The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  SERIES EDITORS

  2003– Laura Furman

  1997–2002 Larry Dark

  1967–1996 William Abrahams

  1961–1966 Richard Poirier

  1960 Mary Stegner

  1954–1959 Paul Engle

  1941–1951 Herschel Brickell

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  PAST JURORS

  2011 A. M. Homes, Manuel Muñoz, Christine Schutt

  2010 Junot Díaz, Paula Fox, Yiyun Li

  2009 A. S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, Tim O’Brien

  2008 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Leavitt, David Means

  2007 Charles D’Ambrosio, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lily Tuck

  2006 Kevin Brockmeier, Francine Prose, Colm Toíbín

  2005 Cristina García, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo

  2003 David Guterson, Diane Johnson, Jennifer Egan

  2002 Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead

  2001 Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Mona Simpson

  2000 Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, George Saunders

  1999 Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, Lorrie Moore

  1998 Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody

  1997 Louise Erdrich, Thom Jones, David Foster Wallace

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Laura Furman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Permissions appear at the end of the book.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94789-5

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  v3.1

  For Elinore and Michael Standard, dear friends for so long

  The staff of Anchor Books makes each new PEN/O. Henry a pleasure to work on and to read, and the series editor thanks them for their excellence. PEN America works for writers all over the world and to them the series editor gives thanks also.

  Mimi Chubb and Kate Finlinson read, wrote, and thought with intelligence, taste, and grace, and made the job of the series editor even more of a pleasure, for which she thanks them again and again.

  Publisher’s Note

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PEN/O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES

  Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say “ ‘Gift of the Magi’ ” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

  O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: One story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard in the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

  Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” The banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.

  Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”

  Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997 The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback, retitled The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in 2009.

  HOW THE STORIES ARE CHOSEN

  As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

  All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the year’s issues in their entirety by May 1. Beginning in 2013, editors may submit online fiction for consideration. Such submissions are to be sent to the series editor in hard copy. (Please see this page–this page for details.)

  The goal of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

  To Reynolds Price (1933–2011)

  In 1990, when I was starting American Short Fiction, I sent letters to the writers I admired most, asking for stories. One bold move was to write to Reynolds Price, and I never expected an answer. Price was the author of A Long and Happy Life, one of my favorite novels. Everything about it pleased me—its characters, setting, and above all the lyricism and earthiness of the author’s voice. To my surprise, Reynolds Price sent in first one story and another later. Both appeared in the new journal.

  “The Enormous Door” ran first in the first issue. It told of a young boy whose parents are in the process of moving, staying in a boardinghouse in the new town until their own house is ready. The boy is given a room by himself, with a bathroom in between his and the next room. He looks in the bathroom’s keyhole and sees—what he sees is an embodiment of spiritual and physical beauty, a vision that prepares him to grow up whole and healthy. “The Enormous Door” is both a realistic story about a scared little boy whose life is changing beyond his control, and a magical tale about an angel. The story works on every level.

  Reynolds Price had great artistic gifts, and also the instinct for generosity to other writers. For this reason among many, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 is dedicated to his memory.
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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  Uncle Rock

  Dagoberto Gilb, The New Yorker

  The Vandercook

  Alice Mattison, Ecotone

  Leak

  Sam Ruddick, The Threepenny Review

  Nothing Living Lives Alone

  Wendell Berry, The Threepenny Review

  The First Wife

  Christine Sneed, New England Review

  A Birth in the Woods

  Kevin Wilson, Ecotone

  Naima

  Hisham Matar, The New Yorker

  Mickey Mouse

  Karl Taro Greenfeld, Santa Monica Review

  Things Said or Done

  Ann Packer, Zoetrope

  East of the West

  Miroslav Penkov, Orion

  A Brush

  John Berger, Harper’s

  Kindness

  Yiyun Li, A Public Space

  Phantoms

  Steven Millhauser, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

  Boys Town

  Jim Shepard, The New Yorker

  The Hare’s Mask

  Mark Slouka, Harper’s

  Eyewall

  Lauren Groff, Subtropics

  Rothko Eggs

  Keith Ridgway, Zoetrope

  The Deep

  Anthony Doerr, Zoetrope

  The Woman Who Lived in the House

  Salvatore Scibona, A Public Space

  Corrie

  Alice Munro, The New Yorker

  Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Mary Gaitskill

  Daniyal Mueenuddin

  Ron Rash

  Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

  The Writers on Their Work

  Recommended Stories 2012

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  ONE OF THE most fascinating, and annoying, questions asked of writers is about the origin of a story. We hope that if we could pinpoint the real beginning of a story, it would reveal all that a story holds—certain aspects of the author’s personal history; the experience, fact, or image that caught the author’s imagination; the path through language from imagination to a coherent work of art. We wish to be able to extrapolate the mysterious process of writing fiction.

  Many stories draw upon either the experience of the writer or another’s experience as reported to the writer. This is not an assertion that every story is autobiographical (or biographical), only that something of the writer’s own life is of necessity part of every story. A number of writers find their stories through research, a method of educating oneself and also of procrastinating. For still other stories, and other writers, the inspiration may be as fleeting as a landscape glimpsed from a passing train.

  But the process of writing always remains mysterious. There can be no definitive answer to a question about a story’s origin because the best stories are manifold and open to multiple understandings. A single origin doesn’t seem enough for the stories we love and reread. Furthermore, a story presents changed meanings over time to a faithful reader, for the story we read in middle age is different from the one we first encountered in adolescence. A single glance from a train doesn’t account for a story’s beginning—it’s too monocular, too limited—and yet that may be the way the story’s creator remembers it. A story undergoes many changes as it’s written, making it a complicated journey from the starting point.

  We do want to know where a story came from, and by that we mean the whole story, not only the tiny flash that began the imaginative process. Implicit in the question is the respect we have for the story, and the answer we suspect: Not even the writer really knows where the story came from. If that were known, why bother to write?

  John Berger’s “A Brush” epitomizes a kind of silence I associate with the short-story form. In the story, the reader finds a slow, almost offhand perception that presents itself when one is looking the other way, or, as W. H. Auden said in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

  We are all self-preoccupied; the narrator of “A Brush” is no exception. In Paris, he makes his way through his routine, giving no evidence that he is either lonely or happy in his solitude. We experience what he wants us to—chance meetings, a slow revelation of character and history by those he notices, and, finally, the shock of understanding, a moment of real attention. In the story’s ending, we understand how much the narrator has come to value and gain from his urban friendship. The narrator of “A Brush” is both the reader’s informant and a character involved in the story’s action. Berger’s masterly writing conveys with equal grace the recent history of Cambodia and the patient skill required in making art. At the story’s simple and exquisite ending, the narrator summons both fact and feeling.

  Salvatore Scibona’s “The Woman Who Lived in the House” has an eccentric and delightful ending. The story is about many varieties of togetherness. Ásmundur Gudmundsson has a few easy relationships—with his father-in-law, and with a sister and niece—and several complicated ones—with a dog who’s crazy about him, an unsuitable lover, and his disgruntled wife. Scibona throws us right into the story with the announcement from a television set that Ásmundur’s latest investment, the one he and his wife put everything into, has failed. In no time at all, the marriage follows suit, in Ásmundur’s determination an act of God, who, “after twenty years of giving them the stamina and will that makes young Eros turn into the companionship of married love,” ends it in a comical street accident. The whole story is a dance of attachment and separation, connection and alienation, and, finally, of love lost and love renascent. The ending is both a surprise and a joy; the one we didn’t know we were waiting for at last is back with us.

  Anthony Doerr was included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in 2002, 2003, 2008, and now appears, for a fourth time, with “The Deep,” a story that combines the author’s preoccupations first with the natural world as it is seen through science and then with the interior, often secret, lives of his characters. In the case of “The Deep,” Tom’s interior life is dominated by his heart, a defective organ: “Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Life span of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.”

  The voice of science—and Tom’s mother—urges extreme caution. Tom’s spirit looks at those small numbers—sixteen, eighteen—and wonders how cautious can he be and live. Tom’s heart keeps him slow, careful, and quiet. His life is different from that of the other children, particularly other boys. The tension in the story is between the restrictions imposed by his literal organ and the desires of Tom’s metaphorical heart.

  In Lauren Groff’s “Eyewall,” a hurricane rages outside and inside the narrator’s three-hundred-year-old house, flinging this way and that her chickens, furnishings, books, and her past. For all that is destroyed, something whole and new is created by the rollicking lively narrator. Groff’s story is poetical and laced with humor, as the dead drink excellent wine with the living, and the storm rocks on.

  Christine Sneed’s “The First Wife” narrates a story about inevitability in a doomed relationship, a kind of wry love letter from the cautious, somber narrator to her beautiful, unfaithful, and predictable husband. The story is a consideration of a cliché—the handsome movie star’s infidelity. A reader might well ask the star’s wife: Why is it that we go on asking questions to which we know the answer, starting things we know will end in failure? The answer is what Jean Rhys called “Hope, the vulture,” and because it feels good to bet against the odds.

  Often the ending of a short story brings a reversal of fortune, characte
r, or the expectations established at the start. In Sam Ruddick’s well-choreographed “Leak,” there’s a comical reversal. A man believes he’s having a straightforward and, for all parties, satisfactory adulterous affair. Before long, it’s clear that he’s the innocent in the crowd that gathers, like clowns exploding from a car, at his assignation. The story’s title is a definition of what happens in every aspect of this lover’s duet, trio—no, quartet. Ruddick has a gift for understatement and for moving his characters along in ways that surprise and delight the reader.

  It’s often said that in marriage one partner is the brakes and the other the gas. In Alice Mattison’s “The Vandercook,” the narrator is the caboose and his wife the engine. When the narrator, his wife, and children move across the country to the narrator’s hometown to aid his aging father and keep the family business going, the marriage’s balance of power and love is fatally disturbed. The narrator’s calm, rational voice doesn’t conceal the pain of a new understanding of his past and consideration of his future. By the end of the story what was whole seems corrupted. The beauty of the story lies in its sense of the continuity of the lives narrated. The characters will go on, but with a telling difference. Mattison’s story will be read and reread to trace the narrator’s understanding of his wife’s character and his own.

  Dagoberto Gilb’s moving story “Uncle Rock” narrates a similar movement toward understanding, though in the case of Erick, whose difficult, compromised childhood is explored, there’s freedom rather than disillusionment in the end. Confronting cruelty, Erick gains a new understanding of his mother, of masculinity, and of his own strength. The boy who doesn’t speak in either of his languages ends the story with an evasion that protects both his imperfect mother and her lover. By speaking, Erick steps toward adulthood. He sees what he didn’t wish to, understands the unintended consequences of lush, powerless female beauty and male power, and moves into his own complicated life.

  In Kevin Wilson’s “A Birth in the Woods,” the mixture of realism and fantasy pushes the reader into a nightmare. A young boy’s parents isolate themselves in the joyful, arrogant belief that they can make a new Eden and raise their child in a utopia. The story’s narration of a mother’s love, and her manipulation of her weak husband and young son, mixes with the elements of horror. The blood announced at the beginning of the story covers the family by the end. Wilson’s story is most brilliant in capturing the innocent ignorance of the child and the ways in which every child is a victim of his parents’ choices.