The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  Christopher Merkner, “Cabins”

  “Cabins” emerged from the experience of having a good friend—or someone I’d thought was a really close friend—very casually tell me over a pastry and coffee one afternoon that he and his wife were divorcing. I remember getting the chills, thinking, My God, I can’t believe this is happening to them, and I told him I was so sorry, and he dismissed my concerns and just continued on with the elaborate details of the divorce—his affair, his wife’s affair, etc.—all of which was a shocking explosion of new information for me to process—and though he reported this information with sincerity and detachment and objectivity, he was also making it clear to me that he’d already told this information to something like fifteen or so other people before me. And so once my mystification thinned out, I started thinking about that, about how the real divorce in our conversation was my divorce from this close friend’s personal reality. And also my divorce from the lives of these other fifteen people he’d already told, all of whom were mutual friends of ours, and none of whom mentioned a word of this to me. The problem of course, and the thing that most bothered me at the time, was that I’d foolishly assumed I had some sort of intimate arrangement with the details of these people’s personal lives. Obviously that wasn’t the case, and I remember thinking, as I was working through this story, just how many lives I find myself assuming I know but ultimately know nothing about at all, or just very tiny bits and pieces.

  —

  Christopher Merkner was born and raised in northern Illinois. His fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, Black Warrior Review, the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, New World Writing, The Collagist, and elsewhere. He is the author of the story collection The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

  Manuel Muñoz, “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”

  My father didn’t become a US citizen until the late 1980s. He was deported many times. As a child, I didn’t know to be alarmed at my father’s sudden disappearances, since he always returned. I had a very naive idea of what it meant to be deported and it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I understood the different circumstances that led to his deportations and how involved my mother was in getting him back home.

  My parents are very good but reluctant storytellers. It takes work to get them to talk about a past our younger memories can’t confirm. They prefer retelling stories everyone around the kitchen table can vaguely remember; they recognize that already knowing a story is a magic quite different from surprise.

  The stories of the deportation years have come more easily now, because they watch the news and see what is happening on the border, the ways in which families are torn apart. “Things are so much harder now,” my father says in Spanish. In the 1980s, my parents had no money, no credit cards, and sometimes no transportation. Yet my mother always brought my father back home. I think of the waiting game at the two parks—a detail of their story that once tested my notions of plausibility—and have humbly accepted that I have a lot of work to do on what it means to have faith, to endure without ever losing hope.

  —

  Manuel Muñoz was born in Dinuba, California. He is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, as well as two short-story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The recipient of a Whiting Award, he lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

  Dina Nayeri, “A Ride Out of Phrao”

  In the summer of 2012, in the midst of a divorce, I went on a trip to Thailand. It was the first time I had traveled alone in a long time, and the place I was headed was my mother’s home in Phrao, a tiny village outside Chiang Mai. The village was just as I’ve described in the story, but the circumstances were very different. Unlike the mother and daughter in my story, who are disconnected from each other and have deep unspoken issues, my mother and I spent most of our time laughing and exploring her new Thai life (she had a machete!). I had a difficult first night, which inspired the final scene of the story, but after some adjustment and a few pep talks, my mother gave me a backpack and some comfortable Thai dresses and we set off on a journey to see the temples of Chiang Mai, to eat street food in Bangkok, and to swim in Phuket. We are big talkers, and so we told each other everything about our lives, and she helped prepare me for my upcoming singlehood. During one of our talks, my mother told me about a boy in her class who grabbed her breast. She said, “What do you think that was?” and we laughed it off as instinct. Over those weeks, she told me other tales of her double culture shock (as an Iranian and a naturalized American) and I began to imagine the story that eventually became “A Ride Out of Phrao.”

  When I returned home, I wrote two pieces. The first was an essay that eventually appeared in The Wall Street Journal about coming to terms with my own weaknesses after watching my mother adapt easily to Thailand. The second was this story. To create the main character, Shirin, I used another woman in our family as a model—a timid and insecure woman, the kind of person who spends fifteen minutes ironing a blouse for her widow’s group—imagining how she would behave in my mother’s situation. She would be less graceful, for sure, but also in a kind of lonely turmoil, a shell she can’t break because of her need to keep certain images of herself intact. Years later, when both stories were out in the world, my mother read them. She said, “Are you allowed to imagine the same trip for two completely different stories?” I said, “Of course!” And she said, “That makes no sense, but okay.” She sent me her diaries from Thailand so I could write a book about the many changes we both experienced during those two years.

  —

  Dina Nayeri was born in the middle of a revolution in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at the age of ten. Her work (including her novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea) is published in more than twenty countries and was selected for Granta’s “New Voices,” Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers, and other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vice, Guernica, The Southern Review, Marie Claire, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Princeton, an MBA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching-Writing Fellow. She lives in New York City.

  Brenda Peynado, “The History of Happiness”

  I wrote this story the first semester of my MFA program. I was trying to figure out how to write about my travels as an IT auditor, living three hundred days out of the year in hotels. I had met two incredibly kind Indian men while at a bar after working through an account’s disaster recovery plan (if a tsunami, for example, wipes out the mainframes, how are they set up to stay online?) and spent the night talking with them on a Singapore beach.

  When I started my MFA, the world had impressed upon me how lucky I was to have gone where I had, met the people I had, been taught by such amazing dynamos of spirit. Even the narrow escapes had still been miraculous escapes. Caught in a riptide, I was able to cling to an abandoned bridge. A taxi driver tried to rob me, but when I opened the door mid-traffic and jumped out, he sped off. Men followed us home but veered off when we reached our destination. Traveling was one of the most sustained periods of happiness in my life. How magical the world is! Through the process of writing this story I had to unlearn all that. What if the people I met hadn’t been good? What if I had less good intentions? What if I didn’t even know what happiness felt like?

  That was my entrance into the story about those two nice men in Singapore. However, for so many drafts, the worst happened that night she spends with Anil and Satik, but then I realized that her yearning wasn’t figuring out how to be happy despite being a victim; it was the opposite. It had to do with struggling with her own complicity in her unhappiness, in wanting so much from the world that she was willing to take it. She wanted to be a victim, and this character h
ad the most to learn by not getting that victimhood. And there I had my story and a lesson that would spur me through the rest of my writing: What do my characters want desperately, and with what quiet disasters does the world defeat them, defeat us?

  —

  Brenda Peynado was born and raised in Florida and spent her childhood summers in the Dominican Republic. She received her BA in computer science from Wellesley College and her MFA in fiction from Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and others. In 2013, she was on a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic, working on a novel. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Thomas Pierce, “Ba Baboon”

  Many years ago my grandfather was in an accident on his farm and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was a different person afterward—with different likes, dislikes, wants, habits. I found these personality changes both frightening and fascinating. I think most of us like to assume we are who we are and will be that way until we die. It can be an unsettling thought, the extent to which our identities are so malleable, the degree to which we are barely ourselves, even from one moment to the next. I suspect there is something nonmaterial involved in all of this—a fragment that can’t be bashed, bruised, or aged away—but somehow I doubt that the soul has anything to do with something so crude as a personality.

  I’d long wanted to write a story that grappled with these questions, but for years I struggled to find the right structure and characters. I had an engine but no car. I only got moving once I had an image of Brooks and Mary, brother and sister, trapped in someone else’s pantry, a pair of vicious dogs outside the door.

  —

  Thomas Pierce was born in South Carolina in 1982. He is the author of the short-story collection Hall of Small Mammals. His stories have appeared in Oxford American, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. He was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received his MFA. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Emily Ruskovich, “Owl”

  “Owl” began with a single image: a woman lying in the grass at night, shot down by a group of boys who had mistaken her for an owl. I didn’t know anything else for a very long time. I wrote several partial drafts of this story in different voices over a period of three years. A few of these drafts took place in the modern day, and a few of them contained a third member of the family, the couple’s young son. But these versions didn’t satisfy me. It felt like I was forcing plots upon a premise whose hold on me I had yet to fully understand. It was only when other vivid images began to gather in my mind around the central image that the story opened up, and opened up fast. The coffee grounds spread on the dirt floor, and the giant-headed inbred cats. These details came from my family history, the coffee grounds from my mother’s side, the cats from my father’s. I knew these two real images were related somehow to the one I had invented, but I didn’t know how—so that’s what I set out to discover. Solving my own mystery, I invented someone else’s. The various histories merged into a strange genealogy. The cats, the coffee, the woman-not-owl. I put them together for a while, and the result was a fifteen-year-old girl tied up in a buggy on her wedding day, pregnant with a pig thief’s child.

  —

  Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Inkwell. Her first novel, Idaho, and first collection of short stories are both forthcoming. She teaches at the University of Colorado in Denver and lives in the mountains west of the city.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz, “The Golden Rule”

  That this story exists at all is really a fluke. I wrote it a couple of years ago and wasn’t quite happy with it. I knew it needed something but didn’t know how to complete it. I set it aside and pretty much forgot it. Then a magazine editor asked me to contribute a story; I hunted around in my files and found “The Golden Rule.” Strange how feeling wanted by an editor—having an assignment, so to speak—gave me the impetus to return to the story. What had seemed unclear and undoable became clear at once, and the finishing touches weren’t nearly as difficult as I had imagined.

  As far as the subject, I’ve been living in New York City apartment buildings for more than forty years and have closely observed all the interactions in those buildings. I even based a novel, In the Family Way, on the antics and fictional goings-on in one such building. So the subject is dear to me; urban apartment buildings are a microcosm of society at large. I’ve also been thinking a lot about aging, and how the “getting old” observe the truly old, in anxious anticipation of their own futures.

  —

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a native New Yorker, is the author of twenty-three books, including the novel Two-Part Inventions; short stories; nonfiction; poetry; a memoir, Not Now, Voyager; and translations from Italian. Her latest is a collection of essays, This Is Where We Came In. Her novel Leaving Brooklyn was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Essays, and other anthologies. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and she teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She lives in New York City.

  Lionel Shriver, “Kilifi Creek”

  Like Liana in the story—like most adults, I imagine—I keep a growing list in the back of my head of the times I almost died. What interests me about the nature of these disparate brushes against nonexistence isn’t the practical “lessons” I derive from them (look both ways before you cross the street, etc.). Many of these moments are dumb. For example, I had the most ludicrous bike accident in Manhattan last summer. Had the spill occurred in front of an overtaking truck, I would hate to read the subsequent obituary: “Ms. Shriver was suddenly forced to slow down so drastically that the bicycle would no longer stay upright and it fell over.” No matter the circumstances, all these encounters teach the same lesson. It’s the sheer brutality of the message that stays with you. Only in the immediate aftermath of having been a hairsbreadth from permanent oblivion have I ever truly believed that I could die. I’ve wanted to write a story about these moments for a long time.

  When I read in The New York Times about the fate of an attractive young woman in Manhattan, something clicked. She was out on the balcony of her apartment, socializing with a date. The balcony railing gave way, and she plummeted to her death. Something about this story had the hallmarks of This Could Be You. It linked in my mind with all the times that, had matters gone just a little differently, I wouldn’t be here.

  —

  Lionel Shriver was born and raised in North Carolina. She is the author of eleven novels and is known for The New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Book Prize) and The Post-Birthday World (Entertainment Weekly’s Book of the Year), as well as the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin and her more recent novel, Big Brother. Winner of the 2005 Orange Prize, We Need to Talk About Kevin was adapted for an award-winning feature film. Both Kevin and So Much for That were dramatized for BBC Radio 4. Shriver’s work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She writes for The Guardian, The New York Times, London’s Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. “Kilifi Creek” won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014. She lives in London, England, and Brooklyn, New York.

  Joan Silber, “About My Aunt”

  When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, the radio had a story about older people in housing projects who were unfazed
at being without electricity and water, much to the surprise of volunteers. (My neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was in the dark zone—but I could get out to lean on friends in the lit parts of town.) I began to think about self-reliance as a key trait, which led to the character of Kiki. I leaped at the chance to invent her background in Turkey, which I’ve visited a few times, a culture different enough to illustrate her pliancy. And I wanted Kiki viewed by a younger female character, with her own ideas about risk and obligation and her own love complications. I liked the sense of these two, aunt and niece, understanding each other just fine but viewing each other across the great divide of age, where neither envies the other.

  I assumed this story was done when I finished it, but it has become the first chapter of a novel.

  —

  Joan Silber was born in New Jersey. She is the author of seven works of fiction, including Fools (longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), The Size of the World (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction), Ideas of Heaven (finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize), and Household Words (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award). Her stories have been in four O. Henry collections. She is also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction, a critical study. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

  Elizabeth Strout, “Snow Blind”

  In truth, it is always difficult for me to know where a story comes from. With “Snow Blind,” I know that I had an abiding image of snow, lots of it, like there used to be in my childhood in New Hampshire. But I set the story in the potato lands of Maine, because I had been there recently and the scenery was fresh in my mind. I was interested mainly in this child and her relationship to the natural world, how she could not keep herself away from those moments of ecstasy she felt by herself. The rest of it unfolded from that.