The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Stephen Dixon, “Talk”

  For the past three years, on almost any day when it isn’t raining or snowing or too hot or too cold to stay outside for very long, I sit, around 5 p.m., after a long walk or short jog, on a bench in front of the Episcopal church across the street from my house. On one particular day about a year and a half ago I’d just finished writing a new short story and photocopying it at a copy center in town, and was already getting anxious about not having anything to write the next day. So, sitting in front of the church, with a copy of Gilgamesh I was planning to read on the bench, and not having spoken to anyone since the previous day but my cat Louis and also to myself a little, I got the idea to write the story “Talk.” A first line came to me, I wrote it down on the inside of the cover of Gilgamesh and knew that the following morning I’d type that line on my manual typewriter and would write the first draft of the story in around half an hour. That’s what I did, and it took me two weeks of writing nothing but this story to finish it.

  Stephen Dixon was born in New York. “Talk” is his fourth O. Henry Prize story. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize for Literature, and the Pushcart Prize. He taught for many years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has published many novels and short-story collections. His latest novel is His Wife Leaves Him. He lives in Maryland.

  Halina Duraj, “Fatherland”

  This story is a distillation of a novel draft. I’d been invited to give a reading, and I knew I wanted to read from the novel I’d been working on. I sat down to choose a section to read, but because of the way I’d written the novel—in many short, fragmented sections that jumped across space and time, organized associatively rather than chronologically—I found it difficult to determine a section that could stand alone. I selected a few sections I knew I wanted to read, and then those determined which other sections would be necessary to provide context and an arc for a stand-alone piece. Those first choices acted as magnets, pulling necessary complements from the entire draft. I ended up culling pieces from various points in the manuscript to create this stand-alone story.

  Halina Duraj grew up in Northern California and now teaches at the University of San Diego. Her work has been featured in journals including The Sun, Harvard Review, Fiction, and Witness. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in literature with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Utah. She is the author of the story collection The Family Cannon.

  Louise Erdrich, “Nero”

  Thirty years ago, I could not have written this story, because parts of it are true. My grandparents really had a dog named Nero who escaped continually from the backyard. He really did rip the electric wire off the top of the fence. He really did end up in the cage with the cauldron to toss around. The misery of his life contrasted deeply with the characters of my tough but kind grandparents. I never knew what to make of Nero until suddenly, one morning, I was writing this story. I suppose I could say something about the water of experience seeping slowly through bedrock shale into the aquifer, but really, who knows? The python lyceum, as well, was based on a real show. It is my most enthralling memory from grade two at Zimmerman Elementary School in Wahpeton. When my grandfather first came to the Midwest from Germany, he made money by going from town to Iowa farm town wrestling for prize money. When it came to setting up the fight scene in fiction, I called on my friend. He is a tae kwon do third- or fourth-degree black belt and Brazilian jujitsu teacher. He sent me some exciting early YouTube videos of tensile Royce Gracie fighting huge guys. If you like that part, please check them out. In other words, this is a story about existence, inevitability, and time.

  Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Her most recent book, The Round House, won the 2012 National Book Award. Her other books include The Plague of Doves, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and The Master Butchers Singing Club. She owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis.

  Mark Haddon, “The Gun”

  Good stories seem to come from some weird zone it’s impossible to access in retrospect. After all, if we knew how they came into being they’d be a damn sight easier to write. I know simply that I’d been haunted for a long time by the image of two boys pushing a pram containing a dead deer across a dual carriageway several miles away from where I live, a road I’ve driven down many times. Where the image came from I have no idea, only that it had a peculiar charge and that it stuck with me. The story grew around it much as those blue crystals grew around the string you left hanging in a jam jar of saturated copper sulfate at school.

  Like many writers I’m always trying to strike out in new directions only to find that I’ve been traveling in a circle, which is not so bad if the place from which you started out is fertile enough. I can see now that the story contains elements that keep cropping up in my writing. There is a tower-block balcony. I find myself writing over and over about tower-block balconies. An animal is killed, which happens quite often when I’m writing. Most important of all, the story takes place in what the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts call edgelands, those grubby, liminal, unloved places that are neither town nor country, whose ownership is dubious and that are never en route to anywhere. I see them still, from train windows, those rags of dirty scrub between the factories and the canals and the sidings. Little holes in the world. And it comes flooding back, the conviction I remember from childhood that they might just be portals to somewhere else altogether.

  Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. He has written children’s books, radio plays, TV scripts, and a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. He is the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and two other novels, A Spot of Bother and The Red House. In 2010 his play, Polar Bears, was produced at the Donmar Warehouse in London. He is working on a second play. He lives in Oxford.

  Tessa Hadley, “Valentine”

  “Valentine” is in fact an excerpt from my novel Clever Girl. But the whole of that novel was written very deliberately as a series of episodes, and each chapter in my heroine’s life was meant to stand by itself and have the feel of a whole short story. As well as being a way of structuring the novel, this corresponds to something I feel about experience in time. We like to think of our experiences as having the overarching shape and drive of a novel, but actually life more usually happens in fragments and stretches—when change comes it’s often as if we start off on a completely new narrative track, forgetting our former selves. As for the 1970s world of the story: My heroine Stella is nothing like me, but she is my age exactly and was born in the same city as I was—Bristol, in the west of England. So I knew her ambience very well—I had no difficulty imagining what they wore, what music they liked, what they smoked, the places they went. I remember beautiful boys like Valentine. I don’t know why I was so certain from the beginning that Stella’s first love had to be a doomed love, impossible to fulfill. But that idea was there from my very first intimations of the novel.…

  Tessa Hadley was born and raised in Bristol. She’s written five novels, including The Master Bedroom, The London Train, and Clever Girl, and two collections of short stories, as well as a book of criticism, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. She publishes stories regularly in The New Yorker. She is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, England, and she reviews regularly for the Guardian newspaper and for the London Review of Books.

  Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, “A Golden Light”

  I struggled to write this comment for “A Golden Light,” a story perhaps more personal than I would like to admit. It seemed as though with every word I wrote I was revealing both too much and too little, fighting to provide insight without forcing my own impressions on any potential reader and failing at every turn.

  For “
A Golden Light” is a humble story with many interpretations, each of which is as true as the next, none of which I would want to accidentally favor or discourage with these words.

  And so I offer my story up without comment and leave it to the readers to find in it what they will.

  Rebecca Hirsch Garcia was born in Ottawa, Ontario, where she currently resides. Her work has been published in Ottawa Arts Review.

  Kristen Iskandrian, “The Inheritors”

  There are a few pet obsessions the story vivisects for me; the most fundamental is the multilayered entity of the female friendship. I wanted to create a situation in which two women started out as strangers and wound up as intimates, brought together not by some adventure or other momentous happening but rather by place, by talk, and by silence. I wanted to hang out in the quiet, fumbling bloom of a relationship and to let that be the story’s pulse. For me, this is also a story about agency. The narrator of the story is not, I would argue, the protagonist. She is someone to whom things happen, someone who is acted upon. Her counterpoint, her “she,” on the other hand, seeks to author her life at every turn, even going so far as to choose her parents, her very origins. Lastly, I chose a consignment store as the central setting because I find them interesting—the sentimental mess of things disowned and things reclaimed, an orphanage for objects—and once there, these characters and their disparate desires took shape and inscribed one another.

  Kristen Iskandrian was born and raised in Philadelphia. She received her BA from the College of the Holy Cross and her MA and PhD from the University of Georgia. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Memorious, La Petite Zine, Fifty-Two Stories, Pank, Tin House, and many other places, both in print and online. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Dylan Landis, “Trust”

  A teenager sneaking through her father’s filing cabinet: a search.

  I had that image in my head, and then, there was Rainey Royal digging around, and she spotted her hated middle name on her own birth certificate. It’s a fishhook that snags everything she finds unlovable in herself. I already knew she was a molested girl. I had to wrench that flash of self-loathing from my own adolescent past, and it was so painful and private I was tempted to tone it down for publication. The second picture that surfaced was of a gun tucked between file folders. I was as startled as Rainey was. I don’t know what generated that idea, either, and I didn’t welcome it. Howard Royal, Rainey’s father, is a seductive, charismatic jazz pianist, and I wanted to pursue their power struggles, not the distraction of a gun. Chekhov said if you reveal a gun in act 1, it must go off in act 3. I believe that. I also believe that if you root in the basement of the mind and grasp an object in the muck, your subconscious put it there for a reason. So I let Rainey and her best friend, Tina, fool with the gun for a while, discussing men and face-blindness, before going out to play robber girls.

  They couldn’t go out and rob someone solely because they had a weapon, though. So the gun confounded me. Over many drafts, I came to see it as an instrument, a psychological crowbar with which I could apply a stress fracture to Rainey and Tina’s intimacy. What finally drives the robbery is the deeper conflict of the girls testing their faith in each other. And I had no more idea than Rainey did how the robbery would end. With every story I write, I like finding my endings in the muck of the basement too.

  Dylan Landis is the author of the forthcoming Rainey Royal and of Normal People Don’t Live Like This, linked story collections that feature the same cast of characters. Her work has appeared in Bomb, Tin House, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. In 2010 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Prose. She lives in New York City.

  Colleen Morrissey, “Good Faith”

  A few years ago, I watched a BBC documentary called The Most Hated Family in America (2007), in which the journalist Louis Theroux spent a great deal of time among the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Of course, the hateful rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church holds a train-wreck type of fascination, but what really struck me was the behavior of some of the younger members of the church, the ones in their late teens and early twenties. They were ready with the church’s talking points, but their expressions and body language bespoke a lingering uneasiness with what they were saying. They weren’t yet totally gone. By coincidence, shortly after seeing the documentary, I read two pieces about Christian ceremonial snake-handling, and I began thinking about how empowering and yet how self-hating such an act was. With “Good Faith,” I wanted to capture that pull between power and surrender, and that time of unrest before we plunge into a belief or way of life.

  Colleen Morrissey was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and achieved her BA in English at the University of Iowa and her MA in English literature at the University of Kansas. She is currently working toward her PhD at the Ohio State University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Confrontation and Monkey-bicycle. Morrissey lives in Columbus, Ohio.

  Chinelo Okparanta, “Fairness”

  This story came to be during a visit to East and Southeast Asia, where I observed, among women of a certain class, a preoccupation with keeping the skin color light. I found myself exploring this issue through my writing. What came out was more a story about loyalty and betrayal across social strata than a story about skin bleaching.

  Chinelo Okparanta was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and moved to the United States at the age of ten. She is the author of Happiness, Like Water, which was longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In addition to being nominated for a United States Artists fellowship in Literature and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has served as Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University, and John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and as visiting assistant professor of fiction at Purdue University. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Subtropics, and Conjunctions, among others.

  Michael Parker, “Deep Eddy”

  I had never written “short shorts” or “flash fiction” in my life until two summers ago, when I wrote twenty-odd of what I called my little tiny pieces. “Deep Eddy” was one of the earliest tiny pieces I wrote, and the title came first. Deep Eddy is a real place, a spring-fed swimming pool in a town where I sometimes live, and even though the water is such a perfect temperature and color I have to restrain myself from drinking it, it was the music of those two words—Deep Eddy—that spawned the story. I had no intention of writing a story about a pool where I love to swim, so I set the story in the rural South where I was born and raised. The delicious water of the pool became a brackish backwoods river tainted by rural legend. These places—sacred to teenagers because they were off-limits, said to be haunted or cursed or dangerous—existed in the place and time in which I grew up, and after I had that place darkly in mind, and after I made my way through the woods to that seemingly bottomless swirl that gave the story its title, and dropped a boy and a girl into its circling, I had only to locate the rest of the images necessary to convey what every story I know worth reading is, on some level, about: the sweet, desperate, and inevitable currents of desire.

  Michael Parker was born and raised in North Carolina. He is the author of two story collections and six novels, including, most recently, All I Have in This World. He is a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. He lives in North Carolina and Texas.

  Robert Anthony Siegel, “The Right Imaginary Person”

  I was asked to read at a benefit hosted by a local bookstore and had nothing short enough to fit the time limit, so I pulled out a section from the novel I was working on—really just a couple of pages of dialogue between a man and a woman that had no clear place in the overall plot of the book and would probably have to be cut. I was just looking for somethin
g amusing to get me through the reading.

  But in the audience at the bookstore that night sat a husband and wife in their sixties who happened to both be blind. They listened with great attention as I read, and when they laughed it was as if they were laughing at the foolishness of real people they actually knew. Toward the end, one of my characters said something self-serving and totally manipulative to the other character, and the husband turned to his wife and said, rather loudly, “Yeah, right.” It was then that I decided to put the novel aside for a little bit and write a story about these characters, to write it just as if I were telling it to the blind couple at the reading.

  Born and raised in New York, Robert Anthony Siegel studied Japanese literature at Harvard and the University of Tokyo. In 2013 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan. Siegel is the author of two novels, All the Money in the World and All Will Be Revealed. His short work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, Tablet, The New York Times’s “Draft” column, the online edition of the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other magazines. Siegel lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.