PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Remarks from the Judges

  “When I sit down with a short story, I’m hoping to be surprised, or unnerved, or waylaid. I want to feel that something is at stake: in the language and structure, in the emotional lives of the characters, in the consequences of their actions. The best stories are almost otherworldly in their dimensions, as if I have opened a small suitcase left on my front door, only to find three geese, a small child, a jewel thief, and her mother emerging. The stories here delighted and surprised and moved me—I’m so very, very glad that I got to read them and that now you do too.”

  —KELLY LINK, 2017 judge, 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and author of Get in Trouble

  “I was really inspired by what I saw here—not just the beautiful weirdness of the writers and their work, but the fact that the stories were published. It made me feel so hopeful.”

  —CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, 2019 judge and author of Her Body and Other Parties

  “It was an honor to read so much exciting debut work for this collection, and I’m thrilled to be a part of introducing these writers’ voices to a wider audience. When I love a story, it stops me in my tracks on first read, and makes me want to see what it will do next, and then stays with me to make me pause again days or weeks or years later. The stories in this collection are haunting and compelling in the best ways, full of brilliant voices, striking images, and work that expands our sense of both the capacity of the story form and the capacity of fiction to help us see the world we live in and the futures we might have”

  —DANIELLE EVANS, 2019 judge and author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

  “There were very well-written stories that didn’t end up on the final list, edged out by the magnitude of feeling and creativity contained in the final twelve. I was particularly struck by the authors’ ability to hit it out of the park, first time up. When I read I’m always (like it or not) guessing what’s going to happen at the end of the line, the scene, on the plot level. The stories we chose were those that forced me, a relentless overthinker, to stop thinking.

  “Amy Hempel’s first short story was ‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.’ That story is great, and contains many of the elements she’s famous for, but it is not like most of her stories. It’s way longer, for one, and more traditional. As if she was only able to peel her inhibitions as she wrote more and more. I’m excited for these authors to participate in that same kind of peeling that helps voice grow more substantial, and I hope this honor gives them the confidence to get weirder and weirder, stronger and stronger.”

  —MARIE-HELENE BERTINO, 2017 judge and author of 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas and Safe as Houses

  “I was so blown away by the pieces we chose for this collection—there was a wonderful array of different styles and approaches in the submissions we received, but each of the stories we ended up choosing had something startlingly alive and bracingly imaginative within it. You can tell that these are writers working with total dedication to gift these fictive worlds to their readers, to make these surprising, vivid scenarios real. I am so wildly enthusiastic about what these writers are going to do next—and in reading this anthology, you get to say you’ve followed their entire career, from the very first short story on! You can’t beat that.”

  —ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN, 2018 judge and author of Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

  “A lot of people talk about how so many short stories are becoming too workshopped, too MFA, too a certain kind of story. And I can say, after reading all the entries here, they are wrong. There are so many stories being told that are extraordinary and unexpected. I fretted over picking only twelve. But the stories that won were all stories that astounded us all.”

  —NINA McCONIGLEY, 2017 judge and author of Cowboys and East Indians

  Praise for the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories Series

  “[An] anthology of remarkable prose . . . The gathered contest winners are uniquely gifted writers whose stories represent literature’s bright tomorrow. The pieces showcase a wide breadth of human experiences, representing numerous racial, ethnic, and cultural identities . . . Sharp, engrossing, and sure to leave readers excited about the future of the craft.”

  —Booklist

  “A great overview of some of the year’s most interesting fiction.”

  —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “These are stories that hide behind corners, stories that make grand statements about identity, and stories that offer a full life and times in a small format . . . A strong addition to the annual anthologies.”

  —PopMatters

  “A greatest hits list for contemporary fiction, a way to quickly get up to speed on what’s being published.”

  —Mental Floss

  “A pleasure for fans of short fiction and a promise of good things to come.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Copyright © 2019 by Catapult

  First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  Please see Permissions on page 219 for individual credits.

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-34-9

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  10987654321

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Yuka Igarashi, series editor

  TODAY, YOU’RE A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY

  Jade Jones

  from The Rumpus

  THE RICKIES

  Sarah Curry

  from Nimrod International Journal

  THE UNSENT LETTERS OF BLAISE AND JACQUELINE PASCAL

  Kelsey Peterson

  from Conjunctions

  THE MANGA ARTIST

  Doug Henderson

  from The Iowa Review

  MOTHER AND CHILD

  Laura Freudig

  from The Sun

  WITHOUT A BIG ONE

  JP Infante

  from Kweli Journal

  LAST DAYS 1

  Tamiko Beyer

  from Black Warrior Review

  GOOD HOPE

  Enyeribe Ibegwam

  from Auburn Avenue

  TORNADO SEASON

  Marilyn Manolakas

  from Alaska Quarterly Review

  CICADAS AND THE DEAD CHAIRMAN

  Pingmei Lan

  from Epiphany

  VAIN BEASTS

  A. B. Young

  from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  BAD NORTHERN WOMEN

  Erin Singer

  from Conjunctions

  About the Judges

  About the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers

  List of Participating Publications

  Permissions

  INTRODUCTION

  I CAN THINK of different ways to introduce you to the stories in this collection—twelve chosen for the Dau Prize, out of hundreds nominated, by Danielle Evans, Alice Sola Kim, and Carmen Maria Machado, all by writers who had never published fiction before 2018. I could describe the interesting things that happen in them: a “good black girl” climbs the flagpole in front of the capitol building in South Carolina to take down its Confederate flag; a woodcutter loses his way home and meets a man wearing a mask made from a taxidermied wolf. I could focus on the playful and daring stylistic choices—one is written in the form of panels for a manga, and another includes incantatory poems and fragments from Audre Lorde and Sun Tzu. I could discuss the ways they engage with “issues” I care about, such as postpartum depression, sexual violence, immigration, mass incarceration, and rural
poverty. I could try to explain why the stories set in seventeenth-century France and in Beijing after Mao Zedong’s death and during a tornado on an Oklahoma farm in 1956 seem as current as the stories that take place in the present, how every one of them feels to me as though they could only have been written today.

  While all this might encourage you to read what follows—I hope it does—I find myself wanting to be more specific. I want to get you closer to how I experienced these stories. What moves me when I read, what I remember best, tends to be smaller than plot, structure, theme, or setting. It’s often a sentence or a detail. Or it’s more elusive. Here are a dozen moments, one from each piece, when something rose up from the page and entered my mind to become a feeling.

  •In “Today, You’re a Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, when the narrator finds herself at the top of that Confederate-flag-bearing pole:

  How many different people control you? The flag is rough and flaps wildly in your grip. You thought it would be made of better material. Silk or satin or something.

  “Ma’am!” a gruff voice shouts below. “Come down, now!”

  “In a moment,” you answer.

  What a funny, polite thing to say while engaged in the most rebellious act of one’s life; how fitting that one would contemplate the texture of a piece of fabric while confronting the country’s history of racial oppression.

  •From “The Rickies” by Sarah Curry, told in the collective voice of four women who meet at a campus potluck for rape victims and become friends when they’re the only ones to call bullshit on “survival”:

  That semester after study abroad, freshmen girls with Bibles in hand-knit cozies were the worst. Anytime they saw a girl alone on campus, they invited her to Bible study: Free soda! Hot Christian guys! We patted their heads. They were wideeyed Yorkies in a puppy mill and didn’t know it. We said, Sorry, we are atheists of everything. But it troubled us. Atheists sounded too positive. Nihilists was too descriptive. All -ists too reductive.

  There are so many layers packed into this passage: the pain and disillusionment behind the words “after study abroad” (and the shock of recognizing what happens to many women during their college summer travels); the sense of superiority toward freshmen that quickly gives way to uncertainty and unease; the women’s refusal to be part of any group, as victims or as anything else, in contrast to the obvious solidarity they feel with one another.

  •The transporting opening lines of Kelsey Peterson’s “The Unsent Letters of Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal,” which immediately changes my perception of nature, math, shapes, and the universe:

  I saw a perfect circle today. The yellow disk at the center of an anemone bloomed early and whose white petals had curled back in the wind. I marveled at its humble perfection, springing forth from some superabundance of the unrelenting spring. I am curious if there is an equation for such a flower, the formula to project its arcs and angles, its radii and planes.

  •The ending to “The Manga Artist” by Doug Henderson, in which a drawing of a mouse and a hamster encapsulates all the complexity of the human love story that precedes it:

  Panel 115: Alfonso and Hamuchan have left the school. They are running down the wide front stairs, fear and excitement in their eyes.

  •A portrait of a marriage in three sentences, from Laura Freudig’s “Mother and Child”:

  John is tall enough to stand behind me and rest his chin on my head. He likes to do this. I do not know how I feel about it: cherished or pinned down.

  •In “Without a Big One” by JP Infante, about a boy and his slippery relationships with the adults around him—his mother, Mary; his absent stepfather; and his beautiful babysitter:

  That morning you realize the Chinese doctor was flirting with [Mary]. You make a mental note to tell your stepfather when he calls from school. He’s only called a couple of times since he left because the apartment phone is always being cut off and there are never minutes on Mary’s prepaid cell phone.

  Your babysitter, Nilda, calls you Ray Ray . . . Nilda is taller than Mary and has a fat ass. Whenever you hug her, you touch it and she doesn’t say anything. Nilda is in love with you. You don’t tell her you know because she has a boyfriend.

  These paragraphs remind me that growing up often seems like an initiation into secrets—not just learning them, but understanding which ones to share and which ones to keep.

  •A few words in Tamiko Beyer’s “Last Days 1” that create an entirely new world:

  There were five of us in that small apartment, hauling water, coding and decoding, soldering metal, constructing strategies, drafting poems. I lifted heavy objects and learned to stitch up an open wound.

  •In “Good Hope” by Enyeribe Ibegwam, as the narrator arrives at a building in Washington, D.C., to see a favorite uncle for the first time since he left Nigeria decades before:

  A teenage girl with flowing multicolor hair, wearing black harem trousers and a yellow top that bared her midriff, raced up the stairs behind me and stopped to flash me a letter. Before I could look at it, she screamed, “I got accepted,” and continued past me, tears slick on her brown face.

  The girl never appears again; she’s a splash of color that illuminates the uncle’s home in a way that a straightforward description of it never could.

  •From “Tornado Season” by Melinda Manalokas, a portrayal of sex that seems especially powerful and unexpected for being from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old farm girl in the 1950s:

  The first time he asked her to be on top, she was embarrassed at first, but then something else happened, a connection made between being with him and the way she would rub herself against her bed at night. She started concentrating, gathering the threads of it, and then there it was—dizzying, boundless, like air or water or light.

  •It’s better if I don’t explain why this exchange in Pingmei Lan’s “Cicadas and the Dead Chairman” delights me so much; it’s part of a theme that quietly recurs and gathers meaning as the story progresses:

  “What’s your name, little girl?” The driver looked at me through his rearview mirror.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  •I could pick almost any section in A. B. Young’s “Vain Beasts,” whose interweaving of ancient motifs reminds me of a fugue:

  The wolf tells the woodcutter, “In exchange for stealing my rose, you will bring me your most beautiful possession.”

  The woodcutter trembles. He wishes he had not left his axe back among the tree stumps. He could split the wolf into equal halves, had he enough force behind his swing.

  The wolf says, “My vanity makes me patient, woodcutter. I have waited many years for beauty.”

  The woodcutter lies through his sharp teeth. “I have no beautiful possessions. I am a poor woodcutter.”

  “What?” says the wolf. “No wife? No daughter?”

  •Finally, in “Bad Northern Women” by Erin Singer, a paragraph I’ve thought about many times since I first read it, in which the narrators seem to break through the story’s walls to address the reader directly, demanding to be acknowledged:

  Before we die we’ll slick your Teen Burgers with Teen sauce, make chicken salad on a cheese bun and keep your kids from drowning in the public pool and we are jolly bun fillers of submarine sandwiches and we ring up your Trojans and Lysol and scented candles, and we shovel your snow and push your babies on the swing set, pare your grandpa’s toenails, harvest your honey, detail your urinals, hold the papery hands of your dying, nestle newspapers in the rungs of your mailbox and ladle gravy on your French fries and we push logs through your sawmill, bring you size-ten Sorels, then size eleven, then size ten and a half, and climb onto our mattresses at night with gasoline on our hands and dog bites on our ankles, chicken fingers on our breath, cigarette smoke in our hair, ringing in our ears and our men’s hands snaking up our thighs.

  A list like this will probably mean more to you once you’ve read the book. The extracts here aren’t meant to represen
t the stories, because of course one passage can’t represent a story, whose effect is always cumulative. And of course every reader’s list will be different; my own list might be different on a different day. The list only represents the possibility of infinite lists like this—infinite moments within these pages by which we might find our way to an infinite variety of emotions.

  THIS ANTHOLOGY IS in its third year. Its previous contributors have signed with agents, published stories and books, inspired other writers. Compared to other annual best-of collections, though, it’s still young. The first volume of Best American Short Stories came out in 1915; The O. Henry Prize Stories started in 1919; The Pushcart Prize is a little over forty years old. As with those prizes and series, I think the influence of this prize and series on its winners, and the influence of its winners on literature, will only become clearer as years and decades pass.

  For now, I want to make two observations. There are a handful of magazines that have impressed our judges each year with the debut writers they’ve discovered. The Rumpus has had a piece in every edition; Black Warrior Review, Epiphany, The Baltimore Review, and Conjunctions have all contributed multiple stories. It seems to me that anyone interested in the future of short stories would want to pay special attention to these publications. I’ve come to think of them—and all twenty-nine magazines that have appeared in these anthologies—as bright places in the “literary landscape” that I’m glad to know and glad I get to visit. To further push this metaphor, the editors of the magazines who originally published these stories, and whose expert commentaries introduce each piece, are the innkeepers and hosts, hanging their welcoming lights; the judges are the explorers who find and forge paths to them.