John Keeble’s “Synchronicity” is a magical story set among plainspoken people in Eastern Washington during a summer when portentous forest fires and smoke cover the western United States. The central characters are two buffalo, who don’t say much but whose presence pushes the story’s action. Bought as calves by an overly imaginative man for his wife, left with his brother-in-law, unruly, growing bigger and more uncontrollable by the minute, the buffalo stand not only for the long history of mistakes made by Anglo immigrants to the West but also for the mistakes of neophytes unaccustomed to the unending demands of rural life. In a city, the same man might buy a baby alligator and then flush it when the novelty wears off, and so an urban myth is born of alligators living in the sewers of New York. The buffalo are a much bigger mistake with great potential for causing trouble. They are magnificent animals, failed by all the human characters except perhaps the one who is the most down-to-earth and preserves their sweetness by canning their tongues.
A rabbit would seem to be more suitable as a family pet than a buffalo. The rabbit in Alexander MacLeod’s “Lagomorph” becomes part of the narrator’s family, adopted as a hypoallergenic pet for his children. The rabbit, given the name Gunther by its previous owner, was initially a chaotic presence, predictably ignored by the children and cared for by the narrator and his wife. At first, Gunther was not well. His diarrheic excrement was everywhere, and “he had this thick yellow mucus matting down the fur beneath his eyes and both his tear ducts were swollen green and red.” Gunther’s ocular-dental problems are cured by the courageous and violent tasks the narrator must undertake to save Gunther’s life. They are bonded.
Eventually, his companionable friendship with Gunther becomes the only relationship the narrator has left. It has many advantages, as everyone who’s decided that life with an animal is simpler than—perhaps preferable to—life with another human will understand. But even rabbits have their limits: “If a rabbit loves you or if they think you are the scum of the earth, you will catch that right away, but there is a lot between those extremes—everything else is in between—and you can never be sure where you stand relative to a rabbit.”
Some marriages and friendships thrive on mistaken identity. In Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s “Julia and Sunny,” two couples seem to become one another’s family and they spend an annual summer vacation together. The narrating duo has a son, and Julia and Sunny have a daughter. The children don’t always get along but Sunny is “there to facilitate,” and he keeps the peace. Bynum’s story questions the possibility or impossibility of knowing another individual, much less a couple. When the narrators idealize Julia and Sunny, are they projecting what they want to be? One of the many likable things about “Julia and Sunny” is the easy, gossipy tone of the narrative, even when the reader becomes distrustful of it. “Julia and Sunny” isn’t so much a revelation of rot at the core of both marriages as a portrait of the fear of even suspecting that a relationship is less than perfect.
The marriage and extramarital affair in Bryan Washington’s “610 North, 610 West” are observed and analyzed by the young narrator and his brothers. They keep a close eye on their mother while her husband is with the other woman. She keeps the family restaurant going all by herself, cleaning up at the end of the day and preparing for the next while her four boys watch: “We’d stare at the plastic with our hands in our laps like they’d show us whoever kept Ma’s man out in the world.” In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster wrote that a story was a “narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence.” “610 North, 610 West” is about infidelity as witnessed and absorbed by the narrator and his brothers, but the plot of the story, what Forster called “the sense of causality,” belongs to the narrator alone, as he observes his mother and understands, perhaps for the first time, that she’s a woman living a life that in moments has nothing to do with either her children or her husband. His new distance is an achievement that might release him from his family’s web of trouble.
Liza Ward’s first O. Henry was awarded for “Snowbound” in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005. “The Shrew Tree” has the foreordained quality of a fairy tale. Gretel’s father is vice principal of the 1950s high school she attends and the boys torture her for it: “Then the boys would pinch her, shoulder her up against the lockers, drop things under her skirt to see how far they could get just a hundred feet from the vice principal’s office as she walked the gauntlet, hugging the line of lockers so close, the locks clocking the metal doors.” The students don’t fear or respect Gretel’s father because he doesn’t beat them and because “he could not bring himself to act violently toward anyone.” He’s too gentle for his job. Her mother was a dancer and then a dance teacher, and now she’s the victim of an unnamed crippling disease that’s slowly killing her. Gretel’s father carries her mother every morning from bed to a hot bath so that she can straighten her limbs. Along with having two cursed parents, Gretel is going through the unpredictable and embarrassing changes of adolescence. Karl Olson, a farmer’s son, stirs her imagination. Earthbound, materialistic, Karl seems to be connected to a better world than the one her parents have created with their love of books and ideas, and their inability to control their lives. Karl is quick to act, snapping a wounded rabbit’s neck without a thought. He has an opinion about everything that’s familiar and contempt for what he doesn’t know. In this way, he’s as different from her parents as Gretel wishes to be. The run-down farm he’s determined to save looks like a refuge to Gretel, not a trap. Gretel fails to take warning from the story he tells her about his grandfather’s immuring a live shrew inside an ash tree. Gretel and Karl marry, and in time her ability to escape is thwarted by a switch from that same tree.
In “Slingshot” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, the narrator begins an affair with her neighbor, a man less than half her age. Richard is sexually self-confident and seems unboundedly curious. He tells his neighbor, who’s been a widow for thirty years, “There’s no such thing as love. It’s a construct.” Her granddaughter, who lives with her, is always in love or recovering from it. In contrast, the widow has never had sex with anyone but her husband: “As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t had sex for such a long time that I could consider myself a virgin. I couldn’t remember how it all happens.” Richard gives frequent parties, and after a while his neighbor feels comfortable enough to attend. When they are alone after one party ends, they have sex, almost inevitably. The opposing powers of sex and love veer back and forth until the narrator is content at last.
In “Unstuck” by Stephanie Reents, Liza’s house is behaving strangely. The old kitchen sink is cleaner. The front walk is swept. The bed is made, though Liza’s sure she didn’t make it. The recycling’s been upcycled. At this point, some would suggest to Liza that she should leave well enough alone. A house that cleans itself up is a rare jewel. Liza, though she hates to clean, finds the unusual happenings unsettling. She questions her longtime boyfriend, Lloyd, who spends weekends with her. He denies having done the good deeds. Liza is a sensible, rational woman, but she begins to connect the strange occurrences in her house with her terror when she was once trapped in a slot canyon. Stephanie Reents won an O. Henry in 2006 for “Disquisition on Tears,” and she’s won her second O. Henry for “Unstuck,” which is a disquisition on being stuck and unstuck, an examination of which condition is the more unnerving.
In “Omakase,” Weike Wang’s couple, called “the woman” and “the man,” are out for dinner at a restaurant listed as one of central Harlem’s top sushi places. It smells strongly of fish, not a good thing in a restaurant serving raw fish. The woman is dubious about eating there, but the man says, for the first but not last time, that she worries too much. Also, he says, she exaggerates. But how cautious is she really? She met the man online, they dated for a while, then she moved from Boston to New York, which she finds to be a dangerous and offensive place. The man would have been happy to move to Boston, or so h
e said, but found it difficult to find a job as a pottery instructor, whereas she relocated easily as a research analyst at a bank. She’s Chinese-American. He’s not. For their meal, they agree to order omakase, chef’s choice. The man tries to talk to the chef, and without warning the subject of race is on the table. Who is Asian and who isn’t comes to matter a great deal for this uneasy, perhaps unequally yoked, couple. “Omakase” was juror Lynn Freed’s favorite story.
Patricia Engel’s “Aguacero” opens in another New York setting, this one an evocatively described midtown downpour. The narrator tells us that she’s left her therapist’s office “without an umbrella and stopped for a pack of cigarettes in one of those midtown shops, the size of a closet and smelling of nuts and tobacco, because nothing makes me want to smoke more than a visit to the shrink.” She’s not sleeping, not talking much, even to the therapist; she’s numbed by urban life. She loiters under a shop awning, trying and failing to summon a cab with a lit cigarette. She’s joined by a man who tells her he knows she’s Colombian because she has “an Andean face.” “Also,” he adds, “you just tried to call a taxi with a cigarette. Only Colombians do that.” A welcome acquaintanceship develops between the two Colombians who are far from home, though, for her own reasons, she’s distrustful and doesn’t quite believe his life story until their friendship advances. Engel’s calm prose moves the story and its reader from an uncomfortable New York rain into the sustained pain of a ruined life.
* * *
—
The hundredth-anniversary edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories is my last as series editor, and I wish to express my gratitude to all who’ve made my time so fulfilling.
It’s been a privilege to work with the authors of the stories and the editors of the magazines that originally published them. There is no role more important than the writer’s, of course, but a story appearing in The O. Henry Prize Stories is also validation of its editor’s skill.
One of my few regrets is that I couldn’t meet every winning writer in person as previous series editors did at the annual O. Henry dinner. Those were different times, of course, and I felt a warm digital connection with the O. Henry authors. (And a more tangible connection through the U.S. Mail with Wendell Berry, a four-time winner who does not use a computer.)
Inviting a new trio of short story writers each year to act as jurors has been a light duty. I’ve been amazed at their real pleasure in finding a new story to love. Given their own achievements as writers, it’s been no surprise to read their clear and affectionate evaluations of their favorite story.
For a century now, numberless readers have been entertained, puzzled, moved, and sometimes perhaps infuriated by The O. Henry Prize Stories. Since the first volume was published in 1919, what remains consistent about the authors, readers, jurors, and series editors of The O. Henry Prize Stories is a fascination with the short story—an art form that’s both popular and elite—and gratitude for the yearly chance to celebrate it.
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas
Tessa Hadley
Funny Little Snake
THE CHILD WAS NINE YEARS OLD and couldn’t fasten her own buttons. Valerie knelt in front of her on the carpet in the spare room as Robyn held out first one cuff and then the other without a word, then turned around to present the back of her dress, where a long row of spherical chocolate-brown buttons was unfastened over a grubby white petticoat edged with lace. Her tiny, bony shoulder blades flickered with repressed movement. And although every night since Robyn had arrived, a week ago, Valerie had encouraged her into a bath foamed up with bubbles, she still smelled of something furtive—musty spice from the back of a cupboard. The smell had to be in her dress, which Valerie didn’t dare wash because it looked as though it had to be dry-cleaned, or in her lank, licorice-colored hair, which was pulled back from her forehead under an even grubbier stretch Alice band. Trust Robyn’s mother to have a child who couldn’t do up buttons, and then put her in a fancy plaid dress with hundreds of them, and frogging and leg-of-mutton sleeves, like a Victorian orphan, instead of ordinary slacks and a T-shirt so that she could play. The mother went around, apparently, in long dresses and bare feet, and had her picture painted by artists. Robyn at least had tights and plimsolls with elastic tops—though her green coat was too thin for the winter weather.
Valerie had tried to talk to her stepdaughter. It was the first time they’d met, and she’d braced herself for resentment, the child’s mind poisoned against her. Robyn was miniature, a doll—with a plain, pale, wide face, her temples blue-naked where her hair was strained back, her wide-open gray eyes affronted and evasive and set too far apart. She wasn’t naughty, and she wasn’t actually silent—that would have been a form of stubbornness to combat, to coax and maneuver around. She was a nullity, an absence, answering yes and no obediently if she was questioned, in that languid drawl that always caught Valerie on the raw—though she knew the accent wasn’t the child’s fault, only what she’d learned. Robyn even said please and thank you, and she told Valerie the name of her teacher, but when Valerie asked whether she liked the teacher her eyes slipped uneasily away from her stepmother’s and she shrugged, as if such an idea as liking or not liking hadn’t occurred to her. The only dislikes she was definite about had to do with eating. When Valerie put fish pie on Robyn’s plate the first night, she shot her a direct look of such piercing desperation that Valerie, who was a good, wholesome cook and had been going to insist, asked her kindly what she ate at home. Eggs? Cottage pie? Baked beans?
Honestly, the girl hardly seemed to know the names of things. Toast was all she could think of. Definitely not eggs: a vehement head shake. Toast, and—after long consideration, then murmuring hesitantly, tonelessly—tomato soup, cornflakes, butterscotch Instant Whip. It was lucky that Gil wasn’t witness to all this compromise, because he would have thought Valerie was spoiling his daughter. He and Valerie ate together later, after Robyn was in bed. Gil might have been a left-winger in his politics, but he was old-fashioned in his values at home. He despised, for instance, the little box of a house the university had given them, and wanted to move into one of the rambling old mansions on the road behind his office. He thought they had more style, with their peeling paint and big gardens overgrown with trees.
Valerie didn’t tell him how much she enjoyed all the conveniences of their modern home—the clean, light rooms, the central heating, the electric tin opener fitted onto the kitchen wall. And she was intrigued, because Gil was old-fashioned, by his having chosen for his first wife a woman who went barefoot and lived like a hippie in her big Chelsea flat. Perhaps Marise had been so beautiful once that Gil couldn’t resist her. Valerie was twenty-four; she didn’t think Marise could still be beautiful at forty. Now, anyway, he referred to her as the Rattrap, and the Beak, and the Bitch from Hell, and said that she would fuck anyone. When Valerie had first married him, she hadn’t believed that a professor could know such words. She’d known them herself, of course, but that was different—she wasn’t educated.
* * *
—
On the phone with his ex-wife, Gil had made a lot of fuss about having his daughter to visit, as a stubborn point of pride, and then had driven all the way down to London to fetch her. But, since getting back, he’d spent every day at his office at the university, even though it wasn’t term time, saying that he needed absolute concentration to work on the book he was writing. Robyn didn’t seem to miss him. She looked bemused when Valerie called him her daddy, as if she hardly recognized him by that name; she’d been only three or four when he’d moved out. Valerie didn’t ask Gil what he’d talked about with his daughter on the long car journey: perhaps they’d driven the whole way in silence. Or perhaps he’d questioned Robyn about her mother, or ranted on about her, or talked about his work. Sometimes in the evenings he talked to Valerie for hours about university politics or other historians he envied or resented
—or even about the Civil War or the Long Parliament or the idea of the state—without noticing that she wasn’t listening, that she was thinking about new curtains or counting the stitches in her knitting. He might have found fatherhood easier, Valerie thought, if his daughter had been pretty. Moodily, after Robyn had gone to bed, Gil wondered aloud whether she was even his. “Who knows, with the Great Whore of Marylebone putting it about like there’s no tomorrow? The child’s half feral. She doesn’t look anything like me. Is she normal? Do they even send her to school? I think she’s backward. A little bit simple, stunted. No surprise, growing up in that sink of iniquity. God only knows what she’s seen.”
Valerie was getting to know how he used exaggerated expressions like “sink of iniquity,” whose sense she didn’t know but could guess at, as if he were partly making fun of his own disapproval, while at the same time he furiously meant it. He stayed one step ahead of any fixed position, so that no one could catch him out in it. But Robyn looked more like him than he realized, although she was smooth and bland with childhood and he was hoary and sagging from fifty years’ experience. He had the same pale skin, and the same startled hare’s eyes swimming in and out of focus behind his big black-framed glasses. Sometimes, when Gil laughed, you could see how he might have been a different man if he hadn’t chosen to be this professor with his stooping bulk and crumpled, shapeless suits, his braying, brilliant talk. Without glasses, his face was naked and keen and boyish, with a boy’s shame, as if the nakedness must be smothered like a secret.
Gil’s widowed mother had owned a small newsagent’s. He’d got himself to university and then onward into success and even fame—he’d been on television often—through his own sheer cleverness and effort. Not that he tried to hide his class origins: on the contrary, he’d honed them into a weapon to use against his colleagues and friends. But he always repeated the same few anecdotes from his childhood, well rounded and glossy from use: the brewhouse in the backyard, where the women gossiped and did their washing; the bread-and-drippings suppers; a neighbor cutting his throat in the shared toilet; his mother polishing the front step with Cardinal Red. He didn’t talk about his mother in private, and when Valerie once asked him how she’d died he wouldn’t tell her anything except—gruffly barking it, to frighten her off and mock her fear at the same time—that it was cancer. She guessed that he’d probably been close to his mother, and then grown up to be embarrassed by her, and hated himself for neglecting her, but couldn’t admit to any of this because he was always announcing publicly how much he loathed sentimentality and guilt. Valerie had been attracted to him in the first place because he made fun of everything; nothing was sacred.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 3