The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  • This story is based on a game that—until the story’s publication—I thought was played only in my house. You can call it the Who Will Hide Me? game or the Righteous Gentile game, or, most troubling of all, the Anne Frank game. If it’s not already clear, the rules are quite simple: you sit around and wonder who would hide you in the event of a second Holocaust.

  In truth, my sister and I have played the game forever and ever. It was maybe twenty years ago when it dawned on me that it wasn’t a game at all. The highest compliment we’d give to certain friends was to say something like “Yes, Nicole would hide me. She really would.” The story started to take form when we were talking about a couple we were both friendly with, and my sister said, “He would hide us, and she—she would turn us in.” And I knew in my heart that my sister was right. And I got to thinking about what it is to know that, or believe that, about certain people. And, in the story, I take the idea to its extreme.

  As for its connection to Raymond Carver’s legendary story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”: I really can’t tell you how long ago I first read the Carver, but I’ll bet it had been fifteen years since I’d last sat down with his story when I started drafting mine. I actively avoided revisiting his masterpiece until I was well into the writing. I say that because the model I wanted to use was not Carver’s story as written, but my memory of it. I first wanted to work with the picture that had formed over the years in my mind’s eye—this sort of faceless visual of two couples at a table with a bottle between them, talking through the changing light of day. Only later did I go back and open Carver’s collection and decide that I wanted to give my story that same entrance, to really bind those worlds, with the narrator saying, “And people from there think it gives them the right.”

  MARY GAITSKILL is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Last year she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where she was doing research for a novel. She is currently teaching writing at the Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York City.

  • I wrote “The Other Place” for a very simple reason. I was afraid. I was living alone in a flimsy fishbowl house on a college campus that, as far as I was concerned, was a pervert magnet. The climactic scene of the story came to me before I had any intention of writing a story; I think it appeared in my mind because I wanted to imagine killer and victim coming right up to the crucial moment and then both walking away unharmed. At some point after that, the story formed.

  ROXANE GAY’s writing appears or is forthcoming in New Stories from the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Salon.com, NOON, American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, The Rumpus, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and an HTMLGIANT contributor. She is also the author of the collection Ayiti.

  • I moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to pursue a Ph.D. and realized I had moved into a different world, one where it was cold and snowy and where nothing made sense. Everyone kept asking me if I was from Detroit, and it was confusing and irritating because I had never been asked such a thing in my life. I’m from Nebraska. Finally, a few months into my tour of duty, which would last five years, I realized, oh, right, the only black people they know are from Detroit. Then it became a game to see who would ask the question, how often, and how I might answer it. My responses got creative. In my fourth year, I met a logger who would do strange things like take me into the woods and bring me dead deer. I started to realize there was a lot more complexity and beauty to the U.P. than I had realized, so I wrote a story about it—a love letter to the North Country.

  JENNIFER HAIGH is a 2002 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since then she has written four novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble. Her books have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author, and have been published in sixteen languages. Her short stories have appeared widely, in The Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, and many other publications. A collection is forthcoming.

  • A few years ago, a friend of mine was honored with a lifetime achievement award in his field. I attended the tribute and found it unsettling to hear his life and career summed up in retrospective fashion, as though no one had noticed that he was still very much alive. That odd situation, and the feeling of dissonance it created, led me to write “Paramour.” Like all my stories, it is in some sense a mash-up of several things that interest me intensely—in this case, other people’s marriages, sex and innocence, the theater, fathers and daughters, and Ukrainians.

  MIKE MEGINNIS studied creative writing at Butler University and New Mexico State University. He has published fiction in Hobart, The Collagist, Lifted Brow, Sycamore Review, PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many others. He serves as fiction editor for Noemi Press and co-edits the magazine Uncanny Valley with his wife, Tracy Rae Bowling.

  • It feels like I spent most of my childhood playing Nintendo. The best games were those I couldn’t play alone. These were adventures like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid; my father and I would play them together, making maps, sharing codes and secrets. The key mechanic in both games is the slow accumulation of new equipment and abilities. Your character grows progressively stronger and more capable until a final, game-ending triumph. These games tell a comforting story: You Get Better. This story makes a lot of sense when you’re very young; it makes less sense as you get older. “Navigators” began with the idea of a game that tells a different, more likely story: You Get Worse. In some ways, this felt more organic to Metroid, which has a hostile, cryptic, and often flatly un-fun design. The structure of Legend of Silence borrows heavily from Metroid, though it is superficially an inversion.

  My real father shares the story’s fictional father’s belief that a video game is best approached with the help of a navigator: someone who can help you better see the game and your place in it. Apart from that similarity, I am happy to report that “Navigators” bears little resemblance to my life. The mother’s absence is necessary to the protagonist’s decline, but I hope it also resonates with the experience of being a little boy playing video games as he slowly discovers the differences between the sexes. So often you are searching for a woman. When you find her, the game is over. All of your problems are solved. In Metroid, brilliantly, the woman you find is yourself: only in the game’s ending do you discover that your avatar, previously obscured by a spacesuit, is the beautiful Samus Aran.

  I wrote “Navigators” during the second year of my MFA program, between semesters. My wife helped me with the second draft. Hobart editor Aaron Burch guided me through to the last.

  STEVEN MILLHAUSER is the author of twelve works of fiction. His most recent collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories, includes stories written over the past thirty years. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the film The Illusionist (2006). He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

  • I was seized by the desire to write a mirror story, but that was as far as things went. Every possibility seemed boring or frivolous. I turned my attention to something else. One day it came to me: the mirror shouldn’t be the gateway to a fantastic world, but should behave very quietly. This thought, or instinct, propelled me into the story.

  ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of new stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; Too Much Happiness; and two volumes of selected stories, S
elected Stories and Carried Away—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Her thirteenth collection, Dear Life, is forthcoming in November 2012. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Granta, Paris Review, and many other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

  • “Axis” was written with the question of whether a person can ever escape the ancient confines of her own history—or gender, for that matter. Grace and Avie, farm girls who go off to study history at university, attempt to use sex in order to manufacture love. On his escape from Grace, Royce is questioned about his goals in life. He sees an escarpment—new life growing from a crack in a massive rock—and understands all that he needs to do.

  LAWRENCE OSBORNE is the author of several works of travel journalism, including Bangkok Days, published in 2009. His novel The Forgiven will be published this fall.

  • I wrote the story some years after attending a lucid dreaming class at Kalani in Hawaii, where I failed to have any dreams. I was actually on a small island in Sicily called Favignana, waiting for an annual tuna hunt called the Mattanza, and the nightmarish atmosphere of the island during this time (I was trapped there with only a bicycle) for some reason reminded me of this place on the Big Island of Hawaii, where I had stayed before. For some reason islands always fill me with dread.

  JULIE OTSUKA is the author of two novels, The Buddha in the Attic, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and When the Emperor Was Divine, which won the Asian American Literary Award and the American Library Association Alex Award and was long-listed for the UK’s Orange Prize. Her fiction has been published in Granta and Harper’s Magazine. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City.

  • “Diem Perdidi” is probably the most personal and the emotionally “truest” (though fictional) story I have written. It came to me very slowly—over many years—and then, once I began writing it—over the course of several months—very quickly. I had been collecting notes for it—jottings on torn scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, napkins, ATM receipts—ever since my mother was first diagnosed with fronto-temporal dementia in 2003. But for the longest time, I could not make myself sit down to write it. I wasn’t sure that I felt comfortable writing about my mother, or myself, or that dementia, as a story (She was here, she forgot she was here, she died), or whether it was even that interesting. Maybe, I thought, I would just go on collecting those scraps of paper forever. Or stuff them into a box and forget about them.

  But once I got the idea for the structure (“She remembers,” “She does not remember”) and found the right voice (using the second-person narrator addressed to the “me” stand-in seemed vastly preferable to writing about myself in the first person), the story began to write itself and seemed to take on a life of its own. So much so that I took three months off the novel I was working on to finish it. I remember, at times, feeling almost euphoric and wishing that the story would never end. Writing it, I suppose, was my way of keeping my mother with me in the world, a way of being with her even as she was slipping away.

  EDITH PEARLMAN is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction, honoring her four collections of stories: Vaquita, Love Among the Greats, How to Fall, and Binocular Vision. In 2011 the latter received the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in fiction. Binocular Vision also received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, presented annually to an American writer whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew.

  • While I was digging in the loose soil of a new story (that’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s unbeatable phrasing), Orion wrote to request some fiction (it had published a short essay of mine about beetles). The story I was just beginning was to be about a triangle. Each member had my sympathy—the mistress, the wife, and the man between them. There was also a girl who didn’t like to eat. But for Orion the lovers and the would-be anorexic would have to be vigorously involved in the natural world. And so, digging further, I encountered suicidal ants; more beetles, including the honeydew-making Coccidae; and the moth grub called bicho de taquara, which, ground up and mixed with water, produces an ecstatic sleep. Thanks to Orion for asking for a story; thanks to my characters for requiring me to do entomological research; thanks to powdered bicho de taquara for revealing itself in a scientific journal. I mean to try it as soon as I find a supplier.

  ANGELA PNEUMAN is the author of a story collection (Home Remedies, 2007) and a forthcoming novel (2014). She teaches writing at Stanford and works as a copywriter in the California wine industry.

  • Twenty years ago I graduated from college, married, and moved from rural Kentucky to Indianapolis. I took a grim, windowless job near the airport with a temp service—a yearlong position supporting wastewater-treatment-plant inspectors for the Indiana Department of Water. During this time, I often drove home to the west side’s ugliest apartment complex for lunch. As I remember, I was trying to make a go of the Slim-Fast diet plan. One day at lunch I caught a television interview with a man whose nose, arms, and legs had been eaten away by a type of strep that he believed he’d picked up through a paper cut at his office. This was a lonely, impressionable period of my life. I felt far away from home, unsure of my choices, and overwhelmed by what seemed the inevitability of their consequences and their distance from my dreams. I couldn’t stop thinking of bacteria—its relentlessness, its omnipresence—and how the people I worked with struggled to harness its covert operations. I couldn’t stop thinking about the unfortunate man on television. During this time I began writing in earnest. I had a feeling I would write about bacteria someday, and I remain grateful for the way this detail and others hovered patiently around my consciousness, like narrative portals. I began this story a lifetime later, while living in San Francisco after finishing the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. The series of drafts that became “Occupational Hazard” hung around for a few years as the piece tried to work itself out. Finally I gave the main character a job as a wastewater-treatment-plant inspector. I gave him a name that means something to me, I “remembered” some of his childhood habits, and I set him in a place I know well. Only then did the story coalesce around my preoccupations and begin to make sense.

  ERIC PUCHNER is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor and the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won a California Book Award. His work has appeared in GQ, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, and Best New American Voices. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

  • This story was a real departure for me. I’m not a big reader of science fiction, though the first stories I fell in love with as a boy were Ray Bradbury’s magical Martian creep-outs. I honestly don’t remember where the idea came from. The opening image—of a man showing up in a boy’s yard one morning, as exotic as Bigfoot—floated around in my head for a long time before I dared to sit down at the computer and get it out there. (The short stories I end up being most proud of are generally the ones I thought I couldn’t—or perhaps shouldn’t—write.) My interest in the story never had to do with divining the future; it was always much more about capturing what it means to have a parent, about distilling the ent
ire emotional arc of having a father into twenty pages. The “girl” was less of a presence in the first draft—it wasn’t until I showed it to some very smart friends, and they encouraged me to push the premise to its logical extreme, that I nudged the story into darker waters. I’d like to thank these friends, and also the folks at Tin House for convincing me that the original title, “Neverland,” showed my hand too early. I think of “Beautiful Monsters” as a fable more than anything else: a stranger-comes-to-town story, in which the stranger is death.

  GEORGE SAUNDERS, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, teaches at Syracuse University and is the author of the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. “Tenth of December” is the title story of a new collection, to be published early in 2013.

  • Sometimes a story comes from a little lonely moment of unwilled, spontaneous fantasy. For example, I once wrote a story called “The End of FIRPO in the World” that came out of seeing this miserable little boy standing right on the curb of a busy street, and then thinking, What would I do or say if that kid got hit and I happened to be the first responder? “Tenth of December” was kind of like that. One day, just minding my own business, it hit me—really hit me—that I would die someday, and that it would happen via a series of actual events for which I’d have to be present: I’d get the news on a certain day, gradually start to weaken, etc., etc. Horrifying. And in next split second I revolted against this idea, thinking, Argh, no way, I’m not doing that; how do I get out of it? Embarrassingly, my solution was this: I know, I’d go freeze myself in a forest somewhere. That way, no fuss, no pain, no trouble for my family. Then all of those thoughts fell away, and I was back to “normal,” that is, realizing that I would never die, and that if by chance I did, there would be nothing horrid or ignoble about it—it would be fast, cool, and heroic. So that was a relief. But I was left with the seed of this story: a guy with a fatal illness decides to kill himself via freezing. I didn’t start writing right away but for over a year just kept that conceptual seed in my head, adding bits to it as they naturally arose. So: guy tries to kill himself by freezing . . . and meets a kid . . . a kid in white . . . who saves him, or doesn’t . . . or maybe he saves the kid, or doesn’t. Saves the kid from what? Freezing? Drowning? The kid falls through the ice of a pond? And then at some point I started sketching things out, trying to get the physicality straight (who follows whom into the forest?) and trying to find out which dying man and which little boy. And that, of course, was where all the real fun started, and when the real meanings started to unveil themselves.