The Best American Short Stories 2014 (55 page)

 

K
AREN
R
USSELL
, a native of Miami, is the author of two short story collections,
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
and
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
. Her first novel,
Swamplandia!
, was a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year selection, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

• Sometimes I think it can be perversely liberating to commit to a premise that seems too goofy to work, or basically foredoomed from the outset. I remember looking up at a certain point while drafting “Madame Bovary's Greyhound” and blinking into the light of a hard truth: OK, I thought, I am writing Flaubert fan fiction, about a heartbroken dog. But I don't think I could have told a story about the vertigo of falling out of love, that terrible inertia, or the gravity that first love can continue to exert on a life, except obliquely, from Djali's low-to-the-ground animal vantage point. In
Madame Bovary
, the newlywed Emma receives a greyhound puppy as a gift from her husband, Dr. Charles. I loved the deep green haunted quality of the pair's twilight walks in Tostes, this dog and her mistress, and the way the animal serves as a screen onto which Emma projects every dream and ambivalence. She rehearses her hopes and her fears, using the animal as a sounding board. You sort of feel for the little puppy. As I tried to write the greyhound as a character, I returned to chapters 7–9 and began at the moment of Madame B's hilarious exhalation, “Mon Dieu, why did I ever get married?” In that scene, her “vagrant” thoughts stray here and there, as if connected by some tether to the dog's manic pursuit of yellow butterflies; at sunset, she is overcome by formless dread, which she transmits to the dog. It was great fun to try to thread some of Flaubert's language into this story. Several chapters later, Emma sets out for Yonville and the affair that will end in her suicide; the carriage pauses, and the little dog runs off into the woods, escaping the pages of this novel, never to return.

This struck me as a wildly surprising event: we expect infidelity from one another, but a dog's love we assume to be unconditional and eternal. A space opened up in the treeline of the original story, one that I was happy to enter: what on earth happened to this greyhound who abandoned her owner?

The greyhound's flight also gave me a physical alphabet to explore the weightlessness, pain, exhilaration, and terror that can follow the dissolution of a bond. And to represent Djali's escape from the shelter of one relationship, and into an unfamiliar landscape, as a kind of survival story.

A huge thank-you to Michael Ray of
Zoetrope
, a brilliant editor with an uncanny sympathy for every kind of story and protagonist—child and adult, animal and monster.

 

L
AURA VAN DEN
B
ERG
is the author of the story collections
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
, a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Award, and
The Isle of Youth
, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel,
Find Me
, is forthcoming in early 2015. She currently lives in the Boston area and is a 2014–2015 Faculty Fellow in Fiction at Colby College.

• I have long been fascinated with Antarctica—the isolation, the extremity of weather and landscape, even the cadence of the word itself,
Ant-arc-ti-ca
—and thus had been trying to write a story set in Antarctica for years. But my drafts, written always from the perspective of a research scientist living in Antarctica, kept withering on the page.

In 2012, on the news I learned about an explosion at the Comandante Ferraz research base in Admiralty Bay. Two men were killed. The story stayed with me. A few weeks later, a line got stuck in my head: “There was nothing to identify in Antarctica because there was nothing left.” This line soon became the first line of a new story and eventually two interlocking narratives emerged: a present thread set in Antarctica, where the narrator has come to investigate the mysterious death of her scientist brother, who perished in an explosion, and a past thread set in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In hindsight, I can see why those earlier Antarctica stories kept failing. Not only am I not an expert on Antarctica, I am also not a scientist (and by “not a scientist” I mean barely able to name an element on the periodic table). The gap in knowledge was too great; I had been coming up against the limits of what I could convincingly imagine.

In “Antarctica,” the narrator is a stranger in a strange land, an outsider—outsider I knew; outsider I understood. And while I have never been to Antarctica, I know Cambridge intimately, and in the end it was the collision between the radically familiar and the radically foreign that helped this story take shape.

A
CIMAN
, A
NDRÉ

Abingdon Square.
Granta
, no. 122

A
DRIAN
, C
HRIS

The Black Book of Conscience.
Zoetrope: All-Story
, vol. 17, no. 2

A
DRIAN
, K
IM

Toast.
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 52, no. 1

A
LCOTT
, K
ATHLEEN

Saturation.
Coffin Factory
, no. 5

A
LEXIE
, S
HERMAN

Happy Trails.
The New Yorker
, June 10 & 17

A
LTSCHUL
, A
NDREW
F
OSTER

Embarazada.
Ploughshares
, vol. 39, no. 4

A
RVIN
, N
ICK

City of Mary.
Missouri Review
, vol. 36, no. 3

 

B
ANKS
, R
USSELL

Blue.
Yale Review
, vol. 101, no. 4

B
AXTER
, C
HARLES

Chastity.
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 52, no. 2

Loyalty.
Harpers
, May 2013

B
EATTIE
, A
NN

Company.
Little Star
, no. 4

B
ECK
, R
ANDI

By Morning, New Mercies.
Ploughshares
, vol. 39, no. 4

B
ENEDICT
, D
IANNE

Radio.
Red Rock Review
, no. 32

B
ERGMAN
, M
EGAN
M
AYHEW

Saving Butterfly McQueen.
Ecotone
, no. 15

B
OYLE
, T. C.

Slate Mountain.
Kenyon Review
, vol. 35, no. 4

B
RADFORD
, A
RTHUR

Turtleface.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 1

B
RAUNSTEIN
, S
ARAH

Marjorie Lemke.
The New Yorker
, April 1

B
ROOKS
, K
IM

A Man Escaped.
Glimmer Train
, no. 87

B
ROWN
, K
AREN

The Authoress.
Kenyon Review
, vol. 35, no. 4

B
USIS
, D
AVID

The Balcony.
Meridian
, no. 31

B
YNUM
, S
ARAH
S
HUN
-L
IEN

Tell Me My Name.
Ploughshares
, vol. 39, nos. 2 & 3

 

C
ANTY
, K
EVIN

Mayfly.
The New Yorker
, January 28

C
OOK
, D
IANE

The Not-Needed Forest.
Zoetrope: All-Story
, vol. 17, no. 3

C
OTUNGO
, K
ATIE

The Shallow End.
Iowa Review
, vol. 43, no. 3

C
UNNINGHAM
, G. C.

Pandemic.
CutBank
, no. 78

 

D
ANIELS
, J. D.

Empathy.
The Paris Review
, no. 26

 

E
GGERS
, D
AVE

The Man at the River.
Granta
, no. 124

E
VERETT
, P
ERCIVAL

Stonefly.
Denver Quarterly
, vol. 48, no. 1

 

F
ERRIS
, J
OSHUA

The Fragments.
The New Yorker
, April 29

F
REEMAN
, C
ASTLE
, Jr.

Protection.
Alaska Quarterly Review
, vol. 30, nos. 3 & 4

F
RIED
, B
ARBARA

The Half-Life of Nat Glickstein.
Subtropics
, no. 15

F
RIEDMAN
, S
TEPHANIE

Exposure.
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 52, no. 1

 

G
ALCHEN
, R
IVKA

The Lost Order.
The New Yorker
, January 7

G
AY
, R
OXANE

The Year I Learned Everything.
Prairie Schooner
, vol. 87, no. 1

G
ILBERT
, D
AVID

From a Farther Room.
The New Yorker
, July 22

G
LASS
, J
ULIA

Chairs in the Rafters.
DailyLit

G
ROFF
, L
AUREN

Salvador.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 1

 

H
AIGH
, J
ENNIFER

What Remains.
Five Points
, vol. 15, nos. 1 & 2

H
AMMETT
, D
ASHIELL

An Inch and a Half of Glory.
The New Yorker
, June 10 & 17

H
AMPTON
, E
VELYN

Blondlot's Transformation.
Black Warrior Review
, vol. 39, no. 2

H
ASLETT
, A
DAM

Seibert.
DailyLit

H
AVERTY
, C
HARLES

Black Box.
CutBank
, no. 78

H
EMENWAY
, A
RNA
B
ONTEMPS

A Self-Made Man.
Ecotone
, no. 15

H
ERONRY
, D
AVID

Less Awful.
New England Review
, vol. 33, no. 4

H
ILL
, M
ARY
L
OUISE

When Addie Died.
Gettysburg Review
, vol. 26, no. 2

H
UNT
, S
AMANTHA

All Hands.
Tin House
, vol. 14, no. 3

 

J
ACKSON
, S
HIRLEY

Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 2

Paranoia.
The New Yorker
, August 5

J
OHNSTON
, B
RET
A
NTHONY

To a Good Home.
Virginia Quarterly Review
, vol. 89, no. 4

 

K
EENAN
, J
USTIN

Love on Mars.
DailyLit

K
ING
, S
TEPHEN

Afterlife.
Tin House
, vol. 14, no. 4

K
LAY
, P
HIL

After Action Report.
Tin House
, vol. 14, no. 3

K
NIGHT
, M
ICHAEL

Water and Oil.
Southern Review
, vol. 49, no. 4

K
RAUSS
, N
ICOLE

Zusya on the Roof.
The New Yorker
, February 4

 

L
AWSON
, D
OUG

The Mushroom Hunter.
Glimmer Train
, no. 89

L
EONE
, M
ICHAEL

Provenance; Or, Notes to a Vanquished Archive.
Ninth Letter
, vol. 10, no. 2

L
I
, Y
IYUN

From Dream to Dream.
Granta
, no. 125

 

M
AAZEL
, F
IONA

My Dad Has.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 2

M
AKKAI
, R
EBECCA

Dead Turtle.
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 52, no. 3

M
AKSIK
, A
LEXANDER

Trim Palace.
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 2

M
ARCUS
, B
EN

The Dark Arts.
The New Yorker
, May 20

M
ARTIN
, A
NDREW

Cool for America.
The Paris Review
, no. 206

M
ATTISON
, A
LICE

Raw Edge.
Threepenny Review
, no. 134

McC
RACKEN
, E
LIZABETH

Birdsong from the Radio.
Zoetrope: All-Story
, vol. 17, no. 3

McG
AHAN
, J
ERRY

The Deer Walking Upside Down.
Georgia Review
, vol. 67, no. 2

M
ILLER
, M
ARY

Recidivism.
Ninth Letter
, vol. 9, no. 2

M
IRVIS
, T
OVA

ILY.
DailyLit

M
OORE
, L
ORRIE