The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  But instead Pomai paddles and kicks and pulls with her fingers through the water, even as the wave peaks. She’ll cut him off if she has to.

  The drop takes her breath away.

  She’s shooting down the face. Rylan has already dropped and established, he’s turning toward her and tucking and sliding for the curl of the coming barrel. And as Pomai drops in and cuts him off, she sees his face. Her drop forces him off the line and the wave detonates on top of him. He’s gone instantly in the churn.

  For a moment Pomai feels the sneering joy of revenge. But the feeling is hollowed out almost as soon as it arrives. The way her father’s face was before he went under, the eyes of surprise and pain—Pomai knows she’s broken something big, bigger than she’d meant to. There is a shift in her weight and her rail catches in the streaking water. The nose of the board dips, yanks out from under Pomai’s feet. She pitches forward into the air. Through the wave she sees the throwing-star shaped vana, the knuckles of green reef, rushing up. Her body puckers and she slaps into the ocean.

  The wave breaks like a truck accident. The air blasts from Pomai’s nose. She’s down and up and twisting. The porous reef smacks her shoulder and scrapes skin away. Her ears are full of the white noise of churning water; her chest aches; she’s rolled again. The last of her breath leaks from her lungs and her head begins to fill with brainy light.

  On the beach, far from the accident, Rylan surfaces. He’s rolled into shore by the last of the rip, and he crawls on his hands and knees in the fringe of the tidewater, his board sliding up and down the shore with each wash of waves. He stops and belches up a sheet of prickling salt water. Gasps. The oxygen is cool and sweet in Rylan’s lungs. He rolls onto his back and opens his eyes against the sky.

  “Goddamn, Rylan, you okay bruddah?”

  It’s Kui, one of the lifeguards, standing above him. Rylan knows Kui. They’ve surfed together before, been to the same barbecues at the same houses. Kui bends to inspect Rylan, his shadow falling across Rylan’s chest.

  “I’m fine,” Rylan says.

  “Just give me a second,” Kui says, and he puts his hands on Rylan, starting a basic trauma examination.

  “No.” Rylan bats off Kui’s hands, then lurches to his feet. Water drips from his nose, slick and warm with his own snot. “Did she make it?”

  “Air drop,” Kui says. “She went under right after you. Howard-them are going for her.” Rylan looks out at the sea. “But did she make it back up?” he asks. “After?”

  Kui does not respond; he’s looking down the beach. Rylan follows his gaze and sees the thrashing, sees the two lifeguards and then, surfacing, his daughter. The lifeguards start swimming her to shore, holding her on her back with her head up. Her board’s been snapped in half and both pieces are tumbling through the white water, bobbing and tucking like kites as surges of water bat against them. As the lifeguards stand Pomai up, Rylan sees her back, the blue rash guard, shredded open from the reef and red with blood.

  Rylan starts jogging towards her, dragging his board behind. He rips the leash strap free from his ankle and keeps going.

  In the medical tent they treat Pomai, staunch her gashed back with bandages and wrap her torso with medical tape. She raises her arms as they wrap, her skull twirling inside itself from the fall, made worse by the tang of antiseptic. She’s sitting in an open-air tent, a flat green tarp they’ve staked high with poles and tied deep and locked with boulders, so that sun and air run through the tent and the patients can sit as Pomai does, on a folding metal chair with her feet in the cool grains of sand. The slick tatters of her rash guard are pooled at her feet. Pomai sees her father out along the shore. He’s loping towards her, his shorts floppy and soaked and slapping against themselves.

  “He looks okay,” Pomai says, to no one in particular. The ocean rips and booms. “It looks like I didn’t hurt him.”

  She sits still and watches her father come toward her.

  Sometimes Pomai’s mother would say to her: You’re just doing this to piss me off. Why don’t you act right? And she would say, Because dad. Because you. And maybe at the start that was true. But soon enough the friction—chain-swearing at counselors, padding through midnight Honolulu with a stolen bottle in her hand, talking down her mother, her father, bitches in their makeup, tourists at her first restaurant job—it became the because. She was tired of these choices: Hawai’i or the mainland, his version of the divorce or hers, a house in Niu Valley or a brick apartment on the fringe of Kaneohe. Pomai wanted none of it. I choose the land out in front of me and a million ways to go, she wanted to say. I’ll go any way, I’ll go all ways, and feel the white blast of the world filling me up. But now Pomai thinks of everything her father told her in the water. There are pictures in her mind she hadn’t wanted to remember: The two of them at ‘Ehukai beach, bucketing sand into the shape of a turtle; the first time she’d stood on a board, he was pushing her from behind; during the hard years, after screaming matches with her mother, she’d snuck into his house, coming down off a glassy high and crashing on his couch. He’d laid a blanket on her and never said a word and she was gone in the blue-black morning, long before he’d stirred. She wonders how it must have felt to him to see the wormed blanket, empty when he woke.

  Her father has stopped walking towards her. Pomai stands and moves to where she can see him better, into the sun.

  Out on the sand, Rylan sees his daughter come to the edge of the tent. She shades her face with the blade of her hand. Rylan hears a soft thump; Pomai’s accidentally kicked one of the halves of her board, lying in the sand. She’s looking down at the shards now, then back up at him. Do her eyes brighten? Please. Just once more. She used to be that way, five years old, arms thrust up towards him, begging with her shining eyes for a pick-up-and-spin. “You’re home,” she’d say, like it was a reward, “You’re home!” He feels himself about to split open with words. He wants to say about the board, that it shouldn’t be the only one she breaks; he wants to say again about the ali’i, the kingdom, about her people, what they were and what they can be again. But she’s still so far away.

  He raises his hand to wave to her. The grit falls from his fingers. Pomai’s still looking at him, but she hasn’t moved. Another set arrives at Second Break. A wave booms down. Rylan looks to the surf, his hand still raised to his daughter. You don’t even have to move for it to happen, he thinks. It makes no difference. The waves keep coming. Here the ocean is big and blue but Rylan knows if he could see it from above—from an airplane, say, flying away—he’d see it as a scribble of white, rolling in again, battering the island into something smaller.

  BRYAN STEVENSON

  The High Road

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  THE VISITATION ROOM was 100 feet square, with a few stools bolted to the floor and wire mesh running across the room. For family visits, inmates and visitors had to be on opposite sides of the mesh. Legal visits, on the other hand, were “contact visits”—the two of us would be on the same side of the room to permit more privacy. I began worrying about my lack of preparation. I had scheduled to meet with the client for one hour, but I wasn’t sure how I would fill even fifteen minutes with what I knew. I sat down on a stool and waited until I heard the clanging of chains on the other side of the door.

  The man who walked in seemed even more nervous than I was. He glanced at me and quickly averted his gaze when I looked back. He was a young, neatly groomed African-American man with short hair—clean-shaven, medium build—wearing bright, clean prison whites. He looked immediately familiar, like everyone I grew up with, friends from school, people I played sports or music with, someone I’d talk to on the street. As the guard left, the metal door banged loudly behind him.

  I walked over and offered my hand. The man, who had been convicted of murder, shook it cautiously. We sat down.

  “I’m very sorry,” I blurted out. “I’m really sorry, I’m really sorry, uh, okay, I don’t really know, uh, I’m just a l
aw student, I’m not a real lawyer.” Despite all my preparations and rehearsed remarks, I couldn’t stop myself from apologizing repeatedly. “I’m so sorry I can’t tell you very much, but I don’t know very much.”

  He looked at me, worried. “Is everything all right with my case?” “Oh, yes, sir. The lawyers at S.P.D.C. sent me down to tell you that they don’t have a lawyer yet,” I said. “But you’re not at risk of execution anytime in the next year. We’re working on finding you a lawyer, a real lawyer.”

  He interrupted my chatter by grabbing my hands. “I’m not going to have an execution date anytime in the next year?”

  “No, sir. They said it would be at least a year.” Those words didn’t sound very comforting to me. But he just squeezed my hands tighter.

  “Thank you, man,” he said. “I mean, really, thank you! I’ve been talking to my wife on the phone, but I haven’t wanted her to come and visit me or bring the kids because I was afraid they’d show up and I’d have an execution date. Now I’m going to tell them they can come and visit. Thank you!”

  I was astonished. We began to talk. It turned out that he and I were exactly the same age. He told me about his family and his trial. He asked me about law school and my family. We talked about music and about prison. We kept talking and talking, and it was only when I heard a loud bang on the door that I realized I had stayed long past my allotted time. I looked at my watch. I had been there three hours.

  The guard came in and began handcuffing him; I could see the prisoner grimacing. “I think those cuffs are on too tight,” I said.

  “It’s Okay, Bryan,” he said. “Don’t worry about this. Just come back and see me again, Okay?”

  I struggled to say something appropriate, something reassuring. He looked at me and smiled. Then he did something completely unexpected. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. I was confused, but then he opened his mouth, and I understood. He had a tremendous baritone that was strong and clear.

  Lord, lift me up and let me stand,

  By faith, on heaven’s tableland;

  A higher plane than I have found,

  Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

  It was an old hymn they used to sing all the time in church where I grew up. I hadn’t heard it in years. Because his ankles were shackled and his hands were locked behind his back, he almost stumbled when the guard shoved him forward. But he kept on singing.

  His voice was filled with desire. I had come into the prison with such anxiety and fear about his willingness to tolerate my inadequacy. I didn’t expect him to be compassionate or generous. I had no right to expect anything from a condemned man on death row. But that day, I could hear him as he went down the hall, until the echo of his earnest, soaring voice faded. When it had gone, the still silence of that space sounded different from when I entered. Even today, after thirty years of defending death-row prisoners, I still hear him.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Daniel Alarcón is a novelist, journalist, and radio producer. His most recent novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN Faulkner Award. He is Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish language audio journalism podcast, and teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

  Shane Bauer is an award-winning journalist and senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine. His work on the criminal justice system and the Middle East has appeared in The Nation, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and many other publications. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Sarah Shourd.

  Box Brown is an Ignatz Award-winning American cartoonist best known for the comic Bellen! In 2008 he was awarded a Xeric Grant for the comic Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing. A passionate proponent of the serial comics format, Brown runs the micropress Retrofit, which is dedicated to supporting independent serial comics work. He is also a lifelong professional wrestling fan. His next graphic novel will be about Tetris.

  Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Fellow, 2015 Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Contest (Bull City Press). His work has appeared in the New England Review, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Winner of the Ninth Letter Poetry Award and the New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he holds an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University and certificates in wilderness survival from the Tracker School.

  Emily Carroll was born in London, Ontario in 1983. In addition to the many short comics found at her website, her work has been featured in numerous print anthologies. She currently lives with her wife Kate and their large orange cat in Stratford, Ontario.

  Katie Coyle grew up in Fair Haven, New Jersey, and has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Her debut novel, Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), was named one of the forty best YA novels of all time by Rolling Stone, and was followed by a sequel, Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle. Her short fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and been featured in One Story, the Southeast Review, and Critical Quarterly, among others. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, and blogs at katiecoyle.com.

  Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2005 and 2011, Ecotone, Glimmer Train, Brevity, The Rumpus, the North American Review, and the Texas Review, among others. “Chainsaw Fingers” is drawn from a collection of stories about characters that have been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Neftali Cuello has been a farmworker in North Carolina since age twelve. Today, she is also a worker rights activist who has served with organizations such as Poder Juvenil Campesino and NC FIELD. She lives in Pink Hill, North Carolina.

  Rebecca Curtis received a B.A. from Pomona College, an M.A. in English from New York University, and an M.F.A from Syracuse University. Her first book, Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money (Harpercollins, 2007) was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007, and an L.A. Times Best Book of 2007. It was also a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, and it won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction 2006 & 2007. Curtis’ fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, N+1, and elsewhere.

  Joshua Fattal is a historian of twentieth century United States and the Middle East. He is coauthor of A Sliver of Light and has written for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He believes the world is round. He lives in New York City with his partner and child.

  Corinne Goria is a writer and immigration attorney. Her fiction has been featured in The Silent History and she is the editor of Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy, which is part of the Voice of Witness (VOW) book series. For more information, visit www.voiceof-witness.org.

  Sheila Heti is the author of six books, including How Should a Person Be? and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse. She is also one of the editors of the anthology, Women in Clothes and frequently collaborates with other artists and writers.

  TJ Jarrett is a writer and software developer in Nashville, Tennessee. Her recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry, African American Review, Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, VQR, and West Branch, among others. She has earned scholarships and fellowships from Colrain Manuscript Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and the Summer Literary Seminars. She was a runner-up for the 2012 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize, and the winner of VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry 2014.

  Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels, including most recently The Vanishers, along with the memoir The Folded Clock. She is the winner of the PEN New England Award, an editor of the anthology Women in Clothes, and a founding editor of the Believer. She is currently a professor at Columbia University.

  Ammi Keller published the zine Emergency. She was
a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and now teaches in the Certificate Program in Novel Writing there. Ammi’s work appears in Joyland, Bottoms Up, and Stories Care Forgot. She is at work on a novel-in-stories about Hurricane Katrina, sexuality, and disaster capitalism.

  Victor Lodato is the author of the novel Mathilda Savitch, which won the PEN USA Award for Fiction. His stories and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Southern Review. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, is forthcoming.

  Alex Mar is a non-fiction writer who lives in her hometown of New York City. She has contributed to the Believer, the Oxford American, Elle, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, New York, and other publications. She is also the director of the documentary feature American Mystic. Her first book, Witches of America, about present-day witchcraft in the United States, is out in October of 2015 through Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Sarah Marshall grew up in Oregon and now lives in Wisconsin, where she is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Bitch Magazine, and the Toast, and her writerly obsessions include insects, invasive species, exotic pets, crime, confessions, vampires, vigilantism, sports, masochism, teenagers, witches, Florida, and maligned women.

  Tom McAllister is the non-fiction editor at Barrelhouse and co-host of the weekly Book Fight podcast. His memoir, Bury Me in My Jersey, was published by Villard in 2010 and his debut novel, The Widower’s Handbook, will be published by Algonquin in summer 2016. He teaches in the English department at Temple University. You can find him on Twitter at @t_mcallister.