The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (51 page)

It was some years later that I asked him and he told me how it went that night. How he'd opened the dirt-scraping door to the hutch and entered that too-familiar smell of alfalfa and steel and shit already sick with the knowledge that he couldn't do what he absolutely had to do. How he lit the lamp and watched them hop over to him. How he stood there by the crate, sobbing, pulling first on Jenda's ears, then Eliška's, picking up one, then the other, pushing his nose into their fur, telling them how much he loved them ... unaware of the time passing, unaware of anything, really—this is how miserable he was—until suddenly a man's voice speaks from behind the wall and says, "You're a good boy. Let me choose." My father laughed—a strange laugh: "And I remember standing there with my hands in the wire and feeling this stillness come over me, and him saying, 'Jenda. Take Jenda, he's the weaker of the two. It's not wrong. Do it quickly.'"

C
HIMAMANDA
N
GOZI
A
DICHIE
was born in Nigeria. She is the author of two novels,
Half of a Yellow Sun
, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
Purple Hibiscus
, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her short story collection,
The Thing Around Your Neck
, was published in 2009. She is the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and was named in
The New Yorkers
"20 Under 40" list of the most important fiction writers under forty years old.

▪ I am fascinated by Lagos, where I live part of the year. I am fascinated by the humor and resilience, by the increasing sprawl of both gated estates and squalid slums, by the people who drive past me in the always-crawling traffic, and by the overall air of mutability, the sense that anything can change at any time. I have run into old friends who have completely reinvented themselves and become other people in a manner that strikes me as particularly Lagosian. Nigeria's shift from military to democratic rule brought social changes in the last decade but perhaps none as dramatic as the speed with which some young men became wealthy, particularly in Lagos. One such young man is an acquaintance whose life I reimagined in this story.

M
EGAN
M
AYHEW
B
ERGMAN
lives on a small farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, with her veterinarian husband and daughter. Scribner will publish her first collection of stories,
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
, in March 2012. Bergman's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the
New York Times Booh Review
, the 2010
New Stories from the South
anthology,
Ploughshares, One Story, Narrative, Oxford American
, and elsewhere.

▪ Within six weeks in 2009, my husband graduated from veterinary school, I gave birth to my first child, my beloved mother-in-law passed away, and we put our old, rickety southern house on the market and moved to Vermont. And yes—we had a camel cricket infestation in the basement that did not amuse the realtor.

My husband's parents were both veterinarians. For a few years they fostered an African gray parrot. After my husband's mother died, I couldn't help but think of the bird (relegated to a sanctuary after years of bad behavior) that still held her voice. Thus, the quest to hear her voice began to take imaginary shape.

When I wrote "Housewifely Arts," I was consumed with what it meant to make a home, grieve for a parent, and become a good parent in my own right. I was bewildered by my constant failures, but heartened by the mess of love and good intentions underneath them all.

T
OM
B
ISSELL
was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. He is the author of several books, including the story collection
God Lives in St. Petersburg
, which won the Rome Prize, and
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
, which did not. His next book,
Magic Hours: Essays and Adventures
, a collection of his nonfiction, will be published in 2012. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches writing at Portland State University. "A Bridge Under Water" marks his second appearance in
The Best American Short Stories.

▪ Uncomfortable Fact #1: Two things in "A Bridge Under Water" have an autobiographical tint. I did very nearly get kicked out of a synagogue while living in Rome, for roughly the reasons depicted. I also once went from zero to breakup with someone over whether our theoretical children would be Jewish. Uncomfortable Fact #2: A large part of the reason I wrote this story was to determine why I can sometimes be an insufferable dick. Writing it, I hope, made me somewhat less insufferable and markedly less dickish. The great gift of being a fiction writer—even, in my case, a relatively infrequent one—is the chance it can give you to perceive and thus understand yourself from without while also gaining some measure of sympathy for beliefs and positions you have previously judged to be unacceptable. Imagination, if nothing else, allows the fiction writer to achieve a magnanimity that he or she has been denied by life as it is, lamentably, lived.

Finally, "A Bridge Under Water" was rejected at least fifteen times before Sven Birkerts and William Pierce kindly agreed to publish it in
Agni.
Although I'd like to imagine that its publication within this august volume has moved the editors who spurned it to smack their heads, fire their assistants, and rend their garments, I'm also pretty cerain that none of them care. Nor should they care. But the frequency of its rejection seems like a helpful thing to mention, given how many young and apprentice writers tear through
BASS
every year, as I once did, wondering how one's work winds up so enshrined. One answer: Yell into a hole, and pretend as though you're having a conversation. Yell long enough, and suddenly you might be.

J
ENNIFER
E
GAN
is the author of
The Invisible Circus
, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001;
Emerald City and Other Stories; Look at Me
, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001; and the best-selling
The Keep.
Her most recent book,
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, a national bestseller, won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the UK's Orange Prize. Also a journalist, Egan writes frequently for the
New York Times Magazine.

▪ "Out of Body" is a section of my new book,
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, which unfolds in thirteen discrete parts that are very different from each other. It was probably the part I had the most trouble writing—initially I tried writing from Sasha's point of view about her time in college, but it was dead on arrival: the single interesting part of it involved her memories of traveling in Asia, and a troubled boy she met there named Leif. So I moved Leif to NYU, where I named him Bobbie and began writing from his point of view about his friendship with Sasha. Second-person narration has interested me for years because of my work as a journalist; people tend to slip into the second person when discussing emotional things, to distance themselves from those emotions. Bobbie spoke in the second person right from the start, but I struggled to see and hear him clearly in his new environment, and the chapter continued to founder. One day, on a crowded New York subway, I spotted a guy with reddish stubble talking to his friend. He was very masculine, and I thought, "I'm not writing about Bobbie, I'm writing about Rob. And there he is." I didn't even look at the guy again, but I held his image in my mind, and when I began writing again, the second-person voice was much more lively and specific. That's when the story began to finally come together; when Leif transformed into Bobbie, bulked up, grew some stubble, and became Rob.

N
ATHAN
E
NGLANDER
is the author of the story collection
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
and the novel
The Ministry of Special Cases.
He is currently at work on a play based on his short story "The Twenty-seventh Man."

▪ I will pretty much get on a plane to anywhere in the world if it's to do an event with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret (and yes, the little boy in the story is named after him). So a couple of years back, I flew to Rome to give a talk with Etgar, and—a nice surprise—there in the first row of the audience was an Italian friend of mine. After the talk, we ended up on the roof of her building telling stories for hours. One of those stories was about Etgar's father, and matching uniforms, and the Sinai Campaign. I really never (at least until now) write stories about things overheard, or based on the tales friends tell—it's just not how I work. And I don't think I'd have dared to write this one if not for the confusion caused when you mix American overpoliteness with Israeli straight talk. I wanted to tell Etgar something about the narrative structure of the story. But I didn't want to be rude and talk about a personal account in an inconsiderate way. So I asked, in Hebrew, "Would you mind if I engaged with that story as a story?" And Etgar turned and said, "Sure. Take it." As in, It's yours, go write it. And there I was backpedaling and apologizing and saying, No, no, that wasn't my intent. But Etgar made it clear. He writes about talking fish and fake angels and women that turn into hairy men after dark, and really, this is not the kind of thing he would do. So a year went by, and I was living in Berlin for a few months and thinking about history and the Holocaust and Israel, and that's when I sat down to write "Free Fruit."

A
LLEGRA
G
OODMAN
is the author of five novels—
The Cookbook Collector, The Other Side of the Island, Intuition, Paradise Park
, and
Kaaterskill Falls
—and two collections of short stories,
The Family Markowitz
and
Total Immersion.
Her fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Commentary
, and
Ploughshares.
Her essays and reviews have appeared in the
New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal
, and
American Scholar.
Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.

▪ Whenever I finish a novel, I write a couple of short stories. It's a chance to play and to experiment. In this case, I'd finished a long, richly layered novel,
The Cookbook Collector
, and I thought, Now for something completely different! "La Vita Nuova" is shorter than most of my stories. The style is spare. Every word counts, and every detail has particular weight. I tried dozens of beginnings before I decided on Amanda and her wedding dress. Once I settled into her point of view, the wry narrative followed. While the story is quite structured, I wrote it without a plan, improvising all the way through the last line. In the weeks I worked on it, I dreamed about it all the time.

E
HUD
H
AVAZELET
has written three books, the story collections
What Is It Then Between Us?
and
Like Never Before
and the novel
Bearing the Body.
The latter two were named
New York Times
Notable Books. Other awards include California and Oregon book awards, the Wallant Award, and fellowships from Stanford University and the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations. He teaches writing at the University of Oregon and lives with his family in Corvallis, Oregon.

▪ Stories begin in autobiography, a bit of occasion you investigate for meaning, consequence. This one began that way, with reaching that age where women don't look at you anymore the way they once did; with cold mornings on Riverside Drive thirty years ago; with me trying to show off to my girlfriend how well I could drive (I couldn't) and rear-ending a lieutenant in the Mineola Police Department on my first road trip after getting my license.

Another source is Chekhov and his great story "The Lady with the Dog." I've been fascinated a long time by the moment when Gurov, before taking the acquiescent Anna to bed, pauses for a leisurely-seeming snack. It seems to me a wonderful example of what Chekhov creates better than anyone, and what I tried to capture for my own Gurov—a moment where nothing at all seems to happen and yet everything has changed.

C
AITLIN
H
ORROCKS
is the author of the story collection
This Is Not Your City.
Her work appears in
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Atlantic, The Paris Review), One Story
, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches at Grand Valley State University.

▪ I am a good and dedicated sleeper. It's a state I look forward to and find very difficult to let go of in the mornings, especially dark winter ones. When I read an article a few years ago about historical sleep patterns, including alleged winter hibernation, I was immediately intrigued, and frankly a bit jealous.

"The Sleep" was a pretty direct attempt to imagine what hibernation might look like in a modern town; once I'd put the Rasmussens to bed, it looked tempting enough to me that it had to spread. But when most of the population was participating, the sleep became more complicated. That arc, of an entire town hibernating, and what might drive them to it, and whether that sleep was a good or bad thing, was in place from the beginning.

As I worked, I had to solve smaller questions, like how much explanation the reader might need of the logistics of the hibernation (there used to be a lot more about canned goods) and what triggered Al's initial decision. Jeannie was alive in the earliest drafts, and at first killing her off felt like a cheap trick. But it soon felt necessary, and it made the sleep more explicitly an escape, a refusal to engage with certain kinds of pain: her death, Reggie's return, whether and how the town itself was dying. I began the story sort of envious of them all, but I think by the end I'd convinced myself to prefer wakefulness.