The Best American Short Stories 2019

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The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 45

by Anthony Doerr


  ▪ I’ve always been interested in the Civil War—some of my earliest memories, in fact, may involve flipping fascinatedly through my older brother’s Civil War cards, a staggeringly gory 1962 Topps series that uniformly horrified parents—but I’ve resisted for all these years writing about it because it’s often seemed to me that there’s something unpleasantly precious about the way the subject is often treated. So I was just doing what I usually do—reading bizarrely arcane nonfiction, in this case men’s and women’s Civil War letters—when I was struck by an aspect of them that seemed shockingly relevant to the unhappy position in which we find ourselves today. Even in the very last days of the war, after all of that suffering and all of those losses, letter after letter articulated its conviction that come what may, the South and the North would never reconcile their positions when it came to race, and that the abyss that had opened up in American civic life was never going to close. One Southern woman’s bitter remark gave me such a jolt that it kick-started my entire story. She wrote “The breach between us is so wide that by the war’s end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all.”

  The intensity of the sense that so many Northerners and Southerners shared that nothing had been solved, and that this problem in all likelihood never would be solved, was a little stunning to me. At one point in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Boss Jim Gettys, the protagonist’s nemesis, tells him, “If it was anybody else, I’d say what was going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.” How had we managed as a country to go through five years of agony with more than three-quarters of a million casualties while still ending up having learned so little? That kind of maddeningly self-destructive mulishness has always attracted me as a subject. It’s also starting to seem, dispiritingly, like one of our central characteristics as a country. There followed, then, one of my usual bathysphere descents into more focused arcane reading, after which I found myself doing what I could to imagine myself inside that recalcitrant Southerner’s position.

  MONA SIMPSON has published six novels and still wants to be a writer.

  ▪ In my twenties, I had two friends who studied trauma: a woman whose research centered on victims, and her fiancé, who put up flyers around campus to attract rapists, without using the word rape. Like many social science studies, it claimed to be about something else, perhaps male sexuality. His questionnaire used the legal definition of rape but never used the word; I remember the phrase “up to and including the use of force.” Occasionally, at university events, a student play, for example, they would see a student they both knew; a favorite from one of the woman’s classes turned out to be one of her fiancé’s rapists. Once married, the newly minted PhDs set up practices. At one point the husband led a group of men on Rikers Island, all of whom except one had killed their mothers. The other had murdered his grandmother with an antique chair. All were victims of sexual abuse.

  Until then, I’d reflexively assumed the logic of the final two lines of Auden’s stanza: Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.

  But damage, it turns out, is not always reciprocated. My friends the young therapists told me about the vast number of people, a majority, they believed, who spent their lives containing the trauma they’d endured, working not to pass it on.

  My interest in the idea of this containment of destructive desire started there, with this work to which my friends have now devoted their lives.

  I read research, followed online communities.

  Of course, much of what I learned didn’t make it into the story.

  JENN ALANDY TRAHAN was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in fiction from McNeese State University. It would be cool to be one of those fancy authors and write that she, her husband, her daughter, and two dogs currently divide their time between Los Altos, California, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, but that would not be true. Jenn is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.

  ▪ Somewhere I read that Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, kept his headphones in to listen to music until the last possible moment before getting into the pool and did this throughout his entire career. There’s that great meme of him in the midst of this prerace ritual at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, getting in the zone. Now, I’m no Michael Phelps, but instead of listening to Future’s “Stick Talk,” I had been rereading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris to get pumped before a graduate workshop deadline. At the time, I was reflecting on how I killed the majority of my twenties making self-destructive decisions, befriending people who didn’t really care about what happened to me, and trying to impress people who would never see or value the real me. I had recently separated from my first husband and also felt ashamed for being en route to divorce, I felt ashamed for chasing my impractical dreams in graduate school, the list goes on and on. I was tired of feeling ashamed. I wanted to conjure what I had lost over the years: a sense of pride about who I am and where I come from. Out came some notes about Vallejo and a group of young women during a specific time where they felt the strongest and proudest, mainly because they were figuring out how to endure life together and play for the same team. I was still wallowing in self-doubt, however, and my classmate and homie, Sean Quinn, encouraged me to stop beating myself up in front of my laptop and to get out of the house. We ended up at a downtown Lake Charles bar, the now-defunct Dharma. This is where I met Glenn Trahan. Glenn, a Marine, had a swagger about him. His rough-around-the-edges yet good-natured vibe instantly reminded me of the Vallejo boys I grew up with even though Glenn grew up in Cameron, Louisiana. I also got the sense that Glenn wasn’t interested in being anyone else but—unapologetically—himself. Suddenly I had the rest of the words and a story for that workshop deadline; Brent Zalesky materialized as the missing piece. That first draft of this story, originally titled “Take Us Back to Vinyl,” wanted to explore the transportive quality of music and had a thread that constantly pitted the husbands of these women against their memories of Brent Zalesky. I would have loved to have had references to Tupac, The Conscious Daughters, Too $hort, Luniz, Mac Dre, Green Day, and the Smashing Pumpkins in it too, but it became clear that it wasn’t so much about the music of my adolescence, husbands who were not Brent Zalesky, or the rediscovery of vinyl as it was about the indomitable spirit of these young women and the spirit of Brent Zalesky. To echo Violet Lucca on the Harper’s podcast discussing “They Told Us Not to Say This,” Brent Zalesky isn’t so much the object of desire as the object that the “we” of the story strives to be.

  The story is very much a valentine to Vallejo, a valentine to the people I grew up with at St. Basil School, and a valentine to my best friends who have stuck by my side through the years, no matter what (I’m looking at you, Marc Martello and James Cho). You could say it’s also a valentine to Brent Zaleskys everywhere—people who inspire you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, people who show up to watch you play and convince you of your strength and value when others want to insist that you are weak or that you don’t belong. In this way you could say that Adrian Kneubuhl at Harper’s is a Brent Zalesky, and I’m incredibly grateful to him for teaching me how to not only grow as a writer, but as a person. Thank you, Adrian, for encouraging me to listen to my story and my heart.

  You could also say this story is a valentine to my muse and my rock, Glenn Trahan, and to my role models—the uplifting professors I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from at Irvine (Alex Espinoza, Michelle Latiolais, and Lisa Alvarez), McNeese (Chris Lowe, Amy Fleury, Dr. Rita Costello, and Dr. Bärbel Czennia), and Stanford (Dr. Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Tallent, and Chang-rae Lee). I try to emulate all of them in my own classroom and strive to be a Brent Zale
sky on the bleachers for my students—and for my own daughter, Teagan, though I’m fully aware that just by virtue of being her mom, alas, she will never think that I’m cool.

  WEIKE WANG is the author of the novel Chemistry, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 prize. She currently lives in New York City.

  ▪ Stories come to me in waves. I will have an idea, usually a setup, and then in the months after, build out and then in (characters, conflict, place). But all of this is still in my head. For “Omakase,” my husband and I had just gone out for sushi. The chef there was not the chef in this story. The “real” chef was actually perfectly sweet and normal. We made small talk. He told us about the type of fish we were eating and the kind of tools he used. We asked questions and had a good time. Yet what was odd about the meal was that for the entire night my husband and I were the only customers. I just found that setup interesting and rich. What could happen if a couple came here and the chef was slightly off—jilted, perhaps—and overshared as people do when no one is around? How intimate could a conversation get? How much do we really know about each other? And what kind of history goes into an interaction that seems fine and easy on the surface? I thought about the story for over half a year. When I sat down to write it, it was done in a week. Then edits, another week. But the core did not change. Nor did the setup.

  Other Distinguished Stories of 2018

  Ackerman, Diane

  A Visit to Frederik Ruysch’s Cabinets. Conjunctions, 71.

  Allingham, Sam

  The Intermediate Class. The New Yorker, April 2.

  Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik

  Our Beans Grow Fat upon the Storm. Electric Lit, no. 310.

  Arthurs, Alexia

  Mermaid Rivers. The Sewanee Review, vol. CXXVI, no. 2.

  Batkie, Sarah

  Departures. One Story, issue 241.

  Bergman, Megan Mayhew

  Inheritance. The Sewanee Review, vol. CXXVI, no. 4.

  Berndt, Nini

  Predator. The Southampton Review, vol. XII, no. 2.

  Berry, Wendell

  A Clearing. The Hudson Review, vol. LXXI, no. 3.

  Bossert, Gregory Norman

  The Empyrean Light. Conjunctions, 71.

  Brinkley, Jamel

  I Happy Am. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 1.

  Brinkley, Jamel

  Wolf and Rhonda. American Short Fiction, vol. 21, issue 66.

  Brown, Jason

  The Last Voyage of the Alice B Toklas. The Missouri Review, vol. 41, no. 3.

  Brown, Karen

  Spill the Wine. One Story, issue 246.

  Campbell, Caitlin

  Quarterway House. Boulevard, no. 100.

  Challa, Pankaj

  Passengers. The Iowa Review, 48/2.

  Chang, Lan Samantha

  The Cottage. Freeman’s.

  Chatagnier, Ethan

  Dentists. Glimmer Train, issue 103.

  Choate, Hunter

  The Mammoth Hunter. West Branch, no. 87.

  Coake, Christopher

  Getaway. Portland Review, vol. 64.

  Dandicat, Edwidge

  Without Inspection. The New Yorker, May 14.

  Dermont, Amber

  So What If I Love You That’s None of Your Business. The Iowa Review, 47/3.

  Diaz, Hernán

  1,111 Emblems. Playboy, September/October

  Djanikian, Ariel

  Happiness Is on the Way. West Branch, no. 87.

  Domet, Sarah

  With Whom. Bridge Eight, issue 7.

  Drager, Lindsey

  Of Breadcrumbs and Constellations. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 3.

  Eisenberg, Emma Copley

  Forty-Four Thousand Pounds. The Common, issue no. 15.

  Eisenberg, Emma Copley

  Mama. ZYZZYVA, no. 113.

  Engel, Patricia

  Aguacero. Kenyon Review, vol. XL, no. 3.

  Fitzpatrick, Caitlin

  The Laws of Motion. Colorado Review, 45.1.

  Ford, Elaine

  The Briggait. Water-Stone Review, vol. 21.

  Ford, Kelli Jo

  Hybrid Vigor. The Paris Review, no. 227.

  Ford, Richard

  Displaced. The New Yorker, August 6 & 13.

  Freudenberger, Nell

  Rabbits. The Paris Review, no. 226.

  Greenfeld, Karl Taro

  Lot 14. Agni, 87.

  Greenfeld, Karl Taro

  Station 4. New England Review, vol. 39, no. 3.

  Groff, Lauren

  Under the Wave. The New Yorker, July 9 & 16.

  Hansen, Michaela

  The Devil in the Barn. American Short Fiction, vol. 21, issue 67.

  Heuler, Karen

  The Year of His Father. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 4.

  Hoffman, Alice

  The Witch of Chelsea. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 4.

  Holladay, Cary

  Carbon Tet. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 10.

  Howard, Tom

  Fierce Pretty Things. Indiana Review, vol. 40, no. 2.

  Jackson, Jillian

  A Leo, Like Jackie O. The Iowa Review, 48/1.

  Jackson, Molly

  Big Man. Santa Monica Review, vol. 30, no. 2.

  Janes, Perry

  Terrariums. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 3.

  Janno, Abdullahi

  Heirloom. Water-Stone Review, vol. 21.

  Jen, Gish

  No More Maybe. The New Yorker, March 19.

  Jensen, Samuel

  Aperture. Cimarron Review, issue 204.

  Kalotay, Daphne

  The Archivists. Consequence, vol. 10.

  Kim, Hannah H.

  Listen. Kenyon Review, vol. XL, no. 1.

  Koekkoek, Taylor

  The Wedding Party. The Iowa Review, 47/3.

  Lang, Jameelah

  Different Animals. The Cincinnati Review, 15.1.

  Lahiri, Jhumpa

  The Boundary. The New Yorker, January 29.

  Li, Yiyun

  A Flawless Silence. The New Yorker, April 23.

  Lin, Chia-Chia

  Practicing. The Paris Review, 224.

  Luchette, Claire

  New Bees. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 4.

  Lunstrum, Kirsten Sundberg

  Endlings. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 3.

  Lunstrum, Kirsten Sundberg

  Where Have the Vanishing Girls Gone? North American Review, vol. 303, no. 3.

  Machado, Carmen Maria

  Mary When You Follow Her. Virginia Quarterly Review, 94/2.

  Makana Clark, George

  Pluto. Glimmer Train, issue 101.

  Maren, Mesha

  Somewhere South of Wichita. Crazyhorse, no. 93.

  McCorkle, Jill

  The Lineman. Ecotone, no. 24.

  McKanna, Rebecca

  Interpreting American Gothic. Colorado Review, vol. 45, no. 2.

  Mendelson, Lailee

  So, the Cold War Is Over. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 1.

  Millhauser, Steven

  Guided Tour. Tin House, vol. 19, no. 3.

  Morley, Grayson

  The Henchman. The Iowa Review, 48/2.

  Moses, Jennifer Anne

  The Goy. Image, no. 98.

  Myers, Les

  Beth Nine. Glimmer Train, issue 104.

  Nadelson, Scott

  Perfect Together. Chautauqua, issue 15.

  Nadelson, Scott

  Sweet Ride. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 35, nos. 1 & 2.

  Newman, Leigh

  Slide and Glide. Tin House, vol. 19, no. 4.

  Nugent, Benjamin

  Safe Spaces. The Paris Review, no. 225.

  O’Connor, Stephen

  Coyotes. Conjunctions, 71.

  Ohlin, Alix
r />   Something About Love. The Sewanee Review, vol. CXXVI, no. 1.

  O’Neill, Joseph

  The First World. The New Yorker, July 2.

  Orner, Peter

  The Return. Conjunctions, 70.

  Palacio, Derek

  La Lucha. Cimarron Review, 203.

  Pearson, Joanna

  The Whaler’s Wife. Colorado Review, 45.3.

  Pease, Emily

  Submission. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 34, nos. 3 & 4.

  Pinkerton, Allison

  The Bell Game. Image, no. 97.

  Porter, Andrew

  Vines. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 3.

  Ramspeck, Doug

  Balloon. The South Carolina Review, vol. 51.1.

  Rash, Ron

  L’Homme Blessé. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 2.

  Rea, Amanda

  Faint of Heart. One Story, issue 237.

  Rutherford, Ethan

  Ghost Story. Tin House, vol. 20, no. 1.

  Santantasio, Christopher

 

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