published in fall 2011. She lives in New York City.

During my family’s leanest years, when I was growing up, we spent our summer vacations (if we got one; sometimes we didn’t,
and sometimes they were as brief as three days) on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was always a boy’s disappointment, compared to the Alabama and north Florida coasts, with their natural white sand beaches and comparatively huge waves rolling in. And their much clearer water, very clear and green in north Florida. The real beaches in Mississippi are offshore, on the barrier islands, accessible by private boat or ferry, but we never went out there. We got the Mississippi Sound, which in those days was polluted by bad stuff from plants upriver, by waste from the fishing industry, and I don’t know what-all else. But it did have a charm about it. The whole place seemed calmer, more still, less corrupted by the glitzier and cheaper elements of upscale tourism. The smell—at first alarming and repulsive, then kind of wonderfully rich, a smell you realized was the rank richness of marine life and death—was one I experienced nowhere else, on no other coast, and not in New Orleans or any other coastal city. Except for a grand old hotel or two, most of the lodging was either run-down or modest. And the clientele was pretty much entirely local, Mississippi, with some Louisiana tourists mixed in. So I have fond memories of the place, even though I despised it at the time. These memories, mixed with memories of an imaginatively reclusive childhood, of often feeling like the odd boy out in my own family, were things I tried for a long time to combine in this story. It went into and back out of the desk drawer for many years, as I’d write a draft and fail, put it away, write it again a year or a few later, until it finally felt right. It feels highly personal, anyway, a story that comes from pretty deep inside. Putting it together, finally, felt like a great and pleasant relief. There was a kind of joyous sadness about it, which I guess is what I often experience when I recall that childhood, that family, mostly gone now.

Brad Watson was born in 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. His stories have been published in
Ecotone, The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, The Greensboro
Review
, and
The Yalobusha Review
, as well as anthologies including
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories
, and
The Story and Its Writer
. His story collection
Last Days of the Dog-Men
received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel,
The Heaven of Mercury
, received the Southern Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (shared with Lee Smith), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent collection is
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

The task of picking the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories each year is at its most difficult at the end, when there are more than twenty admirable and interesting stories. Once the final choice is made, those remaining are our Recommended Stories, listed, along with the place of publication, in the hope that our readers will seek them out and enjoy them. Please go to our website,
www.penohenryprizestories.com
, for excerpts from each year’s recommended stories and information about the writers.

Stories published in American and Canadian magazines are eligible for consideration for inclusion in
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
. Only print editions are considered; that is, online-only publications are not eligible.

Stories must be written originally in the English language. No translations are considered.

Stories may not be submitted by agents or writers. Editors are asked to send the entire issue and not to nominate individual stories.

Because of production deadlines for the 2012 collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by May 1, 2011. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors are welcome to submit scheduled stories in proof or manuscript. Publications received after May 1, 2011, will automatically be considered for
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2013
.

Please see our website,
www.penohenryprizestories.com
, for more information about submission to
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
.

The address for submission is: