Read Our Writers
Volume VIII
Goats
Rick Bass
It would be easy to say that he lured me into the fields of disrepair like Pan, calling out with his flute to come join in on the secret chaos of the world: but I already had my own disrepair within, and my own hungers, and I needed no flute call, no urging. I've read recently that scientists have measured the brains of adolescent boys and have determined that there is a period of transformation in which the ridges of the brain swell and then flatten out, becoming smoother, like mere rolling hills, rather than the deep ravines and canyons of the highly intelligent: and that during this physiological metamorphosis, it is for the boys as if they have received some debilitating injury, some blow to the head, so that, neurologically speaking, they glide, or perhaps stumble, through the world as if in a borderline coma during that time.
Simple commands, much less reason and rules of consequence, are beyond their ken, and if heard at all, sound perhaps like the clinking of oars or paddles against the side of a boat heard by one underwater, or like hard rain drumming on a tin roof: as if the boys are wearing a helmet of iron, against which the world, for a while, cannot, and will not, intrude.
Selected for reprint in The Pushcart Prize 2008Selected for reprint in New Stories from the South 2008
Volume VI
The Girls
Joy Williams
The girls were searching Arleen's room and had just come upon her journal. The girls were thirty-one and thirty-three. Arleen was a dowdy unspecific age, their parents' houseguest. She had arrived with the family's city pastor, an Episcopal priest, who had been in a depression for a number of months because his lover had died. The priest spent most of his time in the garden wearing only a bright red banana sling, his flabby body turning a magnificent somber brown. The girls were certain their parents regretted inviting him for he was not at all amusing, the way he could be frequently, in the pulpit.
Arleen was presently occupied with washing her long hair in the shower down the hall. It had taken the girls many clandestine visits to her room to find anything of interest. The journal was in the zippered pocket of her open suitcase. "I know I looked here before."
"She must move it around."
"Should we start at the beginning or should we start with the last entry, that would be last night I suppose."
"That was the Owl Walk. She went on the Owl Walk with Mommy and came back and said so seriously 'No Owls.'"
The girls found that hysterical.
Selected for reprint in The Best American Short Stories 2005
Volume VI
Pagans
Ron Carlson
Josh and I found the the pumpkin way out on 412, a little country crossroads I couldn't locate again with a map. We were just cruising on the sunny fall day, our first afternoon away from teaching in six weeks, stunned at the larger world after the pressures of the semester at Kelldon, and when we saw the spill of pumpkins and the roadside stand, Josh pulled over. It was too big for his car; I knew that before we even asked about it. There was no way we were going to get it into his Jetta. We strolled around among the gourds for a while, checking out the monster squash and the bins of bright tomatoes. It was fun being away, and we were a little beery from the roadhouse lunch we'd had in Hanley, and it felt good to stretch our legs and look at all this stuff. But we kept coming back to that pumpkin. I had a little one picked out, something like a tall basketball, which would have carved up nicely into Ichabod Crane for the guys in my cottage, but I knew now we were spoken for. We both wanted to get that giant pumpkin, and show it to Sarah Milford, who was also a new teacher at Kelldon, who'd graduated fromYale five months before, and whom we were both crazy for, crazy to show off for, determined to win. She taught German.
Received Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize 2005
Volume I
In Irons
Ann Beattie
Miss May was baby-sitting. Derek was at a Cuban restaurant, breaking up with his girlfriend, Marcia Ryall. Two sips into the first beer, he had blurted it out; by the time he finished the bottle, she had excused herself to go to the bathroom and gone out the front door, instead. That was what a waitress told him, when he finally got up and knocked on the bathroom door and a deep-voiced man told him to hold his horses. "Was she crying?" he asked the cashier. "I didn't notice," she said. She noticed a woman, five foot six, with short brown hair and glasses, wearing a white tee shirt and jeans, but she couldn't say whether that totally inconspicuous person was crying? He ate his fried porkchops, as well as her fried plantains, drank her untouched glass of sangria (sweet!), then asked the waitress to put the leftovers in a box. Miss May might want a late-night snack. He bouth himself a cigar, but tucked it into his pocket with the toothpick instead of smoking it. That might be his own late-night snack.
He was in the doghouse with everybody: Sallie, his ex-wife; Miss May, his ex-wife's aunt, who had raised her; his second wife, who was in the process of divorcing him; his girlfriend, who had listened to what he had to say without comment, before excusing herself to go to the bathroom.
Cited in The Best American Short Stories 1999: "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1998"Volume IV
Bleed Blue in Indonesia
Adam Desnoyers
I don't believe in this kind of thing anymore. Maybe you only get one. But they met like this:
Will drove the rear flag car for the trucking company. He'd been headed for promotion to lead man until a few trips back, when he rear-ended the two-bedroom on the doublewide. While Will was obviously no longer in high esteem with management, some fluke occurred where he got to keep driving while they investigated. It was one of those little breaks some people get all their lives and others never get. Usually, he never got them.
The last trip Will took was supposed to be to Ohio but he'd gotten stoned and couldn't keep up with the convoy and didn't see a whole lot of reasons to go to Ohio anyway. He pulled onto the side of the highway at some anonymous point where I saw a car fire the other day and I knew that place because we'd gone by it when we were going west once and Will said, That's where I pulled over that time and then he told me the rest and when he finished telling me I looked back to see it again but it was gone.
Selected for reprint in Prize Stories 2003: The O.Henry AwardsVolume III
The Story of the Door
David Huddle
In th beginning, of course, it had been a window. Which was probably what gave the student the idea in the first place. During one of the instructor's dreary monologues, this student had glanced over at the little staircase-three steps-that led up to its threshold, and she'd thought to herself What goes up, etc. But in fact there was merely an out, a step out onto the fire escape. You could go out there and gaze over the mountain range in the distance. That was pleasant enough. She'd done it a few times. But something about the asymmetry of the arrangement irked her: Three steps up-there should be three steps down, or the architectural equivalent of three steps down. Psycospiritually the lack of that down began to piss her off: step step step? step step step. What the hell?
This student had done her best to fit into the class and into the school. She was forty-five years old and a little plain, but strong and fit as a new Corvette. And she had the clothes, the manners, the tone of voice, the vocabulary, and the generally polite opinions that allowed her to be considered one of them.
Selected for reprint in The Pushcart Prize 2002Volume V
How to Fall
Edith Pearlman
"Fan Mail!" brayed Paolo. "Come and get it."
Every Monday and Tuesday Paolo lugged a canvas sack from the studio to the rehearsal room at the Hotel Pamona. Until recently Paolo had been Paul. The change in name was going to get Paul/Paolo strictly nowhere, in Joss's opinion; but teenagers had to transform themselves every month or so-he had read that somewhere. After dropping off the mail Paolo picked up lunch for the television brass and brought it back to the studio. He told Joss that he hoped to become a comedian. The letters that came out of the sack smelled of deli. Some envelopes had grease stains.
"Missives!" He swung the sack onto the round table in the corner, and loosened its neck, and allowed some of the letters to spill out-fussy business, too many little motions; but Joss kept his mouth shut. He wasn't in the coaching game. Besides, silence was what he got paid for.
Happy Bloom had been rehearsing his opening monologue-the one he delivered in a tuxedo, the one with the snappiest jokes-in front of the wide mirror between the windows. But when he saw Paolo he whirled, stamped, and called a recess. He loved his fans.
Cited in The Best American Short Stories 2004: "100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of 2003"Volume V
Horseflies
Robert Wrigley
After the horse went down
the heat came up,
and later that week
the smell of its fester yawed,
an open mouth of had-been air
our local world had licked
inside of, and I,
the boy who'd volunteered at twilight-
shunts of chawed cardboard
wadded up my nostrils
and a dampened bandanna
over my nose and mouth-
I strode then
into the ever-purpler sink
of rankness and smut,
a sloshful five-gallon bucket of kerosene
in my right hand,
a smoking railroad fusee
in my left,
and it came over me like water then,
into my head-gaps and gum
rinds, into the tear ducts
and taste buds and even
into the last dark tendrils
of my howling, agonized hair
that through the windless half-light
hoped to fly from my very head,
and would have, I have no doubt, had not
the first splash of kerosene
launched a seething skin
of flies into the air
and onto me, the cloud of them
so dense and dark my mother in the distance
saw smoke and believed as she had feared
I would, that I had set my own
fool and staggering self aflame
and therefore she fainted and did not see
how the fire kicked
the other billion flies airborne
exactly in the shape
of the horse itself,
which rose for a brief quivering
instant under me, and which for a pulse thump
at least, I rode-in a livery of iridescence,
in a mail of exoskeletal facets,
wielding a lance of swimming lace-
just as night rode the light, and the bones,
and a sweet, cleansing smoke to ground.
Selected for reprint in The Pushcart Prize 2005
Volume V
Pagans
Rick Bass
There once were two boys, best friends, who loved the same girl, and, in a less-common variation on that ancient story, she chose neither one of them, but went on to meet and choose a third, and lived happily ever-after.
One of the boys, Richard, nearly gambled his life on her-poured everything he had into the pursuit of her, Annie-while the other boy, Kirby, was attracted to her, intrigued by her, but not to the point where he would risk his life, or his heart, or anything else. It could have been said at the time that all three of them were fools, though no one who observed their strange courtship thought so, or said so; and even now, thirty years later, with the three of them as adrift and asunder from one another as any scattering of dust or wind, there are almost surely no regrets, no notions of failure or success or what-if: though among the three of them, it is perhaps Richard alone who sometimes considers the past, and imagines how easily things might have been different. How much labor went into the pursuit, and how close they all three passed to different worlds, different histories.
Selected for reprint in New Stories From the South 2004Volume VI
Isle of Wigs
Carolyn Cooke
As she sat for her first time in one of the pink Baraloungers at the infusion center, Sarah saw how arbitrary it was, like passengers on an airline flight. Were the loungers pink because-so many women? Or was it cheaper, the pink? She took the advice of the advice nurse at her HMO and asked the women where they went. She asked a yellow-faced woman, she asked a high school senior, she asked a woman who stole three lollipopos from the front desk and held them unrepentantly, like cigarettes. Everybody said the same: The Isle of Wigs.
She bought one wig the first day, and then went back a couple of weeks later and bought another. Two wigs turned out not to be so many. She felt better, doing something positive to help herself. But when it came down to real money, Sarah wasn't willing to put out cash to save her life. How did she know what life was worth? Isn't that what good insurance was for? The faith healer her son Doug found through the gym wasn't covered by her HMO. Plus, he was Catholic, which made Sarah wonder what her own mother, dead of Cancer for thirty years, would think. Would she be happy or even more furious to see her daughter saved by that kind of faith?
Cited in The best American Short Stories 2004: "100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of 2003"Volume I
The Voices from the Other Room
Richard Bausch
Happy?
Mmmm.
That was lovely.
...
Wasn't that lovely
Sweet.
So sweet.
...
I've been so miserable.
...
Are you warm?
I'm toasty.
Love me?
What do you think?
It was good for you?
You were nice.
Nice?
...
Just nice?
Nice is wonderful Larry. It's more than good, for instance. Why are you so insecure about it?
Cited in The Best American Short Stories 1999: "100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of 1998"
Volume IV
At the Bottom of the United States
Carol Bly
Whoever said that the meek shall inherit the earth, that was then and this is now. They didn't know anything about being on the bottom of the system in your own hometown. And another thing, Brad Stropp could tell: those ancient people like Jesus got to be outdoors all the time, keeping their sheep from falling into the hot and sandy ravines or meeting strangers at wells and saying wise things which people actually wanted to hear. Well, people weren't like that now.
It was another thing to live in St. Fursey, Minnesota, Fursey for short, a town with a thousand people whose shitlist never changed. Once you got on that list they went on treating you like nothing, no matter how well you did later, no matter if the first time was only a mistake. What bothered a thinking man like Brad most of all was that no matter how true some insight you had and told, if it wasn't something they'd heard before they wouldn't listen. Brad once told Father Tad during Bible study that if Jesus had lived now he would have sung a different tune, but all Father did was squeeze together the outer edges of his right eye. He waited in silence, and then went back to the Bible for the next verse they were discussing.
Received Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize 2004Volume IV
Kissing
William Kittredge
When they were young they'd walk out on early springtime mornings, into the vast greening and endless Kansas wheat fields his family had been accumulating through generations, since coming from Russia in the 1870s. They would burrow out of sight in one of the gullies, spread a blanket and oil up. "Let's just work at it," Jennie would say. Her face would glisten with sweat. She'd say it out loud. "Fucking." She'd grin.
Decades later, over martinis, Billy had said he'd once thought Jennie hung the sun. "Once?" Jennie said. She found a terrific Japanese restaurant in Kansas City, and they feasted on what she called purity, sashimi and Bombay martinis. Even if that evening didn't cure the boredom, Jenny said, they shouldn't quit on romance. The next spring, as they were driving in southern France, the discovery of prehistoric painted caverns in the gorge of the Ardeche River was announced. Billy read about it in the English language Herald Tribune while they were eating breakfast on the square in Avignon. "Lions,"
Billy said. "They've never found paintings of lions before."
Near Lascaux, the most famous of the painted caverns, no longer open to the public, Jennie consented to let Billy lead her out to an available cave, called Font d'Guame. "This," Billy said, "will be the actual thing."
Selected for reprint in Prize Stories 2003: The O.Henry AwardsVolume II
The Soul of the Gorilla
David Borofka
QUOTE: "The scrimmage of appetite everywhere." - Delmore Schwartz
I was a fat boy and shy. Problems one and two of my childhood.
My belly separated by tee shirts from my shorts, I wheezed when I walked. Rolls of fat circled my wrists until I was twelve. My mother never shopped for jeans in any place but the shelf marked "Husky." Although the name on my birth certificate was Calvin, I answered to Butterball or Porker with greater regularity.
To make matters worse, my shyness, rather than shielding me from others' attentions, only served as an incentive for those who wished me to become gregarious, make friends, be precocious. Get the fat boy out of his shell. Aunts introduced me to cousins. Friends of the family introduced me to daughters and sons. A well-meaning adult's questions, intending to draw me out, were met with my vigorous silence.
Performers seemed especially challenged. When I was two, my parents took me with them on a trip to Ensenada. In a cantina, a rotund Mexican clown singled me out as his Other, the only person not laughing at his tricks and pratfalls.
Received Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize 2001Volume VII
Waiting for Dick to Die
John Keeble
The little town of Cordova lay on the slope above the harbor. It and what else Mitchell saw during his flights was a catechism, as familiar as an often heard story with shifty nuances that always began and ended with the landing strip next to Lake Eyak, or, if he were flying a float plane, the lake itself, the notch between mountains, and the town. On this evening, he and Lizzie took off from the strip in the Cessna 180, rose over the woods, passed through the notch, and above Cordova's wind-blasted buildings. Next was the harbor, chock-full of fishing boats, and then Hawkins Island. Lizzie sat straight next to Mitchell with her hand on her lap and her crinkly hair spraying out from under a many-colored watch cap. Overhead were broken clouds, beneath lay the water, and in between the Cessna penetrated the cobalt-blue sky of the ever-lengthening twilight, going the thirty-five miles toward the Entrance to Prince William Sound where the salmon upon which the Cordovans absolutely depended had brought their homeward journey to an abrupt halt, as if they'd run into a wall.
Received Special Meniton in The Pushcart Prize 2006
