Best Debut Short Stories 2021

by Yuka Igarashi

  In the cab, my father will ask me either [f] or [g] before proceeding to tell me everything that has changed in the city since I last visited. My mother will ask [h] questions about the food I’d like to eat. I will enjoy this attention, this care that was missing when I was a child. It is also inevitable that [j] minutes later, my parents will start quarreling with each other. That is who they are, they cannot stop. I will start feeling anxious; I’ll never be as happy as I am in the moment I arrive. The magic will be over, there will only be mundaneness left. I will briefly feel like rescheduling the return flight I have in [k] days and going back to work. But I cannot do that to my parents. Their faces are still glowing and I wonder if love is a candle lit by distance.

  The cab will stop at the tollgate that keeps increasing its prices. My father will take out his purse, but he doesn’t have [l] rupees. I will have to pay for the toll. He will not look at me, the humiliation in his face transforming into anger. My mother will glare at him, the shine entirely gone. This is not new; I know there is no money. I must continue to work, in a country that will never be mine, for them to have something to eat. Poverty isn’t anyone’s choice. Some lives are meant to be. There’s a Hindi idiom for this I cannot remember. If language is a city, mine is crumbling block by block.

  The flight attendant asks me if I want [m] or [o], they are no longer carrying [n], and I refuse it before I realize what I’m doing. I don’t call her back. I’m sick of airline food. And then, of course, I cannot escape the guilt; I’m exercising a luxury I hadn’t known before. I take consolation in the fact that I will enjoy sumptuous food at home. Everything will cost [p] times less. I’ll have [q] rupees to splurge at restaurants. Better to go in the first few days, before the restaurant money goes toward our loan payments and household expenses instead. That is, if the medical bills don’t take away more than [r] rupees. Everything is a calculation. My father has often said to me: Why are you spending [s] dollars on a plane ticket? Why are you coming home almost every year? As if I didn’t factor this cost into the math of living. I remember telling him once that capitalism has figured out this shit. That having a day off makes a worker more productive in the long run. Just don’t kill me over a plane ticket, I might have said. But you can never please the math teacher in a father, the one who taught you to solve for x first, before you do anything else. The things you say don’t add up. There’s no mathematical value to feeling adrift in a white country.

  Seat belt warning: there is some turbulent weather. There are [t] babies on the plane, and they are all crying. I put on the headphones and pick a movie. One of the teenage lovers has cancer and has [u] months to live; I’m not interested. I ogle the house depicted in the movie; what I’d like is a spectacular home in which to die. I cannot stop working, I cannot abandon my people. My mother has severe bronchitis from years of exposure to heavily polluted air. I’d like to bring her to the country that has me by the collar, I’d like to say to my mother, “You gave me breath, and now, I want to help you breathe.” None of that is possible without money. And time. And work. And exile. What has exile done? It has taken everything I had in return for the idea of a home far, far away. Home is the sound of a river you are better off keeping at a distance. What else can you do except listen?

  There’s a voice in the cabin telling me I am [v] hours away. I know how this goes; each flight is more or less the same. This is the part where I wonder if my father was right, if I should have stayed put in America. Guilt is what I have left after a lifetime of not acting on my desires. A rupee spent on a toffee is a rupee wasted, the ice cream that everyone is having is probably not good for me, nothing is always the correct response to what do you want.

  In the cab, my parents will argue incessantly about the necessity of taking a cab. I cannot stand it; I will begin to wish I had saved the money and not flown home. We’ll make do with [w], I’ll assure them. My mother will cough from the dust creeping through the windows, and I will tell her I bought her American medicine, namely Tylenol, and she will smile. Anything foreign is good, and everything home is sickness. Haven’t I been reading the news?

  My father will ask me how I like America, now that I’ve lived there for [y] years. I will lie and tell him that I like being in a place of great freedom and opportunity. It’s better to let him think of America as my future home, to let him float past all inconvenient truths. There’s no reason to tell him that I will never have enough alphabet to build a room for myself.

  The cab will stop at [z] traffic lights and I’ll see change. The city that was once mine is no longer what it was; every street is altered. I will feel foreign to the city. If my parents do not come to the airport, if they are not alive, I will not know where I am. I might be in the same city, but I will no longer be home. I do not know what I’ll be if I do not have a home to go to. I do not know what I’ll do if I cannot see my experiences reflected in the eyes of someone I love. Home is where rivers die, letter by letter.

  }

  I’VE BEEN WORKING for the Chicago Tribune for about five years when it strikes me that I will go home in two months. The flight ticket has been booked, and I’m ready. The phone rings: my mother’s lungs have collapsed. She is dead. The funeral is in two days.

  My boss reviews the JavaScript code and makes his updates for the day.

  The code is in production.

  Nishanth Injam is a fiction writer from Telangana, India. He received an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he is currently a Zell fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review and The Georgia Review.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  What drew us to “Force, Mass, Acceleration” initially was the sheer ambition of its premise. It is a difficult thing to sustain a story when the reader knows its ending, doubly so when they know that ending will be the protagonist’s death, but Heather Aruffo quickly seizes on the idea that the importance of Ana Mladić’s story isn’t in its ending but in its telling. With a deft blend of history and personal narrative, Aruffo carries the reader through Ana’s twenty-three years of life, balancing her internal motivations with the history of the Balkans as it sifts through her and, of course, with Ana’s slow realization of the horrifying actions of her war criminal father. It is a bold story deepened by its discussion of how those who are good to us are not necessarily good to others, one which I found myself turning over and over in my head long after reading. I am very glad that we had the honor of including it in The Southern Review, and even more glad that Heather Aruffo’s writing will now find its way into the hands of even more readers.

  Sacha Idell, Coeditor and Prose Editor

  The Southern Review

  FORCE, MASS, ACCELERATION

  Heather Aruffo

  ON MARCH 24, 1994, at the age of twenty-three, Ana Mladić shot herself in the head with one of her father’s pistols. She found it in her father’s study, in a cupboard in the Belgrade apartment where her parents lived.

  You may not have heard of Ana, but you have probably heard of her father, Ratko, former commander of the Serbian army in Bosnia, who was responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre during the Yugoslav Wars. Of the great despots of the twentieth century, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ratko ranks among them. In 2017, he was found guilty of war crimes on one count of genocide and nine counts of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison. No one had been tried for such crimes since the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Ratko firmly denies all of the charges.

  But today, we will not speak of Ratko. Men, after all, have a way of swallowing the stories of the women in their lives. Instead, we will speak of Ana. I will try to imagine her.

  In 1971, Ana is born in Skopje, which will later become the capital of North Macedonia. Her father is a platoon commander, her mother, Bosa, a housewife. Ana is their second child, their only girl. Her family has left Serbia for Skopje, where her father is stationed with
the Yugoslav National Army. I imagine their lives: Ana’s mother’s face drawn and white as she holds Ana in her arms. Ana kicks and screams. Ratko leans down, draws the hair out of his wife’s face, and takes Ana from her. He puts his hand on Bosa’s shoulder. Ratko’s father died when he was three years old, leading an attack against the Croatian fascist Ustaše in World War II. He vows he will never disappear for Ana as his father disappeared for him. He will never disappear for anyone.

  Ana grows to be intelligent, kind, and quiet, with pretty dark hair cut like a bowl. Her mother has taught her to be polite, to cross her legs when she sits, to ask nicely for things she wants. She walks from the apartment block where she lives with her family in Skopje to school. She wears a uniform, a pleated skirt. Her socks come up to her knees. Around her neck is a red scarf. In school she sits quietly, absorbing every word. She has a mind that is ravenous, that seeks to consume everything it is offered. She wonders if that is something that other people realize. Her father is finishing his military training in the Yugoslav People’s Army, recently promoted to lieutenant. He has proven himself to be good at leadership, at war making. Yugoslavia, he vows, will never forget his name. When Ana comes home, he pulls her into a crushing embrace. He is glad to see her. She is his little angel. Ana leans into Ratko. She imagines she can disappear into her father’s chest, that it is a cocoon enveloping her. She looks up and smiles at his broad face, how much she loves him.

  In 1980, Josip Tito dies. Ana is nine; her family watches the funeral on the television screen, the procession of his coffin, the lines and lines of state dignitaries who attend. Beside Ana, her mother hangs her head and cries, blowing her nose in a handkerchief. Her father sits on the other side of her brother, Darko, who squirms while watching the procession. Her father has a hard look on his face. Tito is like a grandfather to Ana, to all children. His picture sits above the blackboard in schoolhouses all across the country, smiling down with benevolence. He is the great leader of Yugoslavia, who liberated his people from the Nazis, who guided a middle way between the West and the Soviet Union. The slogan under which he has led his people is “Brotherhood and Unity,” no one nationality greater than the other. For years, he has led his people with his fist closed, like the grip of a cruel headmaster. There remains the question: Who will succeed him?

  When she is eighteen, Ana wins a place in medical school. She wants to become a doctor, and in Yugoslavia’s heavily regulated education system, only the best students are allowed to attend. All her life she has been diligent, taken her notes and minded her equations, tied her red scarf straight. Her father is very proud; he likes the idea of his daughter becoming a medical doctor. It is only the beginning; perhaps his descendants will be more than the peasantry, more than soldiers. They are the Serbs; they will be the new rulers of Yugoslavia. In her first week of school, Ana follows a doctor in a white coat and the rest of her medical school class down the stairs to the basement. They are in a white climate-controlled room. Vacuum pumps shudder as they suck away the spent air; the room seems as though it is breathing. Inside, cadavers lie supine on metal lab tables designed for dissection. The doctor removes a pair of forceps from the cabinet, a pair of large scissors, a scalpel, a bone saw. “This is what you will use,” he says. “It is impossible to understand the human body without first taking it apart.” Around Ana, the other students are watching. The cadavers lie clean on their metal beds, covered in white sheets. They seem to be sleeping. Ana stares at them. She has never been confronted with death so close to her; to see a body is something different. When the doctor removes the sheet, the scent of formaldehyde overtakes her. The body is clean, devoid of blood and color. In death, it no longer seems human. Never before has she seen anything like it. She stares and stares; she cannot take her eyes away from it.

  It is the year 1989. Yugoslavia is about to collapse, like an old man with congestive heart failure. Its ankles have swollen; its breathing is shallow. It sits down on a park bench to rest, leans back, looks at the blue sky, knows it will not get up again. In the years since Tito’s death, Yugoslavia has begun to fracture. Old nationalist leanings flare again. Slovenia demands independence, then Croatia. On the six hundredth anniversary of the Serbs’ defeat by the Ottoman Empire, Slobodan Milošević, the head of the Serbian Communist Party, promises unity for the Serbian people, who have been so long oppressed by their enemies. The Serbs have adopted a new constitution. With the death of Tito, everyone again is Bosnian, Serb, and Croat; Catholic, and Muslim, and Orthodox. The country is plunged into chaos. By 1992, it has collapsed.

  In her first year of medical school, Ana learns physics. The way the equations on the board describe reality fascinates her. A vacuum is a space in which there is no air. The force of an object is determined by multiplying together its mass and acceleration. These concepts are applied in medical school. A vacuum can be used to aspirate spittle from the throat of someone choking on their own vomit. A bullet expelled from a pistol or a rifle moves with the velocity of the acceleration multiplied by the distance of the barrel. When it strikes its target, the force of the impact is the mass of the bullet multiplied by its acceleration. The same applies to someone caught in an automobile accident. This is a grisly calculus, used to determine causes of death, essential in trauma situations and in postmortem evaluations. In her exams, Ana calculates the force upon impact. From an M95/M24 rifle with a 57mm cartridge fired by a partisan; from a revolver, with a cartridge size of 3.57mm; from a semiautomatic, military issue, with a 9mm cartridge. From the Yugoslav People’s Army, a standard-issue rifle, with a 7.92mm cartridge. Some of the bullets tumble through the body, coming out far away from where they entered; others explode and divert like birdshot. Each delivers a great force, with calculations too complicated to carry out regularly. They do not change the reality of the patient on the table, the steps that must be taken to salvage them.

  As Ana continues in medical school, what is left of Yugoslavia festers. Tanks roll into Slovenia; bombs are dropped on Dubrovnik. Slobodan Milošević orders military police to stop opposition protests in the center of Belgrade. New countries bud off from the side of what is left of Yugoslavia. According to Television Belgrade, Albanians, Slovenes, Croats are all enemies of the Serbian people. But in the cadaver lab, Ana is insulated from noise. She has a distaste for politics. She is a medical student; she has her own important duties to attend. In the white room she stands, wearing a pair of white gloves, a mask over her face. In her hands, she holds a scalpel. Slowly, delicately, she incises the skin; blood beads like a water droplet. The smell of death, of preservation, is overbearing. Below her the cadaver stares up with blank, lidded eyes, as round as a child’s marbles. It is a young man, who died from a heart defect. He is perhaps twenty years old, no older than Ana. All around the room, the cadavers lie on their gurneys. An old woman with snow-white hair, a man in upper middle age whose side is disfigured by leprosy. Bosnian, Bosniak, Croat, Serb, it is impossible to know in the basement of the medical school. No one knows where the cadavers come from. It does not matter, Ana thinks, death has come to gather each of them. She breathes in through her mouth. She knows that a greater concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream will dilate her blood vessels, to prevent fainting and vomiting. There are another few weeks of the course and before the end of it, she and her classmates must finish taking the bodies apart. She must finish before she can move on to the clinic. The cadaver lab is an end she must survive. She takes a breath to steady her hand. This time, she tells herself, her nerve will not slip away from her.

  In school, Ana meets a man. His name is Goran, and he is twenty-four, close in age to Ana, a member of her medical school class. He is handsome; on his days off, he wears a leather jacket, rolls his own cigarettes, bitterly reads western newspapers. He is the kind of Renaissance man who can manage science and humanities, theory and practice. He goes to protests in the center of Belgrade; he does not agree with Serbian nationalism or with Slobodan Milošević. When he was a child, his fa
ther was arrested for opposing Tito; it was a very hard time for his family. But things have never been, to his knowledge, difficult for Ana. He rather enjoys parts of Ana: her good looks; her soft, gentle spirit; her smile; the way she works hard, keeps her head down, defers to him in conversation. The way she is just demure enough to let him talk over her, but still strong enough to wield a bone saw. The parts of her he does not like are her naïvety, the way sometimes he believes he is speaking to a child. He tries to speak to Ana about politics, about the issues of their time, what to do about religious freedom, self-determination, but she never gives him her opinion; she has been trained not to. He sees her as a pediatrician, or a gynecologist. She tries to tell him, gently, that she would like to do trauma. Ana loves Goran very much. He is strong and intelligent, with a quick mind that she likes. He has a different, stronger way of seeing that Ana has never encountered before. She wishes she could be as intelligent, as independent as him. Someday, she tells him, she would like them to have a family together. Goran does not reply.

  Ana is a top student in the medical school. She passes her preclinical coursework with top marks. When she receives the results of her examination, she brings the papers home to her father. He has been transferred now, from Pristina to Knin, in Croatia, to lead the Yugoslav People’s Army against the Croatian National Guard. They are defending the Serbian Autonomous State of Krajina, Serbs in Croatia who have created their own autonomous republic. When she shows him the results he embraces her, smiles, and kisses her cheek. He tells Bosa to buy more meat from the butcher and opens a bottle of rakija. He takes much pleasure in his daughter’s accomplishments; they are befitting of a Serbian family of their status. These are his victories, as much as hers; it is only natural that Ana would excel in her own battlefield, as much as he does in his own.