The Best American Short Stories 2015 (57 page)

When Meaghan got the tattoos and piercings, I was angry at first—I had to be, it's a mother's job—but I can't say that I blamed her. I always wanted my girls to be their own people, not to think their fate was tied to bone structure, or to looking like their mother, or to waiting for some man. Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are.

But back then, back when I was fourteen, I still wasn't sure. I saw her face in my sleep at night. And then, a few weeks after she died, Allen brought Mother's things over to Claude's house—some clothes, jewelry, a purse, some pictures, a makeup bag. It wasn't much. Allen was wearing a cast with pins through his arm and shoulder, jeans, and a denim vest. One of his eyes was messed up from the wreck, all red and bleary. He kept pushing his shaggy, dirty blond hair out of his eyes and staring at me. “Goddamn, you look like her,” he said. “Freaks me out how much. There's maybe a little bit a me in there, but not as much as she always said.”

And that was it. Somehow, it didn't really matter, finding out. Two years earlier, it would have changed my life. But on that day, I suppose the only thing I felt was some small measure of contentment for her: that he had, indeed, come back for her, just like she always said he would. They were
different
after all, destined to be together. I thanked Allen for bringing her things, watched him ride away on his motorcycle, and went inside to have dinner with my father.

M
EGAN
M
AYHEW
B
ERGMAN
was raised in North Carolina and now lives in Vermont. She studied anthropology at Wake Forest University and completed graduate degrees at Duke University and Bennington College. She is the author of
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
,
Almost Famous Women
, and a forthcoming novel. In 2015, she was awarded the Southern Fellowship of Writers' Garrett Award for Fiction and a fellowship at the American Library in Paris.

• I've always been interested in unusual women with power, and when I first read about Joe Carstairs, I couldn't stop thinking about her: her early days as an ambulance driver and companion of Dolly Wilde, and then her later days as commander in chief of a small island in the Bahamas. I admire islands as settings—they have their own peculiar, highly specific pressures and can function as a character in the narrative. While writing the story, I became obsessed with researching Whale Cay, through Kate Summerscale's excellent biography of Joe (
The Queen of Whale Cay
), and through maps and real estate sites. I wanted its mostly unspoiled and wild character to envelop the reader and provide a lush backdrop for the antics of the passionate women who lived there.

When thinking about Joe Carstairs, an independently wealthy woman who loved to race boats and control others, I wanted to imagine the life of someone in her orbit. I'm fascinated by the way we treat others, and how power dynamics reveal so much about characters and values. I came up with the character of Georgie, a girl from the small-town South who ended up as one of Joe's many girlfriends on Whale Cay. There are islanders in the story who are also at Joe's mercy; it was important to me not to romanticize her actions. She was interesting, but she was also flawed.

After I wrote the first draft of the story, I knew it had many successful elements, but it took three years of revising, and a final rigorous pass with the editors of
The Kenyon Review
, to come to the best draft.

J
USTIN
B
IGOS
was born in New Haven and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His stories have appeared in
McSweeney's Quarterly, Ninth Letter
, and
Memorious
, and his novella,
1982
, appears in
Seattle Review
. He is the author of the poetry chapbook
Twenty Thousand Pigeons
(2014). He cofounded and coedits the literary journal
Waxwing
and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

• “Fingerprints” began as a memoir. I was finishing my first semester as a fiction student at the MFA program at Warren Wilson College (I dropped out the next semester, then eventually went back and finished in poetry). My adviser, Elizabeth Strout, was willing to look at this “memoir,” and I remember her e-mailing me at night to tell me that it was the best thing I'd written all semester, and that whatever it was, fiction, memoir, essay, I needed to keep writing it, no matter what. So, of course, terrified, I put it away, for about ten years. During my two years of doctoral study (I'm really good at dropping out of various levels of higher ed.), I had to take a workshop outside my main focus, which was poetry. I enrolled in a fiction workshop. And I struggled, since I hadn't written short stories for so long. I dug out “Fingerprints,” and I looked at it. With nothing much to lose at this point, I shattered it, then put it back together, adding new sections and, ultimately, deleting most of the original. I wanted to write a story about stories, I suppose. Though this story is still, to a large extent, a series of memories of my father, as well as my stepfather and mother and the city I grew up in, I wanted the story to be about storytelling—how we tell the stories of ourselves and, especially, of the people who torture us with their tainted love.

At some point I thought I might as well send the story to some magazines, even if I was really a poet. When
McSweeney's
took the story, over a year after I'd sent it, I'd kind of forgotten it was still out there, as it had been rejected from the dozen or so other places I'd sent it. I was pretty shocked. Then I was thrilled, especially since editor Daniel Gumbiner wanted to chat on the phone about revisions and edits, and we went back and forth over e-mail about ways I could make the story even better. Dan's insights and suggestions were essential to the final version of “Fingerprints.” I'm grateful to him and
McSweeney's
for taking a chance on a nobody. “Fingerprints” was my first published story. I doubt I would now still be writing fiction if not for the editors of
McSweeney's
, who gave me a new confidence in my writing. A year later, I now have a collection-in-progress of stories, essays, and a novella, over a hundred pages and growing, titled (yup)
Fingerprints
.

Elizabeth Strout: this story is dedicated to you.

K
EVIN
C
ANTY
's seventh book, a novel called
Everything
, was published in 2010. He is also the author of three previous collections of short stories (
Where the Money Went, Honeymoon
, and
A Stranger in This World
) and three novels (
Nine Below Zero, Into the Great Wide Open
, and
Winslow in Love
). His short stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, Tin House, GQ, Glimmer Train, Story
,
New England Review
, and elsewhere; essays and articles in
Vogue, Details, Playboy
, the
New York Times
, and
Oxford American
, among many others. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian, and English. He lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.

• This story arose out of a time in my life when a lot of things that had been fixed in place started to come loose and rattle around. I found myself single for the first time since the Ford administration, for instance. My father had died. My daughter went to college in Oregon, and my son and his girlfriend struck out for California. I found myself largely alone for the first time in a long time, and without anybody to take care of. This felt difficult in the way I remembered adolescence as difficult: no clear path forward, not even sure what I was supposed to want. This was a moment I recognized as having a lot of potential for movement, for change, the things that stories are made out of.

Into this complex and volatile mixture of emotions was injected a scandalous barroom anecdote, and the story precipitated out pretty quickly from there.

D
IANE
C
OOK
is the author of the story collection
Man v. Nature
. Her fiction has been published in
Harper's Magazine, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, Guernica
, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
and on
This American Life
, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She won the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, and her story collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in Oakland, California.

• When I sat down to write the first draft of “Moving On” I was thinking about a lot of things. I was thinking about being left behind. I was thinking about all the risks we take when we love someone and all the ways we might try to protect ourselves. I was thinking about my dad, who was trying to move on after my mom died. I worried it was too quick and I wished he'd take more time to grieve. I was thinking about how I was drowning in my own grief and wishing I could move on.

I was thinking about a kind of e-mail I used to get when I lived in Brooklyn. Mass e-mails from friends saying something like “My elderly neighbor has just died and left behind this sweet toy poodle named Angel. Do you know anyone who might want to adopt Angel so she doesn't get sent to a shelter or put down?” I was thinking about how confused that poor poodle must feel to have her whole life altered, possibly ended, and probably not understand why. And I was thinking about the people this happens to. Either because they are removed from the only life they know, or because the life they know is forever changed by the absence of the person who is gone. Their loss is doubled in a way.

All of this thinking led to a very short draft. Really just a setup. I had the situation, the narrator, her loss, the shelter, the women on the floor, the manual. But it was just a place populated by shadows of people. Through revision, more elements came to light. The window friend appeared. Women began running. Bingo was played. These things made the shelter and its inhabitants come alive. It became a place where people were either trying to make the best of a bad situation or fleeing from it. Both were attempts to survive, and survival has always been something I connect back to hope. But still, it didn't feel like a story. Then the narrator began writing the letter that figures in the last third of the piece. And finally I felt like I knew her. She wanted something, even though she knew she couldn't have it, the hallmark of grief. It amazed me that for months all these words had existed together without being able to accomplish much, and that the addition of just one element could bind all this material into a story.

J
ULIA
E
LLIOTT
's fiction has appeared in
Tin House
,
Georgia Review, Conjunctions
, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Her debut story collection,
The Wilds
, was chosen by
Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, BuzzFeed
, and
Book Riot
as one of the Best Books of 2014 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her first novel,
The New and Improved Romie Futch
, will appear in October 2015. She teaches at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She and her husband, John Dennis, are founding members of the music collective Grey Egg.

• When I was in grad school, I became fascinated by medieval female mystics, particularly those who, like Margery Kempe, wrote about their experiences. My first attempt at a mystic story was too comic and outlandish, incorporating not only an obsession with the “holy prepuce,” or foreskin, one of the more eccentric relics that supposedly derived from the body of Jesus Christ, but also the obscure tradition of the “lactating Christ” in late medieval religious iconography. After I abandoned that story, female mystics popped up in the dissertations of at least two of my fictional characters. In one story, which remained unpublished, the mystic's feverish visions appeared in big italicized chunks. In a more successful story, unnamed mystics from the narrator's scholarly research hovered in the background of the narrative, occasionally appearing in brief images or lines of dialogue. When I heard about the
Conjunctions
“Speaking Volumes” theme, I decided to rewrite my mystic story, highlighting the medieval practice of mass-producing volumes in scriptoria. “Bride” also chronicles the private writings and obsessions of a female scribe who records her “visions” on stolen sheets of “uterine vellum,” fine parchment made from the skins of unborn calves.

L
OUISE
E
RDRICH
owns a small independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis. Her latest novel,
The Round House
, won the National Book Award. Her next short story collection,
Python's Kiss
, will include “The Big Cat.”

• Although I tried to improve the relationship in this story, things just kept getting worse. At last I let go of any hope of redemption and allowed Elida's malevolence to emerge in her husband's dream. People in Minnesota will usually comment on a book or story, but when mentioning this one nobody knew what to say. “I saw your story.” Mouths would open, hands flap, an odd laugh. Perhaps as a consequence this became a favorite story of mine—it seems to make people uncomfortable.

B
EN
F
OWLKES
is a sports writer who covers professional fighting for
USA Today
and its dedicated mixed martial arts site, MMAJunkie.com. He has covered the sport professionally since 2006 for media outlets including
Sports Illustrated
, AOL Sports, CBS Sports, and others. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and his fiction has appeared in
Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, Crab Creek Review
, and
Pindeldyboz
. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife and two daughters.