It is possible, of course, to tell affecting, well-crafted stories about individuals battling nature or the supernatural for themselves. But to be honest, I prefer stories of humans jostling against each other. These encounters come with the dramatic potential of power struggles, love trouble, family intrigue, and a more complicated sense of time and memory.
Heidi Pitlor, Series Editor, Foreword: Best American Short Stories 2023
It was a great year. But not an easy one.
I like to look for patterns in these volumes, patterns which may or may not be there. One thing that struck me as I finished up this year was the stories seemed more grim, the realities within them more serious, the stakes much higher than in the past.
It occurred to me this perception of darkness might be only in my perception. For the first time since 2015, I missed my self-imposed deadline for completing all the stories and posts by January 1. That’s a bit odd, since the pub date was a couple of weeks earlier than it had been during the pandemic. I reasoned that I was overwhelmed with Xenophon, but hey, I used to make the deadline when I was taking four or five moocs and recapping Top Chef and/or Project Runway, so I’m not sure that’s an excuse. Is this age? Am I at sixty-nine really that much slower than at fifty-nine? If so, what’ll I be at seventy-two? Am I getting to the point of having to hang up my keyboard? Or is it the effect of struggling with the chaos of the last several years?
To get a better handle on whether the grim was in me or in the text, I tried to sort the stories in categories: relationships, loss, cultural shift (such as immigration), personal and political violence, surreal time-melding, technology. This turned out to be difficult, since most of the stories fit into multiple categories: yes, the main plot forms around relationships, but those relationships are shaped by a past full of loss or violence or cultural shift. As in life, the past, no matter how hard we try, isn’t even past (h/t Faulkner).
Still, I think it’s safe to say that, compared with, say, the 2013 or 2015 volumes, the tone overall is much heavier. That could be due to new voices entering the field, market forces making publishers more willing to take a chance on fiction that isn’t feel-good, or just a bit of boredom with the same old domestic realism story (I once proposed Short Story Bingo Cards with “a sensitive tale of a decaying marriage” as one of the blocks), or something else entirely. Or it could be an increasing awareness of the different kinds of struggles so many people go through.
That isn’t to say there weren’t any domestic drama stories. In fact, my favorite story, Ling Ma’s “Peking Duck,” is a mother-daughter story. But it’s set in a structurally interesting narrative that brings in elements of cultural shift affect that relationship, while demonstrating how a story reframed becomes a different story. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to call it an Escher staircase or a Matryoshka doll of a story, so I called it both.
“This Isn’t the Actual Sea” by Corinna Vallianatos is likewise a story about friendship. At first I was a bit dismissive; I didn’t really get it, and when I read in the Contributor Note that it was about women creating art, I thought, oh, there you go, artists, what do you expect. But when I looked more closely, I found several moments of absolute clarity, and came to realize the ending was beautifully constructed from the beginning, just as the friendship turned on the past. I wrote about it as a Reader’s Journey: a conversion story. It was a reading lesson for me.
One relationship story, Danica Lee’s “My Brother William,” had a devastating effect on me for personal reasons: the recent loss of my own brother. I have a feeling that a year ago, I would have viewed this as a story about technology, but this year right now, it was far more emotional. I wrote my question, one that now can never be answered, in my post: “This could have been us; why wasn’t it?”
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s “Trash” is all about a newlywed’s relationship with her mother-in-law, but it’s a lesson on negotiating class differences via a compellingly naïve – I called her “Pure” in my post – protagonist. “The Muddle” by Sana Krasikov is a friendship story, but also a story of what it takes out of you to leave your native land behind, as well as the importance of accepting another’s different choice.
Teenagers frequent these stories, perhaps because adolescence is the time of life when a kind of scream, a gauzy separation between innocence and knowledge, falls away. Though some of the teenage characters in these pages which make loath to admit it, they do gain valuable insight from the generosity of friends and family and even strangers.
Heidi Pitlor, Series Editor, Foreword: Best American Short Stories 2023
The teenage protagonists featured in four of the stories likewise have a lot to deal with. In Benjamin Ehrlich’s “The Master Mourner,” a young Orthodox Jewish boy tries to figure out what’s up with a member of his shul, but the death of his mother, barely mentioned over and over, is clearly on his mind; “Camp Emeline” by Taryn Bowe likewise features a teen dealing with the loss of her sister. “Tender” by Cherline Bazile finds a girl learning how to be vulnerable as her friend’s mother puts in braids, while Jared Jackson’s “Bebo” looks at a moment of violence with regret from a sweet vignette from the past.
The stories in this annual volume were written by living authors who have struggled and mastered both form and narrative in order to have their say with the original worlds they have created, based on emotions felt and perceived, and they give us our emotional truths, restoring our sanity and providing comfort for the days ahead.
Min Jin Lee, Guest Editor: Introduction, Best American Short Stories 2023
Several stories were set outside the US. “Supernova” by Kosiso Ugwueze takes what could have been a harrowing tale of a kidnapping from a Nigerian bus ride and weaves in the effects of familial abandonment and depression in a way that generates moments of dark humor. Maya Binyam’s “Do You Belong To Anybody?” had me struggling for a while, but once I got there, the story of a man who’d left his native Ethiopia behind and now finds himself called back for a uncertain family problem impressed me greatly. “The Mine” by Nathan Harris uses diamond mines in South Africa as a backdrop for class issues, with a brief but effective detour into horror.
Two stories – Da-Lin’s “Treasure Island Alley” and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s “It Is What It Is” – featured immigrants whose American lives are complicated not just by cultural shift, but by tragedies in their pasts. Interestingly, both end up with what I’m calling surreal time-melds, as past and present combine in comforting, if terrifying, ways.
I’m conflicted about the three stories that generated novels. Binyam’s “Do You Belong To Anyone” turns out to be the first chapter of her novel, Hangman; I very much want to read it because the story was so good, but I still balk at including chapters as stories. The case with Joanna Pearson’s “Grand Mal” turning into her novel Bright and Tender Dark is a bit less troublesome; she extended the story, post-publication, as a kind of mystery. Then there’s Esther Yi’s “Moon” which is from her novel Y/N. The story served as an effective ending to this volume, purely by virtue of the alphabet: it followed a string of seriously grim stories with a flash of humor that I appreciated.
I hope that reading this powerful group of stories makes you too look at the others in your life as well as yourself with a new wisdom and kindness.
Heidi Pitlor, Series Editor, Foreword: Best American Short Stories 2023
“Moon” was also the story that left me with a troubling question, as the protagonist’s roommate notes that she’s always reading, but “[y]ou don’t do anything with what you read.” I wonder if I have the same problem. I frequently relate what I read to my life; I feel like I became a measurably better reader just in the course of the two months with this book. But should there be something else? Does my sharing of whatever insights I find via this blog count? Does what I read affect how I deal with others in real life? If so, is it in a positive way? Is this something I should be more concerned about, rather than developing my understanding of how literature works? What is the purpose of reading, anyway? Does it have to have a purpose?
I’ll have to keep that in mind as I put away this volume. It was a very good year, if a grim one. I’m almost afraid of what’s going to be coming down the pike in the next couple of volumes.
* * *
Click here to see the blog posts – including links to interviews, reviews, and author websites – for all of the stories in BASS 2023.
This piece eventually became the first chapter of my novel Y/N (2023). The narrator, a woman living in Berlin, attends the concert of an internationally successful Korean boy band and sets her eyes upon Moon, the youngest member, performing onstage. She is permanently changed; obsession proceeds. Her journey to come can be seen as the following question imaginatively prolonged: was her fatal encounter with Moon a blessing or a curse?
Esther Yi: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2023
Within this volume, we’ve met people dealing with death, war, old traumas, and isolation so deep they can’t quite figure out how to get the safety, companionship, and love they crave. It’s been intense. So it’s really nice to have a final story that’s a hilarious parody of obsessive fandom. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a few complaints, but in general it was a good way to finish.
The author’s Contributor Note above gives a great summary of the entire story – and, by the way, earns my nomination for Worst Contributor Note Ever, since the ideal CN doesn’t summarize (or, worse, promote a forthcoming novel) but gives an idea of where the story came from. Fortunately, Yi’s interview with The Center for Fiction provides that missing information:
When I was nine or so, I had a young woman named Jamie as my Sunday school teacher. Jamie gave us the assignment of writing journal entries whenever we were apart during the week and bringing them in on Sundays for her to read. I did as I was told, and our notebooks, as far as I can remember, were perused on Sundays without much enthusiasm… At some point Jamie stopped showing up to church. No explanation was given. Another teacher simply took her place. And it was precisely then, when the assignment was over, that my behavior turned, quite characteristically, compulsive: nearly every day for months afterward I wrote journal entries addressed to Jamie that I knew she would never read. The texts were nothing special, just brief reports about my day, and though I always made sure to ask Jamie how she was, my tone could never be called importunate or sentimental. It didn’t bother me that Jamie wouldn’t reply. In fact, her disappearance seemed to have fertilized my entries, provided the proper conditions in which my writing could attain its ideal tone: an indefatigability made eerie by its total purposelessness. Dear Jamie… Dear Jamie… Dear Jamie… Every entry ended with the sentence “I miss you.” But I didn’t miss Jamie. I hadn’t even particularly liked her. So who did I mean?
Esther Yi: Interview with Ceara Hennessey for The Center for Fiction
I find it interesting that this took place in Sunday school. My understanding of the BTS experience is, shall we say, limited. Hey, I go back to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, there’s a limit to how many pop phenomena one can pay attention to in a lifetime. But, while I realized the K-Pop boys were behind the fictional singers, I saw the reaction of our narrator, her roommate, and the other fans, as something out of religious fervor, specifically, the emotional experience of evangelical Christianity, of which I was a part for five years of my misspent youth.
At least this was what I’d derived from hours of listening to Vavra. As her roommate, I was subject to her constant efforts at proselytization. But the more she wanted me to love the boys, the more they repulsed me. The healthy communalism of feeling they inspired, almost certainly a strategy to expand the fandom, desecrated my basic notion of love. I could love only that which made me secretive, combative, severe—a moral disappointment to myself and an obstruction to others.
Our narrator even uses the word ‘proselytization,’ so she sees a religious flavor to her roommate’s fandom as well. The resistance of the sinner is familiar as well. It isn’t enough to just refuse participation; one must scorn it as well. And, of course, there’s the eventual caving in to Varva’s request, mostly for the purposes of gathering further fuel for criticism. And then, there’s Moon on the stage, and everything changes. It’s his neck that first draws her in, a neck she imagines is connected to his penis. Ok, sure. And she’s converted.
But there’s more to this than even the connection between the reactions of fans and the reactions of religious converts. Our narrator admires Moon for his “inscrutable logic. I could never predict his next move, but once it came along I experienced it as an absolute necessity.” From the time of Aristotle, drama has pursued the inevitable surprise, the sense that, even though the ending was unanticipated, it was also perceived as absolutely necessary given the preceding story.
This connection to the artistic pursuit of story is further strengthened by our narrator’s absurd day job:
I worked from home as an English copywriter for an Australian expat’s business in canned artichoke hearts. My job required me to credibly infuse the vegetable with the ability to feel romantic love for its consumer. I’d always felt a kind of aristocratic apathy about the task, but in the days following the concert, I avoided my boss’s calls altogether, nauseated by the prospect of speaking seriously about such unserious work.
The conflict between art and commerce, the barrenness of our narrator’s work, couldn’t be more hilariously set.
As a further way to raise the band’s level from simply pop music to art, the boys also base their albums on their readings of Classics: currently they’re doing Sophocles, rejecting the idea of Oedipus blinding himself when he discovers his disturbing truth. The description of the show seems a little forced to me, but hey, I’m not the target audience here. In any event, all of these elements are needed to make this a bit more complex than a typical runaway fan story.
Besides the insipid CN, I also object to short stories being used as novel chapters. I can understand the impulse here; while the story ends respectably, there is plenty of room to continue, and sure, why not, via the novel Y/N. It turns out this is not an abbreviation for Yes/No, but for “Your Name,” as the novel expands into a fan fiction direction where stories allow readers to insert themselves, playing off the story’s depiction of “livestreams” where the band members appear to talk with fans, thousands at a time. Again, it ties the idea of fandom to writing. If you’re going to turn a story into a novel, that’s a pretty interesting way to do it.
In the Guardian’s review of the novel version, the term ‘parasocial relationships’ comes up. At this point I realize I’d read a review of the novel already, probably in some most-anticipated-fiction article, because I’d looked up that term. A parasocial relationship is a one-way relationship, typically between a celebrity and a fan. I get the impression that the band members do everything they can to promote the idea that they are dealing with individuals, which could provoke susceptible people into messy, and possibly dangerous, frames of mind.
I’m almost tempted to read the novel, but I have way too much on my plate.
* * *
Yi’s interview with Ceara Hennessy for The Center for Fiction can be found here.
The novel review in the Guardian can be found here.
I wrote the story in response to a line from The Odyssey: “it is his homeland he missed / As he passed along the whispering surf – line / Utterly forlorn”…. At its core, “It Is What It Is” is a story about the gravitational pull of homesickness and the paradox of communication technologies as a means of connectivity and of witnessing violence. The characters in the story resist the oppressive conditions of their exile by exercising intuitive modes of communication with their literary and genetic ancestors, with their mysteriously telepathic cat, and with nature.
Azareen Van der Viiet Oloomi: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2023
In my summary for last year’s BASS reading, I pointed out how many of the stories involved trauma, and manipulations of time. The same threads run through this year’s volume. I wonder if this will in some future be known as the Trauma Era: physical and political danger, COVID and threats to democracy and book banning and legal suppression of rights, the waning of individual potential into a megamonopoly of billionaires who insist what’s good for the richest is good for the country, that money is speech, that freedom is gained by restrictions and safety by arming up. Keeping with this tendency, this story is all about past trauma and the merging of past and present.
I first heard the phrase “It is what it is” in 2006 on the competitive reality show Top Chef; it was what a hapless contestant would say when they goofed and had no real way to spin their dish. It was so prominent, a reunion reel played each time the phrase was uttered. I looked it up now, because I never really understood for sure what it meant: yes, it’s a kind of acceptance of failure, and, surprisingly, it seems to date back to a 1949 newspaper article admitting that life in frontier-era Nebraska was tough. I’m not sure that’s the meaning the phrase has in this story, however.
It all starts with a cat.
Khorshid, whose name in English translates to Sun, arrived from Canada on a dreary February morning.… She had lost her family, a set of parents and their twin children, on the eve of January 8th, 2020, in an explosion at dusk over the Tehran sky. The family was returning to Canada after a brief visit to their homeland to attend a wedding. The pilots had barely drawn the plane’s wheels into the wheel well when it was shot down by two surface-to-air missiles twenty-three seconds apart. As the plane dribbled down the night sky, it appeared to the confused gaze of bystanders to be the descending sun ablaze.
For days, I sat at the kitchen table in my apartment in Chicago scrutinizing the videos of the explosion. I traced the missiles’ upward trajectories as they carved their way toward the passenger plane and then watched the plane light up from the impact and tumble down the bruised sky. I scrolled through social media searching for posts about the explosion. That’s how I found Khorshid. I saw her photo on Twitter. The caption, written by her pet sitter, read: “Cat needs to be rehomed. Owners died. Victims of flight 752 that was shot down in Tehran.” I stared at Khorshid’s high cheek bones and exaggeratedly long whiskers, her green eyes through which she looked out at the world in shock and concluded that her owner’s deaths had been a kind of disappearance. No bodies had been recovered. They had turned to ash mid-air and taken their place next to all of the unburied dead. Next to my father who had never been found.
I wrote instantly to Khorshid’s pet sitter: “I will take her. I will love her with all of my soul.”
I was aware that my language was over the top. I didn’t care. The situation was uncertain, dire. I needed something to be definitive, even if that something was the tone of my voice.
There’s something of a rule against pet stories, especially cat stories, in literary fiction (dogs are slightly more acceptable). But when the cat mirrors the experience of the narrator, whose father, a famous poet, disappeared in revolutionary-era Iran and whose mother sent her to the US to keep her safe from the same airport that claimed the cat’s family, and serves as a bridge – or maybe companion is a better term – to a different type of existence, exceptions can be made.
Our narrator and her roommate, also stripped of her family, are grad students, completing their dissertations on various disappeared Iranian literary figures, particularly the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose mention here at this particular moment in time might get me put on some list somewhere (now is when obscurity has its benefits). The past is never far away from either of them. And here comes the present.
The story focuses on a particularly traumatic time in 2020:
Tehran 1/8/2020 Ukraine Intl Airlines flight 752 shot down by Iran.
Pandemic spring 2020 Chicago
Iran 7/23/2020 Mahan Airlines flight approached by F-15 minor injuries
Beirut 8/4/2020 port explosion
The two women follow these events online, pretty much live online, as did we all, during the pre-vaccine pandemic. The internet is viewed as both a lifeline and as a portal of tragedy and fear, with supportive connection alternating with doomscrolling. Things start to get a little weird for our narrator as her senses seem to be picking up echoes of the past.
By July, Fereshteh and I decided we needed to bring the noise of Tehran back into our lives. That we should live as though we had never fled Tehran. This impulse, too, I attributed to Khorshid’s presence, as if she were demanding such a life from us, a life that refused to recognize its difference from that other life we would have lived had we never left, a cheap copy, a butchered mimicking job. She was drawing the past back into the apex of our lives, resuscitating memories we had given up for dead.
When the midsummer festival of Tirgan came around at the start of July, we celebrated. We put small bowls of water all over the house and encouraged Khorshid to slap the water with her paws; Fereshteh and I would say to her, look Khorshid jan, like this, and we’d dip our hands in the bowls and flick the water onto one another. Fereshteh played the Daf in the evenings, and as she dragged her slender fingers against the taut sheep skin drawn over the frame, it emitted a deep guttural sound that attracted Khorshid’s attention. The cat would sit at our feet the whole time, and I would read a few lines by Rumi or Khayyam to the rhythm of the Daf, and we’d close our eyes and sway side to side in ecstasy. In those moments, I felt my father was standing next to me. My father whose face I could not picture. My father who had been reduced to energy.
The incident with the second plane only intensifies this sense of the past coming into the present: our narrator has memories of her father she couldn’t possibly have had. A brief outing to LakeShore Drive to alleviate the isolation gives her a sense of unity, but also of impending doom.
And then Beirut explodes.
I remember those first hours, when no one was sure what had happened. It turned out to be deficient storage of explosive materials, but that wasn’t clear for quite some time. This is where the phrase “It is what it is” comes into play, on video feed from Lebanon: chants of “Beirut is on fire. It is what it is.” And our narrator either has a mystical experience, or a psychotic break, but it’s beautiful either way, the universality of the dead, and the living. “Whose death shall we mourn?” “We are all here together.” As we are.
I can’t begin to understand that ending, the use of those phrases. They might be snippets of Persian poetry that are beyond my experience, or they might not be. There’s something terrifying and beautiful about those last paragraphs, as our narrator merges into the past.
The story is beyond me, but I enjoyed using it to learn a bit more about Darwish, about the Dar (a sort of tambourine-drum, Youtube has videos on how it’s played) and about Tirgan, an ancient festival of rain (water is a prominent element in the entire story) and Arash the archer. And I’m reminded that we all carry the past with us, so be careful what past you create for others.
* * *
The story is available online at Electric Literature
The author’s website lists her novels and other writings
Art (modified) by Idan Badishi (ibadishi on RedBubble)
This story came quickly after I decided, for lack of a better plan, to allow myself to write about women trying to make art. The secrecy of their ambition, and what happens when that secrecy is punctured, as it inevitably is, by marriage, friendship, conversation, failure, even success. And that meant the story had to curve close to my own life and experiences. My sensibility has always saturated my writing – what I thought was funny, what I thought was tragic, the little moments of slippage and misalignment I noticed and stored away – but I felt it was somehow more serious to invent scenarios and characters who bore little relation to me, especially in the stories I wrote when I was younger. Now, though, I decided to invent only in order to clarify, to more purposefully articulate something true.
Corinna Vallianatos: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2023
(This is a record of a reader’s journey, with after-edits for clarity)
Ah, now I see – I see why I don’t see. I have no idea what this story is doing, because it’s about art. Art always confuses me. That’s a strange thing to say, considering short stories and books are art, but there are types of stories I don’t understand, and this is one of them.
It’s not that I don’t understand the story, really. It’s about two women who had a falling out years ago, and now connect again, when one makes a film. Not her first film, but her first in some time. And it’s not that I didn’t enjoy reading the story. It’s full of small wonderful moments, both relating to the reconciliation and just observations in general, that I loved. It’s that I don’t get what many of those small moments have to do with the story. And it’s written in an odd voice. I’ve been told I tend to mimic the voices of stories when I write about them. I hope that’s true.
But in case it isn’t, let’s look at the opening paragraphs:
As I approached my friend’s house, I could see by the number of cars on the street that many people had been invited, far more than I expected. I considered turning around. Instead, I let myself in to a clamor of voices and the barking of my friend’s poodle. The long living room windows swam with gusts of color as guests circled in their bright sweaters.
“Come here,” she said. “You look older! And I thought you were timeless.” She hugged me and I hugged her back, and when I pulled away my ring snagged in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was silly that we went so long without seeing each other,” she said, dipping her head as I disentangled the ring, like a child letting its mother work out a knot. She smiled over my shoulder at someone. “You humiliated me.”
I pulled two long, crinkled strands of her hair from the ring, a flat, square, algae-green-and-black-speckled stone, set in gold. It wasn’t my wedding ring. My husband and I didn’t wear wedding rings. Mine gave me a rash, his he’d misplaced sink-side in a restaurant in LA, gone by the time we went back. The thought of wearing someone else’s wedding ring seemed unlucky to me, darkly incantatory. (Probably it had been sold.)
Now that I think about it (writing is how I think), I realize the voice is fairly normal here; it’s the semantic strangeness that puzzles me. How do you greet someone by telling them they look older? What’s the thing with the ring snagged in the hair? Why the story about it not being a wedding ring and the grim history of wedding rings in her marriage? Did the guest humiliate the filmmaker, by catching her hair in her ring, or is she referring to something else, or speaking to the other person she’s smiling at? Who sold the wedding ring, the husband, or someone who found it on the restaurant sink?
As the story goes on, I can unpack some of this. The snagging is symbolic of their relationship: a painful connection. The humiliation is the incident that caused the rift in their relationship. The guest’s marriage seems less than terrific; perhaps not wanting wedding rings is the cause, or the result. There’s a sense that the guest – who is our first-person narrator – is introspective, while the filmmaker – no one in an art story would have such a mundane thing as a name – is extroverted. One thinks without speaking; the other speaks without thinking. I once had a friendship like that. Once. And there is the poodle, present from the beginning; he has an important role in the rupture of the friendship, as it turns out.
The party is a screening (on a bedsheet stretched over the wall – is that typical of indie filmmakers? Can’t they spring for screens? It’s their medium after all) of the filmmaker’s new movie, titled The Park. We aren’t given any hint of what is in the film – in fact, the narrator emphasizes, “It doesn’t matter, just now, what it was about,” although it turns out to matter a great deal later in the story – but the invitees praise it. And here’s where the odd voice comes into play, in the immediate aftermath of the screening:
I watched them say how much they cared about the characters, how she made them care, how they didn’t expect to care so much but they did. The darkness outside was now complete, and I was reminded of a sensation from early childhood, of waking from a nap and feeling that the heart, the dense bud of the day, had disappeared and I was left with misplaced time, an hour I didn’t recognize, silty and mournful and gray.
My friend took my elbow and drew me into the kitchen. “Did you like it?” she said. “I thought it would be different this time, but it’s not. If anything, it’s worse, because I’m older. I should know better.”
I told her I did. I said these quartz countertops were the pathetic kingdom of doubt, and she must leave it, she must leave it forever. “If behind every great man is a woman, behind every great woman is a panting blob of doubt and insecurity, a fanged blob nipping at her heels,” I said.
“I just think it sort of sucked,” my friend said.
“It did not suck,” a man who’d approached without us noticing said. Our heads rolled in his direction.
“I don’t mean sucked sucked,” she said.
“Oh, it’s false modesty, is it? A relic like a shard of pottery or something?” To make sure she got the friendly spirit of his delivery, he reached out and touched her arm.
She laughed. “Here lies the museum of false modesty. Do you have a ticket?”
I slunk away.
I mentioned things I genuinely loved in the story. The blob of insecurity and doubt is one such thing. Another is the anecdote of the peppermint pig, a Christmas tradition I’d never heard before, revealed by the narrator simply because, when she visits the filmmaker a few days later, her ears are pink like the peppermint pig. I love digressions.
Then there’s the filmmaker’s admission, passed along via the narrator, that she “couldn’t stand the idea of her movie being ignored or reviewed. Both scenarios were terrible to her.” I get that, boy do I get that. And there’s the reaction of college students to the movie, their skepticism about “the lives of middle-aged women as lives of frustration and anger and shame. You could tell they didn’t think their futures would bear any resemblance to that.” Again, boy do I get that. I grew up in the sixties. I know Boomers are Evil Incarnate now, but I was going to live on love and be free of the burdens society wanted to put on me. We all were. Yeah.
We eventually find out the incident that caused the rift between them. The friend, while dog-sitting for the filmmaker, took the poodle to a dog park where it bit another dog. There’s no actual fallout from this incident, no police report, no tar and feathering, but between the two friends it becomes emblematic of all the differences between them. It turns out this was the subject of the film. As I read it, the film is the filmmaker’s way of creating a bridge to her friend; in turn, the friend remembers something from that day – the attack “It wasn’t justified, but it was not unprovoked” – that allows her to meet the filmmaker halfway. It’s not symmetrical – the filmmaker expresses her hurt, the friend admits the flaws in her stance – but it’s a connection.
The story ends wonderfully. The friend, having witnessed the filmmaker’s artistic endeavor, reveals her latest project. Telling someone about what you’re doing is incredibly risky, as risky as screening a film for your friends. And there’s an interesting phrase: “She had given me this story….” Is this a self-referential story, or is the “this” merely referring to the antecedent of the project the friend describes? I’m reminded of the Joyce Cary quote: “Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?” The ambiguity belongs there.
We walked higher and higher until we had a view of the valley, cars swimming through the milky smog, flitting close behind one another like fish in an aquarium about whom one inevitably thinks, Do they know this isn’t the actual sea? Then we walked back to our cars, and I followed her to her house and idled out front while she ran inside. She reemerged and handed a DVD to me through the car window, and I could hear the poodle barking and smell something coming off her, a stab of deodorant, a sort of unnatural hope and exertion, and I felt then the terror and promise of friendship, the daily encounter with what the other dares to be.
Yes, that sea reference had me flashing on the wonderful video made from DFW’s graduation talk popularly known as “This is Water,” though it’s a different way of getting to a similar idea, that we often don’t recognize reality for what it is, whether we think it’s something else or we don’t see it at all. Ending with the poodle barking brings us back to the beginning, that circularity I so love. And, what else is friendship, or love for that matter, than allowing someone else to be what they are – no, enjoying what someone else is.
So again, as has happened so often as I write about what I’m reading, a story I didn’t like turned into one I deeply appreciated, Artspeak and all. Let the writer dare to be what she is, and travel with her.
“Supernova” began as a prompt in one of my graduate writing courses. The prompt was to write about a character in physical danger. I’ve never really used writing prompts before, and this is my shameless plug for them. But I started with this story about a girl on a bus and men with guns and then it took off on its own. When I began writing the story, I wanted to capture the incongruence between how we sometimes react to trauma and how we are supposed to react.
Kosiso Ugwueze: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2023
We generally think of absurdity as being exaggerated and outrageous, clearly evident as non-reality. This story shows how insidiously absurdity can warp reality, until which is which isn’t clear. The thin line between drama and comedy also comes into play; it’s not often that a story featuring violence, mass kidnapping, and a suicidal main character has a comic overtone. Part of the humor comes from the absurdity of the situation, and part from the reactions of our point-of-view character, Isioma.
Things start off quite dramatically when a bus, carrying Isioma from Abuja to Enugu in northern Nigeria, is stopped by three gun-bearing men, but Isoma puts a spin on it:
Three men climbed on board and the bus shuddered under their weight. The men continued shooting, emptying cartridges into the ceiling as they marched from one end of the commercial bus to the other. Her fellow passengers cowered, but Isioma couldn’t tear her eyes from the ceiling where bullet holes now let in rays of morning sunlight.
“Oya, get up,” came a man’s voice. Isioma saw this man, camouflaged shirt, a toothpick sticking out of his dark lips. He marched down the aisle, his gun aimed at the ceiling. In the middle of the bus, he stopped and pulled a woman by her braids, yanking her from her seat. When she struggled, he shook her. Then he shoved her out of the bus. Isioma wondered if this was an elaborate robbery or a kidnapping. In Nigeria, it could have been either one.
So this is a place where kidnappings and robberies on public transport aren’t that uncommon. That seems pretty absurd to me, but it’s reality. “[S]omething about the whole scene, the terrified passengers, the bellowing men, was comical to Isioma….” That might seem like an absurd reaction, but she’s just recovered, at least in theory, from a suicide attempt; her view of reality vs absurdity might have its own slant. When she’s dragged out of the bus, she sees the road blocked with branches set on fire: “She imagined running into it.” Yeah, there’s a definite point-of-view here that might not be typical. What bad luck for the kidnappers, whose plan depends on their captives’ desires to survive, to have kidnapped this particular woman.
But the kidnappers are viewed through multiple lenses as well: they’re obviously violent, but they seem to have some patience with Isioma, perhaps because she’s got this odd way of regarding them:
“Move or we move you,” one of the armed men said as he struck a young passenger across the face with the barrel of his gun. This gun-wielding man, like his fellow gun-wielding men, was wearing camouflage, boots laced up to his knees. His eyes were bloodshot though he looked young, somebody’s baby brother out in the world trying to be a man. He had a hardness that Isioma couldn’t take seriously, and though he was wielding an AK-47, Isioma wanted to reach out and touch his face.
He caught her looking at him and his eyes narrowed.
“You,” he said pointing his gun at her. “Oya, march.”
“Where?” she said. “Into the bush?”
He looked puzzled.
“Where else?” he said. “March!”
She turned to the forest of tall grass and low trees. The sky over her head was cloudless but gray; the smell of burning fires mixed with Harmattan dust made her nose itch.
“This way?” she said, looking back at the young man.
“If you don’t march I’m going to scatter your brains on this red soil,” the man said.
“Right,” Isioma said, and she began to march.
It’s notable that, while shots are fired and people are hit, no one is shot or killed. That allows a little leeway for Isioma’s combination of resignation and irony. Even the kidnappers start having a little fun with Isioma, explaining that they go home, one or two at a time, to see their families. Kidnapping doesn’t have to be a full-time venture.
Woven in between these scenes, we get some backstory: Isioma is just beginning her service year, a Nigerian requirement, and was scheduled to teach “in a school that Boko Haram had once destroyed.” That seems a bit absurd to me, and more than a little scary. In fact, she was in NYSC Camp, a kind of initiation into the service year, when she took an overdose. The pills were adulterated counterfeits, however, so instead of dying, she just slept. More absurdity butting against reality.
Her family background is also rather strange:
She had known from a very young age that her parents had never wanted to have her. Her mother and father were young lovers, and when Josephine became pregnant her father had fled. Nineteen and studying medicine at the university, Josephine took a leave of absence to have her baby. But as soon as her daughter was born, Josephine left Isioma with Isioma’s aunt and returned to the university to finish her degree. By the time Josephine graduated at twenty-four, she had decided she couldn’t be a full-time mother to Isioma.
This might have something to do with her depression. It certainly plays into the ending, in which she makes a pointed decision: When normality seems absurd to you, maybe absurdity will seem normal. Or maybe she’s pulling a Bartleby, just opting out, regardless of the consequences.
I found the story a bit difficult to get into, because of the frequent shifts between the main plot and the backstory. I also had my usual anxiety about reading a story set in a place about which I know little. I’ve read several books by Nigerian women, but I still have a rather confused notion of the country. It’s the richest country in Africa; excellent universities provide solid education, particularly in engineering; there’s also desperate poverty and crime, both economic and political; many different languages and cultures exist both together and separately. So I’m a little cautious, trying not to impose judgment or rely on inaccurate stereotypes, but some things come across as pretty stereotypical anyway.
Then again, maybe it’s not that unfamiliar. Maybe consider Isioma’s depression as a reaction to a chaotic family life with limited support; that happens on every continent. Maybe it’s more of a reaction to leaving the comfort of school and entering the world; lots of graduating seniors go through similar disruptions. And maybe change the mass kidnapping to a mass shooting at a supermarket, a concert, or a school; mix in active-shooter drills in elementary schools, and courts and legislatures that insist guns must be permitted everywhere – except in courts and legislatures. One person’s absurdity is another’s reality. You get used to what you live with.
* * *
The story can be found online at New England Review.
The author’s website offers a look at more of her work.
I didn’t know my family and I were what people would call trash. It isn’t that we have no ambition for ourselves or that we didn’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or that we do not work hard. It’s really that we came here with nothing. And just wanted to live. I think that is our greatest triumph. I think there’s tremendous intellectual rigor in someone like the cashier in the story who will always find something to love about what is there and what they have.
I spent some time trying to find a good definition of the word “pure,” not in the general sense, but in the sense that it’s used today: a song, a person described as “so pure.” I couldn’t find anything. Maybe it came from the Alanis Morissette song so it needs no explanation. From the contexts in which I’ve seen it, it means authentic; without artifice, guile, or ulterior motive; genuine.
The cashier in this story is Pure.
We never find out her name, or her husband’s name, for that matter; Miss Emily, the cashier’s new mother-in-law, is the only named character. But it’s the cashier who is the narrator, and her point of view is the entire story.
The cashier married her husband five days after she met him: “He was funny and friendly and polite. That’s all I really need to know about anyone.”
I met Miss Emily not long after marrying her son, on a Friday evening. She took the earliest flight she could get to come see her son. She thought I was pregnant because of how sudden it was. I was not.
She was so eager to meet me. She made her son drive her to the supermarket, and they waited in the parking lot for two hours until I finished my shift. I had been on my feet for eight hours, so I wasn’t looking too hot or feeling that great about myself. But I didn’t think of things like that, impressions — first impressions — what they mean and how people don’t change their feelings about you even years after.
Those of us who aren’t so Pure are already thinking, “Yeah, I’ll bet m-i-l was eager to meet her.” But all our cashier sees is eagerness. Things start out really well, from her point of view. The trio go to dinner, and Miss Emily tells stories of her son’s childhood. The cashier loves hearing these stories, and, when the meal is over, begs for one more.
She thought for a moment. And then she told one about a pigeon her son had picked up off the road in front of their house when he was about ten years old. She didn’t know that what he had there with him was a pigeon. She thought that he had been injured, that there had been an accident somewhere, but he was smiling at her with all that blood on him, and she was relieved to find out that he just had a dead bird. She said her son was always funding things like that – dead animals, caps and bottles, old books – and bringing them home. She said he always asked her to make something out of them.
Those of us who are more cynical about the world are thinking, Maybe she should’ve left good enough alone. But our cashier is delighted, and becomes even more so when Miss Emily takes her on a Pretty Woman-style shopping trip the next day. “No one had ever taken that kind of time with me or cared so much for me.” Of course, the clothes are mostly suitable for a professional office rather than the life of a supermarket clerk, but that just makes it even better: “She was so ambitious for me.” When Miss Emily asks if the cashier thinks she’ll stop working at the supermarket now that she’s married, or if she’s thought about college and career, our cashier gives the purest answer ever:
I told her I really loved the supermarket. I felt loyal to the place. I had been there for fifteen years. I worked my way up, too.
It was a grand place. All those shelves of food. You didn’t have to go very far to get anything. The eggs were near the steaks. You didn’t have to spend hours making the perfect cake or rolling thin sheets of dough to make croissants. You didn’t have to own any land or take out feed or work up the nerve to kill anything that had a face. Someone somewhere did that work for you, and it was all there on display. Each and every item was given a bar code of its very own, everything was kept track of. The feel of the cash machine tray as it popped out and hit me on the arm was like an old friend checking in throughout the day.
The cashiers at my supermarket don’t seem to have the same joy, but I don’t doubt for a second her sincerity. And she’s right: if you’ve come from a different sort of life, a supermarket is a miracle.
The problems start when Miss Emily takes her back to her husband’s apartment. First it’s the cashier’s housekeeping that isn’t up to speed – takeout boxes, dirty ashtrays, a toilet rim that needs brushing – then it’s husbandkeeping that’s insufficient: he needs a haircut, a manicure, and he snores. “She said her son had never been like this when she had him.” I get the feeling that’s exactly why he married the cashier, someone who wouldn’t be constantly nagging him to be some idea of perfect. Even our Pure cashier finally gets the idea that Miss Emily isn’t a big fan of hers. But she doesn’t let it bother her; in fact, she finds some good in it, while resisting demands to change herself to meet m-i-l’s expectations.
Now let’s go back and look at the second part of Thammavongsa’s Contributor Note:
What I loved about writing “Trash” is what happens at the turn and with the word “too.” For a long time we are told what is said and told to the narrator. We don’t see or hear Miss Emily’s voice in dialogue tags until the turn in the story. And once we hear it, the tone of the story changes, and even more so if we reread it. What seems polite, nice, kind, helpful is actually quite awful. The word “too” is not all that grand or profound in itself, but a writer can make it so. If we follow how this word is used in the story, we see how ambitious it is, but also how so very doomed. Another thing I love is the confidence the story has in its property and clarity.
This is what bothers me about the story: it reads like an exercise, something written for an advanced Creative Writing class where the assignment is, “Write a story with a dramatic turn.” It’s perfect, really. And the message comes through. It’s maybe a bit too perfect, a bit too on-the-nose. But look at it from another angle: It’s not like The New Yorker to take workshop exercises. And by the way, Thammavongsa is no novice; she’s published four books of poetry, she’s had other prize-winning stories, and her debut fiction collection, How To Pronounce Knife, was also a prize-winner and nominee (and is on my TBR list). Maybe her explanation of the story is what’s too on-the-nose, not the story itself.
I do have some issues that allow for reader development.
We readers are left to figure out why the turn happens. Miss Emily was perfectly polite during dinner and shopping, though her pointed comments and actions indicated, to someone who isn’t as Pure as our cashier, that she was rather dubious about the girl’s suitability for her son. But it wasn’t until she saw the son’s apartment that she lost it and let her true feelings – the cashier actually sees disgust on her face – surface. I suppose that’s purity, too. It’s like her son was her prized possession, and she isn’t happy seeing him treated like any other guy.
Ben Walpole at Short Story Magic Tricks brings up something that was bothering me: the husband isn’t really part of the story. He’s in the story – he’s in the car with Miss Emily, he’s at dinner – but he never says anything, isn’t referred to. The cashier never mentions how he’s acting when Mom is telling stories, particularly the cruel one she finishes with. We have no idea if he’s ok with his marriage, if he’s blissfully happy, if he realizes he made a mistake, or if he married the cashier to spit in his mother’s face. My money’s on the last option. But it bothers me that he’s a ghost.
I’m also interested in Thammavongsa’s comment about the word “too,” something I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t read her Contributor Note. I found four occurrences of the word; each is in a context of connecting the cashier and Miss Emily, of showing similarities between them, as well as differences (emphasis added in all quotes).
First, they both want a family, having already lost one:
I was family now, she said, and it wasn’t up to her to say anything about that. Her son was, after all, his own man.
For as long as she could remember, all she ever wanted was a family, too. Her husband had died a few years ago. Heart attack. Sudden. She had married him right after college. Gone to law school, made partner, owned her own practice. Had three children. Bought property. She could afford to travel and take vacations abroad.
Miss Emily seems to want a great deal more than family, however; she wants success, wealth, maybe for security, maybe for status. Though they both have experienced losses, our cashier lost her family when she was a senior in high school, which is very different from losing a husband in late middle age when one has established a career and has financial security.
Second, they both have dreams:
I didn’t want to live with anyone and was proud to find a place I could have all to myself. It was across the street from a park. It had one window…. An actress, I was told, had lived there. She gave up the place when she got a big break out in Los Angeles. I thought it was good luck to move into that space. Maybe I would catch a big break myself. I didn’t know what, exactly, that might be, but it was something to believe in and hope for, too.
Our cashier’s ambition is far more limited than that demonstrated by Miss Emily, but it’s part of her character to find positive aspects of even mediocre circumstances. She also shows a certain passivity as opposed to Miss Emily’s aggressiveness in pursuing improvements.
Third, they both have a certain pride in what they’ve accomplished:
…[S]he asked me if I might quit the job at the supermarket, now that I’d married her son. I told her I really loved the supermarket. I felt loyal to the place. I had been there for fifteen years. I worked my way up, too.
Of course, working at a supermarket for fifteen years isn’t the same as going to law school and starting a firm, but for our cashier, building that sense of loyalty and longevity is another point of pride, as much as Miss Emily’s career is to her. Anyone who’s ever been grocery shopping knows the difference between a good cashier, and a bad one. Me, I’ve taken to self-check-out almost exclusively, for want of someone like our Cashier.
Fourth, they both want to love:
I thought about a mother’s love. The incredible generosity it required from you. Her son had taken in a stranger, someone else’s child, and, whatever this thing was with the two of them, she felt that she, too, had to love and give everything she had, even if she didn’t want to. I knew that, whatever she felt about me, it was true to her, and that there was some truth to it. I wasn’t good enough for her, and I never would be. But I wanted her love. I guess it was like a child wishing to see a crowd of gold stars next to her name. Proof that she’d done good that day, and that someone had taken the time to see that.
The forms their loves take are very different. For Miss Emily, it’s about creating a work of art out of her son, someone worthy of her. For our cashier, it’s something else, though we aren’t shown enough of the marriage to really understand what. What is evident is that she doesn’t seem to want to change her husband. Maybe she doesn’t even love him in a way we think of love, but she is ready to have children and love them in a way they can understand and respond to. She knows how a child craves love, in a way we might doubt Miss Emily knows.
However, as our cashier points out, by the definition of being authentic to who you are, Miss Emily is Pure, too. And that’s a scary thought. They are at opposite ends of a spectrum of Pure; at one, our cashier makes the best of everything no matter how bad; at the other, Miss Emily needs to create perfection.
So in highlighting their similarities with the word “too,” our cashier is, without even realizing it, enumerating differences. That’s no CW201 assignment; that’s a really good trick.
The last paragraph is a stunner, as the imagery of animals and trash comes full circle. Our cashier remains Pure, secure in her self-image, which has nothing to do with how clean the house is or what her job is. She knows who she is.
I have to admit there were times in the story when I felt like the cashier was putting us on. I mean, come on, there’s Pure, and there’s ridiculous. Is my doubt founded on reality, or on cynicism? Is the cashier ridiculous – or am I?
I’m left divided: I hope she can stay that Pure, but the cynical side of me says it’s not possible. Then again, she’s survived fifteen years in this state of blessedness; maybe she’s just the kind of person who can survive Miss Emily.
* * *
Ben Walpole’s post on this story can be found at Short Story Magic Tricks.
I’m pretty sure it was my dear friend Alice who told me in college that if one was ever attacked, the thing to do was to go limp and pretend to throw a violent fit. I have no idea if this advice has any basis in fact, but it still rattles around my head whenever I find myself walking through the dark, outside, alone. Probably it’s just one of those mental talismans that so many of us, especially women, carry through our lives in hopes that they will keep us safe. The illusion of control holds such appeal. We long for it, especially when the world seems always to be bending toward entropy. This longing, I think, also has something to do with questions of belief, our search for order in disorder. Over the years my interest in these problems grew into “Grand Mal,” the story that appears in this anthology, and later served as the kernel for a novel, Bright and Tender Dark.
Joanna Pearson: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
The first time I read this story, I found a lot of plot holes. When I read it again, this time in quieter surroundings with less time pressure, I discovered those plot holes had, for the most part, fixed themselves, which either speaks to the miracle of what stories do when the covers are closed, or to the value of careful reading.
The story is told with the benefit of hindsight. Joy and Karlie are dorm mates during their freshman year at college, when Karlie, possessed of beauty and a warm, magnetic personality, is an enthusiastic member of the local Evangelical Association, studying such works as I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Joy, our narrator, is less blessed, but tags along. Joy and Karlie drift apart the following year, but stay in touch. Karlie goes through what Joy calls a “personal rumspringa” of bars and frat boys before showing signs of returning to the straight and narrow. But, “Not three years after we’d met, Karlie was dead,” murdered in her off-campus apartment.
Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler; it’s on the second page. A spooky panhandler is convicted and jailed for the crime, and life goes on – at least, for Joy, it does. There’s some vague mention of a professor who had some kind of relationship with both Joy and Karlie; intimacy is implied, but the details, at this point, are sketchy.
Then, years later, Joy receives a letter from Karlie.
The letter was a sort of time traveler – worn with the years, the envelope written over and crossed out, originally addressed to my college apartment. It had made a long and improbable voyage through time after clearly having been tucked away somewhere and forgotten, found, redirected, forwarded. A miracle. I dared not open it.
…Karlie had been on my mind even before I got the letter: I’d recently happened on an article online about the guy who’d written I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Now he regretted it. He was divorcing his wife and leaving his pastorship. He’d lost his faith and no longer identified as a Christian. It all seemed too sad to warrant any schadenfreude.
I was getting a divorce myself.
This is one of the plot holes I had so much trouble with on first read. A twenty-year-old letter showing up out of the blue? It isn’t that it’s impossible. The story does deal with the improbability in a reasonable way. In fact, The West Wing used a similar trick as a plot device, with a much longer time span. If I’m going to give Aaron Sorkin a pass, I must do the same for Joanna Pearson. Reluctantly. By the way, when Joy’s husband claims he’s leaving her because she’s “fundamentally unhappy,” I flashed on Toby’s wife telling him, “You’re sad.” Don’t mind me, I have portions of The West Wing memorized.
What’s really odd is that Joy doesn’t open it; she just carries it around.
The intrusion of the past upon the present, plus, I’m guessing, her impending divorce, brings the vague Professor back into play.
I decided to find my old professor.
…
My professor and I had not communicated in years. He’d moved during my junior year to take a position at a small liberal arts college in Georgia. But now, he’d returned here, back to the university town where I still lived, the place where he’d begun his career, to retire. I’d heard all of this through a loose network of his former students, all admiring, all filled with unrequited intellectual adoration. I both scorned and related to these former students. My professor had seemed old when I’d been his student, but now, of course, he would be a senior citizen inarguably. I worked for a women’s health nonprofit, and I wondered if he’d find conversation with current-me engaging. I assumed he was still interested in the things he’d studied over the course of his career: nondenominational Protestantism, cults, the prosperity gospel, televangelism. Younger women.
I could find him. I knew all of his old haunts. The youthful me inside myself, still a hopeful girl, alert to every tender shoot, thirsting for beauty, for love, gave a little flutter like a wintering bird catching a ray of light. He is elderly, I reminded myself, and you are very sad. This is nothing, I told myself. You will find him and have a drink, catch up. He is simply an old mentor, an elderly friend. But my skin flushed and prickled at the thought.
This was the second thing I tripped over on first read: the convenience of the Professor being away and coming back just in time for the letter to provoke a response. But again, it’s handled with reasonable plausibility. I might have been reacting more to the overall vagueness of the role of the Professor in Joy’s life.
That is soon to be resolved – and, caution, here be SPOILERS: Joy finds the Professor in one of his favorite bars. It turns out, there was a reason he’d wanted to meet Karlie, the amazing roommate Joy had mentioned so often when she visited him for office hours:
“You were jealous,” he whispered. “You wanted me to cross that line with you.”
“No.”
“You hated her.”
I thought then of all those days I’d waited outside his office, listening to voices inside – his, Karlie’s. She’d laugh softly, he’d murmur something, she’d laugh again, but soon there were other sounds. I’d stood by the door listening, a terrible heat spreading over me.
The truth is that my professor never so much as kissed me, although his every gesture had seemed to promise it: fingers on my shoulders, my back, sending shivers down my neck. His breath behind my ears, at the nape of my neck. The barometric pressure between us thick, ominous. Promises, signals, implications, leaving me like an arrow pulled back on a bow but never released into flight.
“I never hated her,” I said.
This at last gets to the intense and authentic emotion of the piece, just as it exposes both Joy’s jealousy and hurt, and the Professor’s cruelty.
From this descent into the past – a B52s tune is playing in the bar – we return to the present, the reading (finally!) of the letter, and Joy’s reaction, taken out on her soon-to-be-ex-husband and his already pregnant soon-to-be-second-wife. And, in a final weirdness, the seizure trick. What attack is being fended off is left to the reader.
It’s this switching between past and present that raises the story a few levels. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that writing is really about what to leave out, and most of the years between college and the present are elided. It’s not a view from a point of wisdom, it’s more of a retreat into the past, and it doesn’t go very well for Joy. Retreats into the past seldom go well.
I’m intrigued by Pearson’s comment that this story has been recast as a novel, to be released next year. From what I can tell from blurbs and jacket copy, the murder mystery predominates. Several plot points from this story – the Professor’s move to a lesser academic sphere, the scapegoating of a misfit, Karlie’s return from the wilderness of her rumspringa, a comment in the long-delayed letter that might implicate Joy herself as a contributing factor – seem to lead in a particular direction, but whether that’s deliberate misdirection or not will only be found in the book itself.
* * *
The author’s website includes a description of the forthcoming novel Bright and Tender Dark as well as Pearson’s story and poetry collections.
This story came from a failed date I had many years ago with a man who had only recently left his family. Around the holidays, he was moved to return to them, concerned about their very young child. When I told some friends about this, their snap judgments surprised me….The lack of empathy stung me. It seemed clear-cut to my friends that the light of the opened closet was the real story – the ony story worth listening to. The sooner he entered that light, all the better.
But I refused to judge this man or his decisions. This was where he was. I had learned a long time ago that the act of listening was far more important than the act of telling. That’s what guided me here.
Manuel Muñoz: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
Spanish, for speakers of English only, can be a tricky language. Some Spanish words are similar enough to English words – and/or familiar enough from random cultural references – to make a kind of translation possible, even without study. Familia. Necesito. Padre. But then there are some words that only seem similar, but have very different meanings. It’s easy to embarrass yourself using embarazada without realizing it means pregnant. We’re all looking for exito, but it’s not the exit, it’s success.
The same holds for compromisos. It’s not compromise; it’s commitment, responsibility. That gives a totally different read to the story, one I wish I’d had when I started it.
That turns out to be a metaphor for my underlying sense that I missed something, an important subtext, in this story. I suspect that’s due to my sketchy knowledge of Latino culture, particularly of the interaction of gay culture with Latino culture. It’s stories like this that help fill in those gaps, but it’ll take more time before I’m proficient. And none of this would have been evident without Caribbean Fragoza’s introduction that precedes the story online:
Some see California’s Central Valley, the setting of Manual Muñoz’s new collection, The Consequences, as a place of idyllic farm life: rows of almond trees and grapevines, visions of a vital California. For others, like the generations of immigrants that have toiled in the fields of the US’s most productive agricultural region, it is a world that offers the promise of a better future. But, it is also one of heavy responsibilities and oppressive rules. In this world, family becomes a necessary mechanism, one that feeds the spirit and protects from the harsh conditions of racism and exploitative labor, but one that also takes a significant toll on personal desires.
The family becomes the single most crucial structure from which any deviation could have the worst consequences, among them death and deportation. But Muñoz also shows how the gendered mold makes excruciating demands of its characters.
Caribbean Fragoza, Introduction at Electric Literature
The long opening scene of Mauricio purchasing oranges and carnations allows for some of the prior details to be fit in.
At home, his daughter could hear how angry and hurt her mother was, but she understood only that it meant Mauricio would not stay at the house any longer, that her father would come only every few days. Even now, deep into January, Mauricio didn’t know exactly what Alba had told the kids. Their older son, Alonso, was in high school with his own troubles, and if he missed having Mauricio around, he never let on. Rocío was different. Since December, Mauricio had had restless nights, sitting up in the thin bed of the one-room he was renting in Kingsburg, one town over. The hours got later and later, closer and closer to dawn, and he couldn’t shake the sense that he had made a terrible mistake. The restlessness had decided for him. He would have to come back. He would have to ask forgiveness.
We find out Mauricio had left his family to pursue a relationship with Pico. We also find out Pico is not interested in compromisos, commitments: “You already made your bed… I’m not asking you to leave anybody.”
The situation is a bit complicated by Alba’s past infidelity; when she came asking for forgiveness, Mauricio agreed. But her dalliance wasn’t on the same level as Mauricio’s. To deny one’s sexuality in the interests of family might be noble, but it’s a huge commitment. Maybe an impossible one.
I’m rather confused by the story. It seems to me the only reason Mauricio is trying to get back into the family is because Pico has rebuffed a satisfying relationship. Whether that’s because Pico knows trouble when he sees it, or because he just isn’t a commitment sort of guy, isn’t clear.
I rather like that Alma doesn’t flip out the way many fictional wives do when their husbands hook up with another man. She’s rational about it; she knows the level of commitment that’s required and I suspect she knows chances are this won’t be the only time Mauricio strays. But she’s not closing the door, either. They’re both trying to figure out what their family is worth.
I had a much more connected read with Muñoz’ story “Anyone Can Do It” from BASS 2019, which also focused on a family, in that case, one pulled apart by the perils of immigration laws. I wish I understood this one better. But it’s a step, part of the learning process.
* * *
The story, with an introduction by Caribbean Fragoza, is available online at Electric Literature.
One day in spring 2020, I was jogging around a runner’s track near my apartment, and I started forming this fragmented narrative that begins with Iron & Silk, then loops around to the Lydia Davis story. This trail of thoughts seemed diaphanous and almost flimsy. It was almost as if I were trying to compose an essay, though I already knew it was a story.
….When I got home, I laid out a partial outline of fragmented sections that followed a loose narrative. Some sections seemed to represent sides of a long-running argument I’ve been having with myself come about the ways that the second generation create cultural capital of their immigrant parents’ experiences, and questions about how non-English-speaking characters are supposed to be conveyed, particularly in first person.
I worked on a draft on and off over the course of a year. I didn’t know what the last sections would be. If I got lost, I would look at the partial outline. It was leading me to complete a thought. Once I realized what form the final section would take, I also realized it was important that this section feel immersive, that it should read as a story in its own right.
Ling Ma: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2023
As I’ve been reading this volume, I’ve been admiring many of the stories, some for their technique, some for their impact. But I’ve been waiting for the story I would love. And here it is.
It’s a story in six parts. Five of those parts read like an essay or memoir; that just adds to the overall impact. It’s a story about writing: a story about framing a story, about who tells a story and why it matters, about the stories we tell, how we write our reality every day even if we never pick up a pen. And yes, it’s about appropriation. But it’s not just a technical discussion, it’s an example of how a story can reveal different sides of a person, can shift from one mood to another. We experience it, we don’t just read about it.
I keep thinking of it as an Escher staircase of a story, a Matryoshka doll of a story, a recursive function of a story: a story that keeps reframing itself to demonstrate reframing, that keeps shifting, opening new views, keeps going inward and ending up outward. It’s marvelous.
Because this was a New Yorker story, and because it’s included in a highly touted collection, the internet is full of commentary from everyone from random bloggers to NPR and The Nation. I’d rather focus on my experience, because I think I was one of a range of ideal readers for this story.
1.
I’ve never had Peking duck, but it was once a near-iconographic image. In a past life in Fuzhou, it represented some reality other than the one of daily congee and pickled turnips, cabbage and boiled-rib soup. On TV in the evenings, I saw it in soap operas set among the wealthy, in the commercials filmed in Hong Kong. After I moved to the US, however, I forgot about it.
In the first section, the narrator recounts an anecdote from a library book, Iron & Silk (yes, it’s a real book, and yes, I want to read it) Mark Salzman’s memoir of his time as an English teacher in 1980s China. He had his students write an essay about “My Happiest Moment.” One wrote about an elaborate banquet at which Peking Duck was the ultimate dish. Then he confesses it wasn’t his memory, it was his wife’s, and she tells him about it often. “I think, even though I was not there, it was my happiest moment,” he explains.
This opens up several cans of worms. Can someone else’s experience be one’s happiest moment? Is it fair – I don’t want to use the term “ethical,” that would require a degree of formality I’m not ready to undertake – to write a non-fiction essay claiming an experience that wasn’t yours? How does it change the experience; would his wife’s version be different? Would she even consider it her happiest moment? For that matter, is his happiest moment a contact high, is it delight in his wife’s pleasure, or is he borrowing her happiest moment?
This goes beyond “Whose story is it?” to “Who is the author?” That it’s featured in a fiction piece – which reads as nonfiction – complicates matters further. And then the narrator brings in her own memory of Peking duck as an “iconographic image” that she’s never experienced, but that has meaning for her: luxury beyond her reality. Yet, this iconographic image is forgotten when she immigrates to the U.S. Why? Because more “American” images of luxury took its place? Because there were too many other images crowding it out? She hasn’t really forgotten it, or she wouldn’t be recalling it now; it’s merely moved to a back burner, accessible under certain circumstances.
What really struck me here, though, overshadowing everything on first read, was that I’d read this before. I tried to figure out if I’d seen an excerpt of this story – since it was from TNY, that wasn’t all that unlikely – or if I’d read the entire story. I couldn’t remember. I hate that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, and it brought my reading to a halt for a while. But eventually, I moved on.
2.
We live in a one-bedroom apartment that is very tidy, but sometimes ants come in through the bathroom. I sleep in the living room, where, at night, I still hear my grandma’s phantom snores.
In someone else’s home, a two-story mansion nestled in the mountains outside Salt Lake, a VHS cassette of Bambi plays on the TV while actual deer come through the backyard, pulling into the garden foliage with their teeth, and we are separated from them only by a sliding glass door.
My mother points outside. Deer. Tree. Teeth. Eats.
I repeat the words, then put them in sentence order: Deer eats tree with teeth.
The English lessons take place inside the mansion, where my mother is employed as a nanny to a toddler named Brandon…
English is just a play language to me, the words tethered to their meanings by the loosest, most tenuous connections. So it’s easy to lie. I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English. I don’t take it that seriously. When I’m finally enrolled in first grade, I tell classmates that I live in a house with an elevator, with deer in the backyard. It is the language in which I have nothing to lose, even if they don’t believe a thing I say.
The English lessons move from an American in China to a Chinese family in America. I find the idea that English is the language for lying to be fascinating, considering this narrator is writing this story, a fictional tale. In the same way she tells her schoolmates she lives in a mansion with deer in the yard, she is telling us a story.
There’s a mention of a salesman of cleaning products who comes to the door, the difficulty of communication between him and the narrator’s mother, whose English is not fluent. The girl wonders: “I think maybe he’s willfully misunderstanding her, hoping it will result in a sale,” as he comes in and begins demonstrating his products. Mother sends the girl away while she deals with the salesman. It’s a small part of the section, which mostly deals with the child learning English, learning her play language.
3.
Matthew, the only other Asian student in our program, has read the book, too. He says, “This idea of framing and reframing the same anecdote raises a question: Can the writer, who’s retelling another’s story, really assume authorship? And, going along those lines, can Mark Salzman assume authorship for his student’s story?”
We kick this ball around for a bit — discussing the difference between appropriating someone’s story and making it new through retelling — without drawing much of a conclusion. At some point Allie, the star student, declares, “By writing the story, the writer naturally lays claim to it.” To which Matthew responds, “But we know that’s just an excuse. Authorial license never justifies appropriation.”
We transition again, from the child’s earliest English lessons with her mother to an MFA workshop where she now learns the fine points of using language. And I find my answer to where I’ve read the opening anecdote before.
The Peking duck anecdote from Salzman’s book was re-cast by Lydia Davis as a micro-flash, “Happiest Moment.” I read it ten years ago in a Madras Press teeny-tiny book of several food-related stories. When I posted about the collection, I called it “a flash so short, and so perfect, that I won’t attempt to extract a quote.” It begins: “If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once”. This is a little bizarre, since that wasn’t a story she had written, so it must be referring to the story that is being written, about a story that was written about a story that was told about a happiest moment.
It’s a nesting doll of favorites, happiness. And, what if reading this story becomes my happiest moment? How removed from the moment can you get and still claim it as yours? Or does it become yours as soon as you read it, hear about it? Does it matter that we’ve moved from the moment itself – the original woman eating Peking duck – to writing?
As for appropriation, I’m still uncomfortable with the whole topic; I don’t understand its boundaries in a way I can defend, either pro or con. I think this phenomenon of nested moments might be why. It’s tricky: to present something as once-removed is to offer an interpretation, not the original; that seems legitimate to me, yet illegitimate, at the same time.
4.
Thom always speaks first. “The way English is rendered in this case, it’s kind of artificial. I mean, the first person narration reads too smoothly and is too well articulated for a protagonist who’s not fluent in English.”
Others in the workshop echo some of Thom’s sentiments about the inherent awkwardness of rendering the experiences of such a character in English, but there’s no consensus on how to solve this issue. Someone suggests that it could be written in Chinglish instead, but another student encounters that this would play into stereotypes. “Using Chinglish would exaggerate the character’s inarticulateness, and flatten her into an immigrant trope.”
From the far end of the conference table, Matthew clears his throat. Somehow, I’ve been waiting for his response. “Whether the story is written in English or Chinglish,” he says deliberately, “it’s just a tired Asian American subject, these stories about immigrant hardships and, like, intergenerational woes.”
I felt a little embarrassed reading this, because every time I pick up an “immigrant experience” book or story – including this story – I wonder, “Oh, no, is this going to be another of those stories about immigrant hardships and, like, intergenerational woes?” It seems like we’ve moved past that moment and something else is required. But everyone’s story is different.
This section continues the MFA class (don’t you just love the absolute certainty of the students?) but moves on to workshopping the narrator’s story, about an “immigrant nanny” and her encounter with a door-to-door salesman. The focus on language obscures the story itself, but ties it to previous sections. It’s a valid writing issue, by the way. How do you have a non-fluent character – or any character whose language is non-standard – in a story without confusing the reader, annoying them with too much dialect, or upgrading the character’s language ability?
By the way, if one of the small points made by the two MFA workshop sessions is that the teachers are idiots, Ma has done a great job. That isn’t fair, of course. The workshop teacher might better be described as a facilitator, someone to get the ball rolling, to prevent intimidation from squelching different views, to encourage respectful and fact-based disagreement, to start and stop discussions, to keep the train going and pull it into the station on time. I’ve become more familiar with this technique since taking Catherine Project reading groups and tutorials: these aren’t classes, they’re lightly mediated discussions. So the workshop teacher’s role isn’t to lecture or come up with “the answer” but to allow orderly yet lively discussion. This character does so. She sounds like an idiot, thanks to narration like, “the instructor says brightly” and “forced cheer in her voice.” I think that’s because she isn’t really a character; she’s a guardrail. The arrogance of the students, however, seems pointed.
5.
“Do you think it’s you in these stories?”
“There are so many mothers in your stories, what am I supposed to think?” My mother is suddenly indignant. “But they’re also miserable. Does there have to be so much suffering?”
I look down at my plate, a mound of rice covered with gushy mapo. “Well, they’re not all about you. I wasn’t trying to capture your experience.”
“You weren’t trying to capture my experience,” she repeats, as if to herself. “Then why did you write them?”
I’m surprised by this question. “Well, the nanny story was more based on you, compared with the others. It was about what happened to us when you worked as a nanny. I wanted to show how terrible – “
“But how would you even know what happened? It happened to me, not to us. You were too young to understand. And you weren’t in the room. I made sure of that.”
This section covers everything. The narrator and her mother have lunch in a restaurant famous for its Peking duck, but they don’t like duck, so they have other things. The narrator points out the irony of the choice of restaurant, and hints that it was her choice, since she wants to know if her mother approves of the food.
The issue of language comes up early: Mother isn’t fluent in English, and Narrator/Daughter/Writer is “no longer fluent in Mandarin,” but that’s where their conversation goes.
A lot of the interaction strikes me as nails scraping a blackboard. Mother seems to be constantly criticizing Daughter in subtle ways. Why are there stories in a book when people can read them elsewhere for free (note, I haven’t read “Peking Duck” because I don’t have a subscription to TNY, and I gave up finding copies in the library long ago, so it isn’t really “for free,” it takes either money or time)? When asked if she likes the food, she says, “I like simple food,” which is an answer of sorts. And here I insert my own parent/child drama: it was my father to a tee, and we’re nowhere near Chinese. But as our guest in a restaurant, he had to assert his right to judge, combined with his need to show a command of contemporary (if slightly outdated) pop references in his criticism, which, in his eyes, made it humor. I was not amused.
Then we get Mother’s reaction to the story itself. She questions the reframing Daughter/Writer has done, her right to reframe the story at all. Mother rewrites the story from her own point of view, not the nanny in the story. The salesman was a silly man, not a dangerous one. And she protected Daughter. Yet, Daughter knew what happened. Mother’s version is as fictional as Daughter’s.
Daughter/Narrator extends this to – yes, we finally get there – Immigrant Hardship with Intergenerational Woes:
She sighs a little. “Look, we’re not like Americans. We don’t need to talk about everything that gives us a negative feeling. I wouldn’t move forward if I just kept thinking about it. But I do move forward. I set a good example for you. And you had a great childhood.”
I take a sip of water. We’ve been over this before. There’s no point in setting the record straight for the millionth time about my childhood, the school bullying. The worst part was how my mother used to encourage me to lie to her, to pretend how great things were. She would phrase her questions like “You’re popular in school, right?” or “You have a lot of friends, right?,” training for me to answer the way she wanted. She couldn’t not have known that I was lying, but she wanted to bathe in the lies. She needed to believe that I was thriving in the U. S., that my happiness came at the cost of hers, rather than acknowledge the fact that we were both miserable in this country together.
Because this is so enmeshed in the issue of reframing, of appropriation, of who gets to do the reframing and appropriation, it isn’t the squirmy kind of Immigrant Hardship with Intergenerational Woes I was dreading but an example of how we all interpret and rewrite all the time. Mother rewrote reality in real time, as well as rewriting the past. She seems to have done it in her head during the salesman incident, assuming Daughter wasn’t scared in the moment, wasn’t even aware of what was happening. And she rewrites Daughter’s school experience more or less in real time.
Isn’t this something we all do? We want to believe the best of ourselves, and that includes that we protected our children. That we sacrificed for them. Again, I’m struck by the similarity to my relationship with my father. But I’m not going into that here and now. Just trust me on it: Swedish stoicism layered onto mild narcissism is barely a stone’s throw from Mother’s world.
The scene closes with a TV in the background, playing clips about the restaurant: food as history. Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing food TV shows like to say. So what does it mean that they’re not eating the signature dish? Peking duck is all over this story, but no one in the story ever eats any.
The closing volley is between Mother and the waiter. She gives instructions, in Mandarin, for wrapping the leftovers, and the waiter tells her, “I don’t speak Chinese.”
I learned about “the 1.5 generation immigrant” from Ma’s PBS interview. A first-generation immigrant is born in another country, and comes to their new country as an adult, with all the learning and experience of an adult. A second-generation immigrant is born in the new country to parents who are first-generation immigrants, setting up “intergenerational woes.” A 1.5 generation immigrant comes to the new country as a child, and thus doesn’t have the grounding in the old country, but lacks the foundation that children of the same age in the new country have. A child without a country, between cultures. That’s our narrator.
And that’s also the child character in the nested story, which we’ve read about in the MFA workship, and read around over lunch, but still haven’t read. Now it’s time. And it strikes me that this nested story is a 1.5 generation immigrant: it’s not based in either the old or new country, but is in-between.
6.
When my daughter first came to the States, she would insist that I tell her a bedtime story every night before sleep. This was a tradition her grandma established when she lived in China without me. So I tried to make up stories, simple fables with a moral lesson. Except when I got to the end, my mind would go blank. What’s the lesson here supposed to be? I would always lose track, thinking she’d be asleep long before the story finished. But she would wait for the conclusion, and if it didn’t satisfy her she would ask a lot of questions. She wanted the story to make sense, at a time when my own life didn’t make any sense. Shortly after, I began taking her to the library. I would read her picture books instead, and that solved my problem with thinking up endings.
The ending of what happened that day is that, as soon as the salesman hears the garage door opening, he panics. Cursing me, he stands up quickly, the fork and knife dashing off the table. Watching him rush out the door and then downstairs, I think, This is so easy. This problem is this stupid stranger is so easily solved despite all the fear I felt.
In Part 5, all the themes came together over lunch. And here we have the root of the story, both the inner nested story and the overall story. It’s one of those “But why didn’t she…” stories. It goes from everyday banality to understated terror along a rapid curve. My fingers gripped the pages tighter; I was terrified of what might be in the next paragraph.
There is a puzzle here, though: this woman, who had the dignity to quit her job cleaning when she was told to get down on the floor with a rag instead of using mops or brooms, who has the dignity and sense of self to quit her nanny job when her employer wants her to clean up the mess the salesman made, this woman who won’t stand for indignity, allows this salesman to push his way into the house, to demand lunch. Why? Is it cleaning up that offends her? That he is a cleaning products salesman, does this not feed into that? Or is it the fear that, unlike the employers, he could actually harm her, and her daughter is in the house?
Everything’s in this story. Language: the salesman pretends to misunderstand Mother’s not-very-good English. Appropriation: he takes over, rewrites what she wants; Mother assumes Daughter is safe in another part of the house, when she is listening at the door. Food: he wants Chinese food (and she rather impishly offers him “Kung Fu Chicken,” a dish she deliberately makes as “a mess” though he says he likes it, fool that he is). Protector of Daughter. Daughter as unwelcome interpreter. Immigrant Hardships: this Mother, who was a high-end accountant in China, is now a low-wage nanny. More appropriation: the homeowners don’t see how Mother handled the situation, delaying and keeping the salesman occupied knowing they would be back soon; they only saw a mess on the floor, to be cleaned up by the help. Even Peking Duck, mentioned in passing.
And then, in the coda, the mother’s secret, the one she never reveals to anyone, least of all to Daughter: Her Happiest Moment. As written – as reframed, as appropriated – as imagined? – by her Daughter/Narrator/Writer.
It’s all pretty head-exploding. Just my kind of story.
* * *
Ma’s interview for American Masters on PBS can be heard and read online.
The story is included in Ma’s 2022 story collection, Bliss Montage; Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard reviews it for The Nation.
Art by Tiffany Schmierer: “The Lost Art of Conversation and Connection”
As a lawyer, I often think about work that involves reporting stories of great grief and cataclysm to the public, such as that performed by journalists and lawyers. I think about how the weight of the stories accumulates on psyches and bodies. With this story, I wanted to explore the life of a character who carries a similar weight like this one, her reserves of motivation and vulnerabilities. At the same time, I live in the SF Bay Area, an epicenter of alternate realities and virtual technologies. I regularly meet engineers and artists who work on the cutting edge of these technologies, whose work enables the world to live more and more of our lives online. The dialogue between the main character and her brother is my questioning of tensions that exist between living in the real world and inhabiting virtual ones, the ethics of escaping reality, and how these technologies are changing how our needs for connection are met, or not.
Danica Li: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
When I wrote about the last story (Sana Krasikov’s “The Muddle”) I hesitated to say too much about it, because it dealt with unfamiliar aspects of a very familiar story. With this story I have the opposite problem: it hits me smack on two high-voltage wires, so that I’m not sure I’m reading the story itself, or reacting to the story. I’ll get into that in due time; but first, let’s try to look at the story itself. I’ve reproduced the author’s Contributor Note in full to help keep us focused on the actual story.
We start with two characters, a sister and a brother, who are at the same time very similar and very different. He’s a systems engineer, a big fan of gaming and virtual reality; she’s a journalist, geared towards observing the world and writing about it. We follow them over the course of about thirty years, from their early twenties to maybe their early fifties. Both of them see their work as having a positive impact on society. Both of them go through periods of success, and times of peril. They are close, though their level of contact varies over time.
The first time I threw out my back was in New York City, shortly after college…. The pain was immense. Swallowing, in its totality. Later, when I was immobilized in bed, Will conferenced in and listen to me yowl. The grainy pixelated loom of his face on the screen of my laptop. Long after my friends left, he stayed on. He was doing work, I knew, or if not working, gaming, or if not gaming, scrolling through social media, corresponding simultaneously on three platforms with his legions of online friends. He didn’t say much. Just kept me company. Occasionally he looked over at me and I would see him tapping on the screen. Hey, he said, hey. Don’t die. I’m supposed to go before you. Order of succession. Sib dibs were called and sib dibs were inviolate, he reminded me. Never mind that no one had ever died of a back injury.
This first paragraph of the story serves as our introduction to our (unnamed) first-person narrator and her titular brother Will, connected by videoconferencing during the trauma of her first backache.
Compare that with the last paragraph of the story, when, thirty-odd years later, she again is bedridden with a severe backache:
I put the phone against my sternum so I could listen more easily and so I could feel its warmth against me.
Hey, will, I said, almost lightly. It was easier to conceal my fear now that I was talking to someone.
Why are you awake? he asked.
I’m in … a bit of a pickle, I said.
He laughed. Yeah, he said. In a tone of voice that said: I figured.
Can you just stay on the phone with me? We don’t have to talk or anything. I’m in Guatemala right now, I said.
Okay, he said, sure.
I felt calmer. I heard him tapping on his keyboard. The tapping made me feel better, like I was twenty again, crying and bemoaning my condition with Will on the line listening. After a while he started humming. Some stupid song. I didn’t ask him how he was, what had happened with his company, if he was happy with his life, Happier than I was in mine. I lay there with my eyes closed with the line between us open In my palm. Somehow it was all beside the point.
In between we see Sister go through all manner of changes – an off-and-on relationship, a climb up the professional journalist ladder, bouts of depression and back pain alternating with periods of satisfaction and success – and, through her eyes, get a much hazier idea of Brother’s career path, if not his personal relationships. And through it all, it’s the connection – whether by laptop or phone or in person at their parents’ house over the holidays, whether monthly or yearly or less – the connection, rather than the medium or the time span or the content, that is the constant, that is the point.
At one point they have a serious discussion of the role of computer-generated realities versus real-life reality. He defends the use of online communication, games, chats, virtual reality, as a valuable escape for those dealing with difficulties IRL, and gives the example of a mother raising a disabled child: after spending all day caring for her beloved son, she spends some time online in a more carefree world. Sister points out that the mother’s needs reflect “a real world whose social structures re inadequate to take care of her kids” and the goal should be to fix the failures of the real world rather than create a bandaid via a virtual retreat from its stresses. This is, by the way, the reaction a lot of online people have to those “Awww, how heartwarming” stories about a neighborhood pitching in to pay a child’s overdue school lunch tab, or an uninsured woman’s prescription costs. It’s great that people want to help each other – but how do these things arise in the first place?
In the course of my work I thought about technology too, of course, since I was in the media, and was, like my brother, constantly online, scrolling through my social media feeds, talking to lots of people at once, connecting and transacting and commenting and liking and prospecting. Like him, I was in the business of producing online content, but unlike him, I found the whole thing troubling, in addition to inspirational. What was troubling was the extent to which we were becoming dependent on our screens, the refractory effect on our attention spans – consciousness becoming like the trillion bits in a kaleidoscope which every ten seconds was given a vigorous shake – the compulsive repetitive refreshing of our feeds, the extent to which life itself seemed increasingly concentrated in the lit glowing squares in our hands.
It was necessary to play the game, which I did and did well, but I played it so that I could achieve an end. My brother played it for love and love alone.
I get a bit lost in here. Sister seems to feel it’s nobler to use technology only because you need to, not because it’s enjoyable, then, in the end, she finds the connection technology affords to be a great relief. Is that a faint scent of hypocrisy I smell? Because I think the issue is a bit different from how she frames it: There is a difference between not being able to function in the world, and enjoying functioning online. Brother William seems to do just fine in the real world. In fact, she praises his skill at connecting in person: “When I talked he was entirely there with me, listening… How ironic that in all of his work on alternate reality he had gotten very good at concentrating himself in this reality.” So I don’t really get what her problem is. He enjoys it too much?
One problem I had throughout was the timeline. It seems to me, if we’re talking thirty years, video conferencing and laptops for the general public are introduced a bit early in the timeline of the story. Of course, there’s no reason the end of the story can’t be extended a few years – five, ten – beyond the present in reality.
I also wondered about that last sentence: “Somehow it was all beside the point.” Although I barreled ahead with an interpretation above, I’m not clear about the pronoun antecedent for that “it.” I begin to wonder if reflects Sister’s self-absorption in another touch of irony. But I may just be looking for ways to villainize her, and that isn’t fair.
In the end, I stuck with this: it’s the story of two people going through a lot of changes over thirty years, and remaining connected, both in person and online. About the need for connection. Only connect. I feel like I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what.
Now I did say something about high-voltage personal issues, didn’t I.
My blogging buddy Jake Weber (who is at the moment sitting out this part of the volume) used to say my posts reminded him of devotionals. I was vaguely hurt by that characterization, taking it as an indication that I’m not a “serious” reader but just some old bag prattling nonsense. I’ve come to accept that I approach reading in a somewhat more personalized way, because I don’t think a story can exist in a vacuum. What each of us brings to a story is different: our experience, our knowledge and ignorance, our psychological makeup, all are different. Although I reference literary technique when it seems important to me, I write posts only I can write, because I am the reader. Someone else might do a more advanced literary analysis, might come closer to what the author – or the guest editor – envisioned. But I can only do me. And what’s the point of reading, if it doesn’t impact your life?
My first high-voltage line is the issue of living in reality versus online, and how the latter is considered deficient. For introverts like me, dealing with the real world is exhausting. I spent decades – and tons of money – in therapy trying to fix myself. I spent a lot of time talking to therapists about my discomfort and mistakes, a lot of money on antidepressants and anxiolytics. About fifteen years ago, I said the hell with it. I’ve been much happier since. Am I defective? Very well, I’m defective. But the internet didn’t cause my defect; it ameliorated it, far more effectively than all that therapy.
The second high-voltage line is more complicated. My brother died recently. We’d been estranged for many years; that was his choice, not mine, and he never explained the reason. I’m still working on processing the details. Let’s just leave it at this: by the end of this story, I was sobbing: “This could have been us. It could have been. Why wasn’t it?” And now I’ll never know. It’s going to take some time to come to terms with that.
So for opposite reasons, this again is not my finest moment as a reader or a blogger. But it is what it is. And I find myself positively biased towards the story because of its effect on me – just as I found myself feeling attached to the prior story because it seemed out of my reach. Go figure.
I wanted to write about the war from the angle I was witnessing it: as a kind of civil war among fathers and sons, wives and husbands, something that tested long standing bonds of friendships. Shura, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, and Alyona, a Ukrainian woman married to a Russian man, arrived almost as mirror images. At various points in their lives, each has felt a sense of both connection to and estrangement from her own country. Exploring these women’s relationship to their physical land, whether a dacha tended for survival in Ukraine or a front yard groomed for appearance in New York, like a good starting point to exploring these larger questions of connection, estrangement, identity, and independence.
Sana Krasikov: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
Fiction can serve many purposes. Primary among the reasons usually listed by advocates of reading: we can learn about times, places, people, ideas we’ve never encountered. This story served an opposite purpose for me: it showed me how little I know about something that’s been on the news every day for a year now.
I was very confused by the story, and surprised by my confusion. I know about bombs destroying apartment buildings, about refugees showing up in Moldova and other places, about potential war crimes and troop losses and destruction of equipment (just last night, I saw a piece on PBS about Ukranian engineers countering Russian drones) but it turns out I know very little about the people who are at the center of the storm.
It is, to be fair, a complicated story. It’s complicated in that it features relationships between three people – Shura, Alyona, and Pavel – in three countries – the US, Ukraine, Canada – with different identities, permanent and recent – Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Canadian, American, immigrant, native. It’s complicated because it deals with big issues: reality under authoritarianism, ties to culture, ties to land in different cultures and for different people, antisemitism, language, education, and friendship, all undergoing strains due to war.
Shura was trying to reach Alyona and Oleg, first over Skype and WhatsApp, then Facebook, on which Alyona kept an account she barely used. It should not have been so hard to get hold of them. Alyona had not posted recently, but she’d checked her messages, Shura could see that. Maybe she thought Shura was being dramatic—hadn’t she always thought so? With her digital silence, Alyona was making a big show of her own calm, doubling down on her refusal to treat anything as a catastrophe. Well, goody for her, Shura thought, and shut her laptop. If Alyona wasn’t panicked, why should she be? …
On day five, a reply came over Skype. “We’re alive.” Two words in a pale-blue bubble. It should have taken the tension out of her lungs, but it only agitated Shura more. She’d expected a bit more emotiveness—did they have groceries? Were they spending nights in their building’s basement, or in the metro? We’re alive. The bare minimum.
Shura and Alyona went to school together, fifty years ago, in Ukraine; Shura has since moved to the US, while Alyona, long married to a Russian colonel, still lives in the Ukraine. Her son Pavel lives in Toronto; he arranged for them to migrate years ago, but they went back to Ukraine after a few months. A few days after the war started (or, by some sources, continued, since it started in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea), Alyona and her husband fled the city and went to their dacha in the country, considered a safer place.
Shura is the point-of-view character; the story consists of her evaluations and judgments of Alyona’s actions over the years, from school onwards, and how differently they view things.
The title comes from a wonderful scene in their second-grade classroom. They’re told to paint “the spring outside;” their teacher brings in her own painting, the typical yellow sun, blue sky, and green plants, as an example. But Shura sees a different spring:
In truth, she’d hewed closely to her teacher’s design, altering only the palette, graying the blues, daubing brown along the picture’s grassy bottom edge. She’d covered the sun with a gray cloud.
Moving down the rows of desks, their teacher had stopped and, with pincered fingers, lifted Shura’s wet paper as an example of what the others should not do: muddy their colors, soak their parchment with water, fail to pay attention to the assignment. Shura had sat wordlessly, her cheeks growing hot. It was true she’d used too much water, but the charge of not paying attention to the assignment seemed utterly unfair. “But I did paint the spring,” she protested, turning to the window as proof. The young teacher, still looking at her picture, had declared, “This is not spring. This is a muddle.”
That afternoon, Alyona and Shura walked home together, and Shura’s outrage unleashed itself…. “You saw! You saw!” Shura kept insisting, because it seemed to her that only Alyona did not think her crazy, even if Alyona herself had decided to ignore the world outside the window. Finally, seeing that Shura’s tantrum would not end without some concession on her part, Alyona said, “She wanted us to paint spring as it should be.” Her voice was filled with quiet, tidy exhaustion at having to deliver an explanation too obvious to be spoken aloud.
Only it hadn’t been obvious to Shura. For the next eight years of her schooling, she’d learn to adopt a kind of vigilance toward herself, to ferret out what a teacher really wanted from her, to stop herself before her hunger to excel tipped over into intellectual extravagance. She found it helpful to follow Alyona’s lead in this regard.
This division between seeing the world as it is, and seeing it as one believes it should be – or, in this case, as one is told it is – remains the division between the two women so many decades later.
I’m not comfortable saying much more about the story because it’s so deeply steeped in unfamiliar echoes of history and identity and subject to highly charged opinions I’m not sure I understand. I highly recommend Krasikov’s TNY interview, in which she explains so much about these two characters
I wanted to look at self-correction as a natural process that begins with our accommodation to other people’s expectations of us—our teachers, our parents, our spouses. I think that Shura is simply less capable of being a pleaser than Alyona is, and as a result she becomes more independent-minded. Yet, at the same time, Shura’s certainty about herself is also a kind of blindness that makes her mistakenly see Alyona as someone who has been brainwashed rather than someone who is also making a choice.
Sana Krasikov, TNY Interview
This idea that a person who believes something we label propaganda is making a choice, rather than acting out of deeply ingrained blind obedience, seems very important to me. And it has nothing to do with Ukraine. Another issue she goes into in depth is the difference between Shura’s and Alyona’s gardening: both are in the interests of connections to the land, but the reasons are very different.
I sympathize with Shura, since I am also a Little Miss Fixit, a tendency I still struggle to keep under control. Sometimes someone just wants to tell you about their difficulties; sometimes they just want to complain. To heap solutions on them is not the appropriate response at those times, but it’s my impulse to make all kinds of suggestions, and feel a bit put out if they don’t take them. Fact is, most people choose the solution that makes sense to them, and understand the down side; having a different opinion of which choice is preferable is more about personal preference. It’s a lesson I keep forgetting, and keep needing to re-learn.
Whenever I read a poem, I tend to get stymied by the question: Why is this a poem and not a story or an essay? In this case, I wonder, why is this a story and not an essay? Where the story was confusing, Krasikov’s interview was very enlightening. However, I understand the importance of creating characters who live through the lessons, who struggle with the decisions that might go into a nonfiction piece. Somehow it’s easier to wonder, “Why is she doing this and not that?” than reading declarative sentences that might get our backs up. In this case, it’s striking that some readers might be more sympathetic to Shura, and some to Alyona, which allows the reader to make a choice without disagreeing with a writer. It also humanizes the questions, takes them out of the realm of theory and puts them into feelings we can understand.
Even though this is not my proudest moment as a reader – or a blogger – the story has had a profound impact on me. I need to let some of my friends have their own preferences as to which difficulties they choose, and recognize that, although they may not make the choices I would make, they make the choices that make sense to them. This is perhaps the foundation of coexistence.
I needed Collin to be honest, to sit in his discomfort and still be vulnerable in spite of it. That’s hard to do in real life, and it’s the same in fiction. Most of us, including myself, failed to have the courage to consistently show up in this way, for ourselves and others. I hope I, we, can be better; I know we can…. Once Collin was able to confront the truth of his decisions, the beginning and ending of the story, which had eluded me for some time, became clear.
Jared Jackson: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
I’m too old for this.
I often think this when I read fast-paced stories about kids: information came rushing at me in the first two paragraphs. Past and present are entwined throughout the story. For that matter, there’s a future present mixed in there as well; I get the clear impression that Collin is remembering this story long after it happened.
Whose story is it?
This was the question I learned to ask a couple of years ago during my first Catherine Project reading group, a semester focused on short stories. Collin is the first-person narrator, but Bebo is the title character, and the first character to appear, the first word, in fact. It’s always possible a first-person narrator is an observer, taking the place of the impersonal third-person point of view as a way to make the story more intimate, but the story belongs to someone else. Not here, though. It wasn’t until maybe two-thirds of the way through that I began to realize it was Collin’s story, an impression that solidified in the final paragraphs. But it’s up for grabs for a while.
Bebo and I used to kick it. Then we didn’t. But the fact that we once did gave Enis the idea. Practice had ended, and we were parked with our gear on the curb outside the Quickie Mart where Enis’s dad worked. Fall came quickly that year, gave summer the boot without notice. By the time we made the fifteen-minute walk from the park, crossing the last practice field—the one with grass so thin, so patchy, it reminded us of our coach’s balding head—and down to the corner where the store sat, two buildings over from the Boys & Girls Club, across the street from the other convenience store, the one that gave Enis’s dad headaches because that one had a gas station and his didn’t, which cut into the business, the sun had almost clocked out for the day.
Jackson’s Contributor Note mentions that this story came to him as part of a city-based collection; he also indicates, with his question, “Why is Collin the one telling it?” that, at first, he wasn’t sure whose story it was, either. But he sure figured it out.
Notice in that first paragraph quoted above how quickly the focus shifts from Bebo to Enis. The story is, in a larger sense, how Collin’s attachment undergoes the same shift, from his buddy Bebo, whose mom worked in a store next to the store Collin’s mom works in until she had to be committed to a mental institution, to Enis, the only white boy in the neighborhood, who “moved here from Wisconsin by way of Bosnia” (forgive me, but shouldn’t it be the other way around?) a couple of years earlier, and “seeped into my life like a gas leak.” That’s a hint. Gas smells so leaks can be detected; a stolen baseball bat, an arrogant way of daring the coach to accuse him of theft, should have been the smell, but sometimes we ignore things, we excuse them, or we don’t recognize them for what they are. Later, we see this view of Enis: “The one with enough charm to convince you to love them more than yourself. Who can convince you to do what you know is wrong.” Sound like someone in the culture, like maybe Beelzebub, the Devil, the guy smelling of sulfur who pitched apples in Eden?
Enis wants to be on Ralphie’s drug crew. Ralphie, who’s Ralphie? Bebo’s older brother:
When we hit the last block before reaching Bebo’s place, we saw Ralphie from a distance. He was shorter than Bebo but had a lean body with muscles that fit together like puzzle pieces and a beauty mark on his left cheek that made him look nicer than he actually was.
He had changed from the kid I knew when his mom was around. The kid who played MASH with neighborhood girls to prove he was destined to marry them. Who threw water balloons at friends he’d see walking by the front window of his apartment. Who walked his brother home because their mom worked late and their pops didn’t care.
I paid a lot of attention to the parents in the story. Bebo and Ralphie: their absent, ill mother, their withdrawn dad; Collin: an absent father, a hard-working mom; Enis: hard-working, war-torn immigrant parents. I thought maybe they were not only incubation chambers for the kids, but also role models for the future, some more inviting than others.
The character I had trouble with was Suit Man, a mildly crazy guy “muttering to himself in his usual uniform, a rundown gray suit he wore without a shirt. His chest hair was long, coiled like a Slinky. And he clutched a briefcase to his chest, as if it held important papers.” He crops up at crucial moments, too crucial to be ignored. I thought maybe he was, like the various parents in the story, a potential future. But Elliot Holt of The Kenyon Review had another idea in her explanation of “Why We Chose It”, one that never occurred to me:
This is the Work Issue of the Kenyon Review, so it’s fitting that we’ve included a short story with a character who reads as a ghost of work. The Suit Man plays a minor role in Jackson’s story, but he looms large. He strikes me as the perfect representation of late capitalism: a tragic figure who clings to his career costume, despite the fact that he’s now unemployed, hungry, and apparently homeless. The Suit Man has lost his mind, but still has his briefcase. He serves as a kind of cautionary tale for fourteen-year-old Collin and his friends, a reminder that opportunity and stability are hard to come by and easy to lose. There’s no safety net in America, and the boys in this story already know it.
The story takes place on an autumn afternoon, when “the sun had almost clocked out for the day.” Even the sun is described as an employee on a time clock; in Collin’s universe, everyone works for someone else. Collin’s friend Enis wants to work for Ralphie, an older boy who runs a crew of drug dealers, because Enis’s family needs the money.
Elliot Holt, “Why We Chose It,” at Kenyon Review
I’m a bit dubious, but she’s right: there’s a lot of work going on. Good work, shady work. Work that’s still in the future for these fourteen-year-olds. Suit Man does fit right into that.
But I wonder if he’s the voice of What Could Have Been. Consider this flashback scene, the paragraph that drew me into the story at long last, hit me like a truck really, a flashback against a current scene of Bebo and Ralphie and angry drug customers and a gun, a scene from before Mom went to the loony bin and Bebo starting viewing cockroaches as friends:
Once, when Bebo and I were ten, before his mom was out of the picture, we spent an afternoon riding our bikes near the community center in the park. Our tires flattened dead grass and sprayed through sprinklers. We popped wheelies and coasted with no hands. With no one around, we sped down the gravel hill that led from the jungle gym to the baseball field without a fence. I lost my balance and fell off my bike. Glided down the rocky slope like it was a Slip ’N Slide. I felt nothing until I looked down and saw the blood leaking through my ripped tank top. Then I looked up and saw the Suit Man. He stood in the distance, watching as Bebo patted my chest, then patted his own, like Ralphie would do to him years later, except Bebo wasn’t pushing me away.
The Blood Brothers they could have been. Who knows what could have turned out differently, for Suit Man, for Bebo and Ralphie. And, maybe for Collin, if this story collection goes anywhere near where I imagine it goes and this is Collin of the future looking back. Confessing.
That’s what I think Jackson meant in his Contributor Note. It’s Collin’s story. It’s his regret. When – who – to leave, when to stay. Alas, all in retrospect, our sharpest visual field.
I guess I wasn’t too old for this after all.
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The story and the Holt commentary are both available at the Kenyon Review website with free registration.
Urban legends have always intrigued me. I found The Grootslang particularly fascinating. I also saw in some dark corner of my imagination the eponymous mine itself, which carried with it a specific type of horror, an emotional horror – one life with elements of exploitation, a deep sense of ongoing trauma for every single individual who had stepped foot in that place. I wanted to put those images, and those emotions, onto the page.
Nathan Harris: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
A man caught between two worlds sets up a duality that persists through this story. Nicholas, the captain of a South African gold mine, followed in his father’s footsteps, advancing from miner to surveyor to his current management job. He is, in fact, the first African captain, and the company executives love to spotlight that fact. But he is not that far removed from the miners who spend all day in the hot, dark underground and emerge blinded by light and chilled by the relative cold of the surface.
The omnipresent metaphor of the mine emphasizes this duality from another angle, as any metaphor implies a duality between a concrete image and an idea or theme. In this case, the metaphor is loaded with significance: not just between descending to the depths of Nicholas’ psyche, but to the depths of hell. As Halimah Marcus points out in her introduction to the story on Electric Lit, “a mine is a wound in the landscape” and this reflects the wound Nicholas bears as he tries to negotiate between past and present, tradition and commerce, belief and rationality.
The initiating event, as they say, makes this wound real: a miner has died, fallen deep in the part of the mine referred to as the crypt. Now the body must be retrieved. This is the reality of mining, Nicholas knows.
There are individuals versed in retrieving bodies from the mine. It happens, perhaps twice a year, and it must be handled with great care and discretion. It is reported to the attorney for the company that backs us, a man I have never met and know only as a voice. It is of the utmost importance that the matter remains confidential – including the payment to the dead man’s next of kin. So in such an instance, when the boys who are trusted with the task are reticent to do it, the occasion has become delicate enough to require my full attention.
This is not an unfamiliar portrait even to those of us who have never been near a mine. Bad things happen in the course of business; corporations do their best to keep them under wraps, or at least tidy them up if they must come to light. Whether it’s a dead miner, or a car with an exploding gas tank, or a drug that has horrific side effects, or a fraudulent financial scheme, it happens every day. Someone on the ground cleans up the damage. Someone in an office writes a check. Duality.
The story focuses on the job Nicholas must do now: get the body retrieved before the execs tour the mine. He’s put them off a day, but now push comes to shove and he needs to get this done. This gives the story a tight time-frame, a deadline, and a tension: What lengths will he go to in order to get it done? What if he can’t get it done?
He isn’t above using his own past, emphasizing his connections with the miners, to gain cooperation. It is, after all, a valuable tool, just like the execs trotting out is African-ness for public relations purposes. Duality.
“Boys,” I say. Benji stands at my side, his arms tucked into the pouch of his overalls. I pace before them like their superior officer, telling the same story I have told so many other employees, perhaps these same ones. “Did you know that I worked these very mines when I was your age? That what you fear, I once feared? That my own brother died under rock-fall? I had only waved goodbye to him the very morning of the accident. If I had not been holed up with my father, learning how to manage the books, I would’ve died alongside him. In a sense, we, too, are brothers.” I point at them now. “Tethered by this place. But as I did my duty back then, you must now do yours.”
He discovers the resistance to the task: the body has fallen into the crypt. This isn’t a mining area, but an extremely deep niche where scientists occasionally research soil and microbes. It isn’t the science the miners fear: it’s The Grootslang: “An elephantine being with a serpent’s tail.” A monster. A devil. Evil personified. This exists next to the technical equipment of research. Duality.
As we read the story, we see cracks in Nicholas’ firm rationalization. Memories of his brother, his father, haunt him. His own background as an African with traditions: maybe he hasn’t left as far behind as he thinks. But against these are the opportunities his daughter will have thanks to this job. A man caught between two worlds, two motivations.
The story dips into horror as Nicholas himself must lead the team to retrieve the body. Rationality is one thing; experience is another. And hovering over it all is a sense of cynicism reinforced by the execs with their clean hands and spreadsheet expectations. If Nicholas did not break under the pressure, we’d be disappointed. If, in the final scene, he did not ask his daughter’s nanny, Imani, to tell him some from her village, we would feel betrayed.
Last year, I discovered Jerome Bruner’s theory of canonical breach: when a story defies expectations. This story perhaps goes out of its way to color within the lines, to avoid any breach of expectations. We know the conflict, we expect Nicholas to have some kind of revelation regarding the folklore he seems to despise. That can be both a weakness and a strength. I’m undecided, in this case, which way it plays. But I do think the strength of the story is elsewhere. It’s in the interactions Nicholas has with other characters. It’s in the almost hallucinatory scene in the mine – literary horror. And it’s in Harris’ ability to keep so many themes – cultural unity, appropriation by corporate interests, compromise in the name of economic opportunity, the never-past past that comes back to haunt us in the form of guilt, our limited ability to override deep fear with reason – in play at every turn.
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The complete story can be read online at Electric Literature.
“Annunciation” is a story I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to tell for twenty years…. Some stories linger in the mind until the writer has lived enough to do them justice. The story languished during the darkness and anxiety of the COVID pandemic and reanimated when the danger lifted enough in May 2021 for a long-delayed stay at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria. This was a time of tremendous outward bursting toward life, roses and sunlight and incredible food and Piero de la Francesca and beauty redounding. In that golden light, the story allowed me to finish it.
Lauren Groff: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
This is a seven-layer cake of a story. Just the most overt symbols start my head spinning:
Let’s start with Griselda, owner of the plot of land where our unnamed first-person narrator lands on her maiden voyage into the post-college real world. The echoes of Chaucer et al aside – associations with patience oddly borne by a story of neglect and abuse at the hands of a husband in the name of passing some test of love – there’s something fairy-tale about her. Her home is in what is almost an enchanted forest:
Every day, I sit with my tea out under the oak tree, I told her, and I press my ear to it and hear the way the world and the tree seemed to have found a resonance within me. It is like a triangulation – the world, the tree, and me.
Then I saw a bee land on the chair close to Griselda’s bared shin, and I said, careful, bee.
She bent and looked at it, then looked across the yard, and to the geraniums, where more bees were crawling in and out of the vivid red flowers.
I watched as slowly her eyes lifted above the wall of bamboo, to the top of the great oak tree, and she held her hand in a visor and squinted, looking there for a long time, frowning.
When she dropped her hand, in her face there was something like pity. Oh, she said. I’m so sorry. It’s not the resonance of the world, or whatever you think it is. It’s bees.
I couldn’t believe that I had missed them in their thick origin of the top of the tree, where there must have been a hollow.
But as those of us who have read pre-Disneyfied versions of fairy tales, there’s always a dark side to the magical charm. Griselda has de-voiced her dog; his vocal chords were removed. That our narrator connects this to Griselda’s death, albeit tangentially, emphasizes the horror aspect of the act.
Griselda tells multiple stories – she was attacked by robbers, she taught Philosophy and had affairs with either Derrida or Nagel, she can’t remember which, she was the daughter of a fantastically rich German industrialist. Our narrator doesn’t believe most of what she says.
Then there’s Anais, whose name conjures up eroticism tinged with excess and transgression, yet the name itself comes from a root meaning “holy.” The Anais in the story is a single mother on the run, protecting her daughter from an abusive husband. She works with our narrator at DHS, typing stories of abused children from hand-written files into a new computer system. When our narrator, who admits she is vain about her writing, fusses over sentences, Anais tells her:
No, no, this won’t do. You’re being too fancy. You got to be simple, clean, in and out, get it?
I must have looked as stung as I felt, because her voice softened. She said, you got to understand. We’re about to see some pretty heavy stuff with these kids. Neglect and hunger and rape and broken bones and a bunch of other bad stuff, and if you are writing all of that fancy prose you are going to feel all that badness in you. But if you’re sharp and cold it won’t get to you so deep. You see what I’m getting at? You need to protect yourself, sweetie.
I have always had difficulty with tenderness that comes to me unexpectedly. Perhaps it was also true that by then my beautiful solitude had slid a little into loneliness. My eyes filled with tears. Anais sat even closer, and put her hand, stinking of something strange, on my face and said, Oh, sweetie, you’ll be OK.
That our narrator eventually sends Anais on the run again, somewhat accidentally, deprives her of one of the few human contacts she has at this point in her life. She herself is sort of on the run, though no one is chasing her; in fact, she might wish that someone was, given that her mother is too busy with four or five (I lost count) other siblings plus a husband to pay attention to her, to attend her college graduation, or to find her. After her New England education ended, she fled to California, in search of whatever it is the unnoticed go in search of. Something worth noticing, perhaps.
And then there’s the title: Annunciation. The word simply means ‘announcement” but to anyone who’s had even a smidgen of Christian religious training, or maybe just attended a few Christmas services at any random church, it means the appearance of Gabriel to Mary with the news that she, a random girl, is to bear the Savior of the World:
The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
Luke 1: 28-35
This dual nature of Jesus will persist through Christianity, dividing orthodoxy from heresy for two thousand years, often being used to establish terrestrial rather than heavenly power. In this Biblical story we have holiness, a child, and the meek acquiescence of Mary to God’s will (though sermons often tie in her surprise and fact-finding to make her a bit more proactive), connecting her to Anais, the Holy protective mother, and meek Griselda. Too much of a stretch? Maybe.
The story itself, however, is written as an envelope story, with a little prelude and a beautiful page-long coda in the present. The story, set in the past, can be seen as the announcement enfolded in the envelope; the announcement of what I see as the main theme of the story, that we are all sacred and profane mixed together. For if we are, sticking to the Christian ethos for a moment, in the image of God, we contain his holiness, as well as our human failings.
This annunciation, this message, relates to Griselda fairly directly; in fact, it comes from Griselda, as she lay injured, waiting for the ambulance the narrator has called:
While we waited, Griselda spoke, and amid her wild talk, her nonsense words, the long phrases in German, the directives to call her daughters, whose numbers were in the book by the phone, and to please please please, Liebchen, tidy up before the ambulance comes, she said two things that I later wrote down.
She said we have art so as not to die of the truth.
She said that in every human there is both an animal and a God wrestling unto death.
The first was Nietzsche. The second I have found nowhere. I think it was Griselda’s own philosophy.
And it becomes, to some degree, our narrator’s. Or, at least, it’s something she recognizes. She recognizes it in the story when her mother comes to see her, having tracked her down by her Social Security number, and they spend a weekend sight-seeing in San Francisco. As her mother leaves, she’s struck by the transformation she witnesses at the airline gate:
At first there was a tension between us, a hesitancy, but she had always dreamed of San Francisco and had never been able to visit, and here she was, her face full of wonder, and the warmth between us returned, sweetened. We spent the weekend sightseeing.
… At the airport, she hugged me and cried, and just as she was about to go through security I watched as the new mother I had seen all weekend – bright, laughing, eager – Changed physically, bending down to take off her shoes and coming up slightly slumped, shoulders rounded, as if already facing her chaotic home, her baffled husband and noisy children, and all the heaviness that opened her there. I held my breath, but she didn’t look back before she disappeared through the gate.
This, more than Anais’ disappearance, or Griselda’s death, seems to be a turning point for our narrator: the recognition that her mother is not the neglectful stone she’s resented since the graduation she missed, but a person who has abilities and flaws, a person who went to the trouble to find her, who was illuminated all weekend until she returned to her daily life. And it is that daily life, not a lack of love or caring, that caused her to be less than attentive. A maternal failure, perhaps, but an understandable one, and, now, finally, a forgivable one. Forgiveness is not something we do to heal the trespasser; it’s something we do to heal ourselves.
The annunciation also comes with reference to Anais, and the maybe-accidental betrayal of confidence that sends her on the run again:
I ask myself now if some part of me wanted Anais to be jolted; if I wanted, obscurely, to force her to find a solid place for her child. If I knew that she and her daughter might be separated. I would never have put it like this to myself at the time. There are moments in our lives when our sense of our own goodness is so shaky that we build elaborate defenses against the possibility that we may be far worse than we fear. I have come to think that I had a secret intention, held at the very center of my actions, so small and dark that I pretended not to see it then; I could not see it even a decade later. It is only now, when I know myself to be good and bad in equal measure, that I can glimpse it, if barely
Notice how long it takes her – the entire length of the story’s envelope, though we aren’t sure just how long that is – to face this. Whenever I read one of these envelope stories, I wonder, Why is the character telling the story now? Not, why is the author writing the story in the present, but why, in the timeline of the story itself, the world of the story itself, is the character thinking about these things, recalling them, recounting them so we read about it?
I believe the coda contains hints to the answer, though not the details. There’s a reference to dark periods in her life, to escapes to recover. And now, in the present of the coda, she is in a place – Italy, perhaps – where she is surrounded by Madonnas: “Each woman is one in whom the animal was briefly overcome by the god that lived within her.” Going back through the story, we can trace those moments: moments of kindness, between mothers and daughters, between friends, in spite of pain, or fear, or mistrust. It makes for a marvelous second read.
* * *
While looking through materials on The Annunciation, I happened across an article, “Reflections on the Annunciation,” by The Revd. Dr. Jarred Mercer of Merton College at Oxford. It includes the wonderful “Annunciation Under Erasure,” a poem by Mary Szybist from her collection Incarnadine. I include it here because it, too, was inspired by “a personal tour of the paintings of the Annunciation in Italy.” The erasure poem shows a different side to Mary, to Gabriel, to God, to the event, perhaps the more profane than sacred in the foreground. I found the idea that this art could serve as inspiration to both writers to be powerful.
I had to write an entire novel and abandon it in order to arrive at this short story, but in doing so I finally found the correct container, the necessary narrative pressure to bring this insistent character to life.
Sara Freeman: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
Considering the complexity and confusion of the prior two stories – the ambiguity of “The Master Mourner” and the time shifts of “Treasure Island Alley” – you’d think I’d be relieved to have an atmospheric, fairly straightforward emotional portrait to chill out with. I suppose I was; at least, relieved enough to face off with the character as if she were in the same room.
Leah is enjoying a bit of solo time, her husband and daughter off on their own adventures. Those relationships aren’t going all that well at the moment.
I would not have said, at the time, that summer of 1992, that my family was falling apart, only that we were at something like an impasse, that it was true that my eight-year-old daughters sizable will had recently flourished and seemed aimed at annihilating me. My husband, despite his efforts at fairness, firmly sided with our daughter, and so a fault line had emerged, and I had found it easy to simply give myself over to it, to fall into this trench in my own family life. And yet the problem was that I could not remember a time before this one, the arrangement before this one. I could not recall ever having been pleasantly and easily at the center of my own life, at the center of Bertrand’s attentions. Like all small familial tragedies, it seemed, that year, as though it had been there all along, this truth, waiting to live out its inevitability. For months now, I had wanted this time alone, advocated for it.
When we first meet her, Leah is reading at a café when she sees her mother. This would be routine if it weren’t for the fact that her mother died twelve years ago, when Leah was eighteen, shortly after a fight that left her as a teenager wishing, as teenagers sometimes do, that her mother would die and she could do what she wanted. Of course the guilt still haunts her. But seeing her mother is something on a new level. She realizes, on closer inspection, that the woman doesn’t really resemble her mother that much. But the experience brings to the fore old feelings and memories.
The next day Leah observes a young girl, about five years old, playing in a park under the not-so-careful eye of a teenage babysitter. She enjoys being a sort of remote mother of this little child, a relationship free of the tensions between her real-life daughter, Dafna. Again, feelings are stirred.
A few days later she has the occasion to meet the girl’s mother, who turns out to be her husband’s ex-wife. What were the odds?
There are faces that are so familiar, so intimately known, even if you believe that they have faded, you encounter them, and your knowledge is there, uncreased, every shadow and plane left intact and as devastating as before. She pushed her hand out. “Maude,” she said, but of course I knew that already. Her smile was unchanged: at once shy and self-assured. I had looked, over the years, at dozens of photos of that face, tucked in the pages of Bertrand’s red and white Editions Gallimard, photos whose angles and intricacies I had studied for the proof of something, everything that I could not be – his past, his first love, his match and companion in everything. My hand somehow made it over to hers. I spoke politely. I amazed myself with my poise.… Maude did not appear to recognize me, as I had recognized her.
Again, this stirs up dormant feelings: her husband wasn’t quite separated when they’d initially met. She thinks about the strain in their marriage, and briefly contemplates sending him back to her, like “a library book checked out and then returned.”
This web of interrelationships, the complicated feelings they provoke, take the place of action or drama in this story. As I said: atmospheric domestic realism. A lot of musing. Memories, connections, comparisons.
Back in her home, she comes across her daughter’s favorite sneakers, featuring Velcro strips for closures. A few weeks earlier, her daughter had beckoned her over, and started “playing” the shoes as a musical instrument by opening and closing the Velcro with its characteristic scratchy sound.
I had asked her, after what felt like longer than was humane, to stop, too abruptly no doubt, and she had thrown the shoe in my direction and yelled, “You don’t even respect me,” parroting some adult speech, from television, or from Bertrand and me. I had responded, quickly, thoughtlessly, “You are so obstinate.” I had said it and remembered the word immediately, stashed away and then recovered, untarnished; the same tool my mother had so often used on me. Hadn’t it been the undertone of every one of our fights: my selfishness, hers? My obstinacy, hers. I couldn’t help now, shoe in hand, opening and closing the Velcro strap, laughing about it, how right Dafna was, how satisfying the sound was when you were the one making it.
This paragraph serves as a climax and an epiphany. It’s nicely written: the reference to “our fights” could refer to either Leah and her mother, or Leah and her daughter. Mothers and daughters, handing down their conflicts over generations. Replaying scenes, maybe in the hopes of getting it right this time, of correcting earlier behavior. An exercise doomed to failure, but irresistible, nonetheless.
The story ends with an answering machine message from dad and Dafna, and what could be considered an invitation, an opening: “We miss you. We miss you. We miss you.” Because family, with all its stresses and pains, is still family. And a little distance might be exactly what they all needed at the moment.
I found myself wanting to have a stern talking-to with Leah. I wonder if people without real problems find ways to turn minor daily conflicts into soul-crushing struggles, the way autoimmune diseases tend to occur in countries where infectious disease is less prominent. That’s perhaps a bit harsh. I’ve never been a parent, but I’ve been the child who wasn’t turning out the way my parents hoped, so maybe I have my own axe to grind here.
It’s a story that readers will probably describe as beautiful and poignant and touching, an emotional portrait of a family whose future hangs in the balance. With a little luck, that last half-page will tip it in the direction of healing. I confess, I have an urge to arrange a Concerto for Velcro. But that’s probably not a common take-away.
After nearly two decades of academic education, as an intellectual, and a student of literature, I find myself less determined to know and more open to not knowing. I wrote “The Master Mourner” before I could have articulated that, but the ending of the story, it is clear to me now, is an invitation to either know or not know, perhaps both at the same time. The narrator navigates this; the reader navigates this.
I do not know why I wrote this story. I do not know why I write at all – thank God.
Benjamin Ehrlich: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
I, for one, don’t know. It’s not a choice; believe me, I’ve tried to know, but I can’t get there from here.
Though it’s a fairly simple story told in traditional narrative style, the ambiguous ending aside, it raises a lot of questions. The first paragraph about Morah Lev (I discovered that the Hebrew word “Morah” merely means a female teacher, so this could be her title, or her name), Jacob’s Hebrew school teacher, starts us off in a theological direction:
My Hebrew school teacher used to tell us that God is everywhere. In fact, I remember her saying exactly that – “he is everywhere” – elongating the every for what seemed like eternity while waving her ancient hands over our tiny classroom in the basement of the shul, which was meant to represent the totality of universal space. Then she smiled, wide and yellow. Morah Lev’s black hair was always pulled back tightly atop her head, forcing the skin of her wrinkled forehead taut. Behind her skull, the thin strands of her hair converged into a long, firm braid that hung down to the bottom of her back. She used to tell us that she had three hearts: the organic one inside her chest, the one that was her last name (lev, the Hebrew word for “heart”), and an additional, symbolic one, for bravery, located somewhere in her gut…. Morah Lev wore three different colors of lipstick at once: blue, in a line around the outside, orange, in a stripe across her upper lip, and deep red, the color of blood, closest to and often on the enamel canvas of her twisted teeth.
I started wondering about all the threes. Three threes, in fact. A braid – three strands woven together; three hearts; three colors of lipstick. Hair, heart, lips. Hmm. Nothing leapt out at me. When I hear three in a Christian theological discussion, of course I go to the trinity, but that doesn’t belong here. There is, however, a Judaic significance to the number three:
The number three symbolizes a harmony that includes and synthesizes two opposites. The unity symbolized by the number three isn’t accomplished by getting rid of number two, the entity that caused the discord, and reverting to the unity symbolized by number one. Rather, three merges the two to create a new entity, one that harmoniously includes both opposites. On its own, Entity A leaves no room for Entity B, and Entity B does not allow for the existence of Entity A. Entity C demonstrates how A and B really are compatible, and even complementary. Bringing together two opposites (A and B) requires the introduction of an entity or common goal (C) that is greater than both of them.
Eliezer Posner: “On the Meaning of Three” at Chabad.org
That sounds tantalizingly like Hegel to me, but I haven’t studied Hegel enough to be sure – he wasn’t Jewish, but, if I’m reading correctly, he felt Judaism was a stage, a thesis if you will, that required antithesis to get to synthesis – so I’ll just leave it there. What this has to do with the story, I’m not sure. But those threes stand out to me.
The other major non-family member in Jacob’s life is Bernie Bernstein, who, it seems to him, is indeed everywhere.
I started to see Bernie Bernstein everywhere. Kissing the hand of a newly bat mitzvahed girl and the cheek of her mother in the kosher bakery, tickling the chins of babies in strollers on the sidewalk, recalling to grade- schoolers that he used to know them when they were only this tall. It seemed I was seeing him impossibly frequently. Once, from the window of the kosher deli, I saw him helping an older woman into her car, easing her into the driver’s seat as though it were a scalding bath. Then I turned toward the counter and immediately saw him shaking shoulders with the owner. Could Bernie Bernstein possibly be in more than one place at one time? I wondered. I asked my father about this, and he laughed, kicking back so that the great and terrible sound was released to the heavens. “Bernie Bernstein is an unusual man. Perhaps he has found a loophole in this dimension.” My father could be quite funny when he felt the world was funny.
What I find interesting in this passage is the father’s huge laughter. We’ve been introduced to the father before: after the death of Jacob’s mother, he appeared to be napping, he quit his practice of fairly serious running (semi-annual half-marathons aren’t something casual around-the-block joggers do), and he “was in a different realm. I came to understand that this new realm was where he lived, and our real realm was the one he visited.” That doesn’t sound like a man who kicks back and laughs a great and terrible sound to the heavens. What is it about Bernie Bernstein that releases the laugh from the other realm? How did he and Bernie Bernstein (who is always referred to by both names in narration, but as “Mr. Bernstein” in a singular direct address) come to be best friends? Was it merely because they were both in the schmatta business? Or is there something more to Bernie Bernstein?
Jacob becomes obsessed with Bernie Bernstein. Is he pulling a fast one on the congregation? Is there more than one of him? If so, he needs to be exposed! He confronts him one Saturday after shul:
“Mr. Bernstein,” I said in an unprecedentedly friendly tone. “Do you have an identical twin? I feel like I see you everywhere.”
His breath came slow and noisy, like a struggling car. He closed his eyes, and I saw that his eyelids were pink. “I had a brother,” he said. “He was murdered at Bergen-Belsen.”
My face flushed with shame, each individual blood vessel burning. I understood that hell itself was that heat right there. Every Friday night and Saturday morning when Bernie Bernstein silently rose for the mourner’s Kaddish, joining my father and me and the rest who recite for the dead, I had seethed. I realized then that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I assumed I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be.
I’m not sure I believe this last sentence, nor do I understand why Jacob is so affected by Bernie Bernstein’s statement of loss. That he lost family in the Holocaust is, of course, a community tragedy, but not a rare one; it’s a humbling, embarrassing moment for Jacob, but why does it shake his personal epistemology so thoroughly?
I tried constructing various combinations of threes to see if I could come up with something that made sense in terms of the harmonizing of two opposites. Morah Lev and Bernie Bernstein could be seen as opposites: one didactic, the other pastoral. Jacob would have to serve as the junction that combines them, and maybe his admission of ignorance – or, more accurately, reversed polarity of knowledge, since he now seems to believe opposites of what was before – is that harmonization. But then his father is a lame duck, a character without purpose. Is his father, before and after his wife’s death, harmonized by Bernie Bernstein? Are there two triads at work?
And then there’s the ambiguous ending, which, like the shul encounter, I don’t understand at all.
These seem to be the facts:
Henry drove his car to shul, in spite of the Shabbat prohibition.
Jacob left shul and walked home apparently by an indirect route, taking his sweet time; it’s after dark, after Shabbat.
When Jacob arrives at home, the car is not in the driveway, as usual, but in the garage.
He assumes Henry is upstairs in his room.
Bernie Bernstein arrives, panting, his shirt torn, with Henry’s car keys. “I am sorry, Jacob,” he says as he hands them over.
Jacob runs upstairs.
Is Bernie Bernstein’s shirt torn from exertion, or as a sign of mourning? Who is he mourning? How did he get the keys? How did the car and the keys get separated? Where is Henry? What is he sorry for?
One interpretation would be that, while Jacob was walking the long way home, his father died, and Bernie Bernstein, after tearing his shirt in mourning, drove the car home, keeping the keys until he could turn them over to Jacob. This ties into their initial meeting in the grocery store, when Jacob, playfully riding a shopping cart, runs into the man who turns out to be Bernie Bernstein, who says, “Drive the cart, don’t let the cart drive you.” His “I am sorry” is an expression of condolence.
Another interpretation is that Bernie Bernstein took Henry’s keys to prevent him from breaking Shabbat rules yet again; this caused an argument between the two. His shirt was ripped by accident. He then drove the car home after dark, and is now returning the keys. He’s sorry to have caused Jacob embarrassment when confronted at shul, and/or to be disturbing him at night. Jacob runs upstairs to check on his father.
There are probably other interpretations. Jacob’s interpretation, whatever it may be, may or may not be in line with reality. But what is, within the world of the story, the reality?
We don’t know.
Jacob, by running upstairs, appears to want to know. We, as readers, are forced to not know, because there is no upstairs, no more story. We can only believe what we choose to believe. Knowing, and not knowing – how Bernie Bernstein appears in so many places at once, what happens at the end – is, as Ehrlich tells us in his Contributor Note, the point of the story. Faith itself is getting comfortable with not knowing.
But there’s one more element that tugs at my consciousness: the title. It’s almost a given that it would apply to Bernie Bernstein, given his status in the community and his continued recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish. But… is it possible it could refer to someone else?
It may be because it follows “Treasure Island Alley,” Da-Lin’s story about a woman mourning her mother throughout the long years of her life. Because the character who is present but not in this story is the mother. She serves as a time index in several places – Jacob refers to before his mother died, when she was still sick, while she was dying, right after she died, and since she died. He admits he has almost no memory of his mother, though he clearly remembers the hat the doctor who attended her wore. Hidden in the shadows, but the center of time: is it Jacob, not Bernie Bernstein, who is the Master Mourner of his mother?
I can’t remember a story where not-knowing was so central, so permitted, so necessary. It’s not particularly comfortable for me, probably not for a lot of readers. Maybe that’s why it’s important: practice not-knowing on a story, so when it comes to real life, it isn’t so unbearable.
* * *
In his post on Workshop Heretic, Jake Weber sorts through the pairing of Morah Lev and Bernie Bernstein as alternate faces of God, and the mysterious universe Jacob inhabits.
Eliezer Posner’s article “On the Meaning of Three” can be read in full online at Chabad.org.
The author’s website contains the usual information of other publications, including a biography of Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who earned the title Father of Neuroscience by “establishing the neuron, or nerve cell, as the basic unit of nervous structure.” And you can bet that’s going on my TBR list.
Everyone has a life situation, and mine is that death and birth appeared so entangled in that one moment that I struggle with mortality, connection, and being anchored in some sort of meaning of life. Some Buddhism teachers say that you can use any situation to wake up or cling to old ways and stay asleep. I find that challenging but inspiring.
This story is one of the earliest I started when I began taking writing classes. It was the first that meant something, or rather, everything, to me. My impulse was to be real moments of pain and real moments of transcendence into something whole, something more beautiful and meaningful than I can make in real life…. Even though most of the final draft appeared in some form in the first draft, it took almost eight years to jettison real events that did not serve the fiction, invent elements that made the fiction truer, and smooth out the time jumps that remained clunky for a long time.
Da-Lin: Contributor note, BASS 2023
One of the stranger moocs I’ve taken was provocatively titled “Reality Bites: An Introduction to Metaphysics.” It covered, among other things, four theories of time and existence. Do objects in the past and future exist? Or :do only those things in the present exist? Proponents of eternalism feel that, just as objects are distributed throughout space, they are also distributed throughout time, so everything that ever has existed or will exist, exists. Eternalism “does not make reality depend on our inertial frames or perspectives. In reality, there is no distinction between past, present, and future objects and persons. They are all on an equal metaphysical or ontological foot…”
I’m not sure I understand that, but Xuan-Xuan, aka Susan, the protagonist of this story, understands it just fine.
When she is fifteen she will give her virginity to a boy who makes her laugh. At twenty-two she will move to the United States to study biochemistry. She will change her name to Susan and settle in Silicon Valley, and for two decades her startup will be her life. She will marry a white man with a boyish grin and a linebacker’s gait, Alex, a venture capitalist. After their divorce, she will become a staunch atheist in search of a religion. At a Silicon Valley meditation boot camp, she will write down everything she knows about her mother on one page with room to spare. On the last day of her life, when she is a hundred and five, she will lie in her deathbed with her second husband by her side, and she will feel lucky despite the sadness that is just beneath the surface of everything.
Time escapes from her fingers and hops, skips, jumps. It’s not that difficult really: you wiggle a little and you are there, in a different crevice of time. You close your eyes to the kid in the mirror and open to a face full of wrinkles. You lie down beside your lover, your cheek pushing against the pillow, and there you are again, five years old, hiding, waiting…
The story itself hops and skips around in time, but through it runs the story of Xuan-Xuan as a five-year-old in Taiwan. She hears an argument between her mother and grandmother on the day before her mother dies giving birth to her sister. She comes away with the idea that Treasure Island Alley is hell, and that’s where she can find her dead mother and, with the help of the Monkey King – a mythological character from the 16th century Chinese classic, A Journey to the West, recreated as a children’s cartoon with all the accompanying licensed merchandise – rescue her. Of course, Treasure Island Alley turns out to be some cross between a brothel and a down-and-out red light district. But thanks to some relatively benevolent strangers, she travels through it unharmed, though realizes her mother is elsewhere.
Later, years later, she will doubt if any of this really happened. The blue dress. The pool of light by the dog hole. Cinematic spotlight of reconstructed memory. Perhaps she can’t bear the failure? Perhaps she wishes she really had gone to hell to search for her mother? She will decide that she never looked for her mother, never wanted to, for many years.
Her mother’s funeral, complete with chanting of monks, further confuses her. But she grows up nonetheless.
She later goes to the US for grad school in bioengineering, and changes her name to Susan because her given name, “when… pronounced by her English-speaking professors and peers, sounded like wound-up springs.”
At the pitch meeting for startup funding, she meets a young Oxfordian named Oliver who chats with her about her research.
She told him about errors of cell replication, nano-robotic telomerase repair, how death is a disease and a disease can be cured. How about the beauty of ephemera? Of irreplaceability? he said. What’s the point if we disappear as if we’ve never existed? she said.
I don’t take moocs in strange subjects like molecular biology in order to better comprehend fiction – I mean, come on, how often will a story referencing telomerase come up? – but it does lead to a certain thrill when I see that sort of thing in the wild. Hey, I know what telomerase is! I know a little about replication of telomeres and how they, the end portion of chromosomes, become the mechanism of aging. It isn’t in any way necessary to follow the story, but I love this sort of thing when I encounter it.
The story, however, is rooted in the repressed grief of a five-year-old. As Susan’s startup fails on her forty-second birthday,, she wanders the streets of San Franciso and finds herself in front of a Eternal Light King Fu Academy, where a Laughing Yoga group is in session. The sensei – or whatever they call it in yoga – presses a spot on her ribs, and she starts to laugh and cry as she releases “a wad of grief, which Xuan Xuan pelletized and wedged in when she was five.”
And here’s the flaw in this story: the sudden epiphany, the cure, all at once, nicely packaged in one sentence. In reality, healing takes a lifetime, and one moment won’t do it. But it’s a forgivable flaw. Maybe it’s even not a flaw; maybe I’m just measuring Laughing Yoga against western therapies, and it works differently. Maybe time isn’t as big as I think it is.
Perhaps the truth is this: that past and future are concepts the mind makes up to take refuge from the present. Perhaps all of time is one. Send a word back to when you were that kid, not yet strong enough to fall. Say you’ll be okay. Send a word forward to that moment you dread, your last moment, say I’m here. I’m with you. if you are lucky, you will feel all of you cushioning your fall. And if you are very lucky, you will realize before it’s too late that what is the point is really the wrong question.
I try to be rational, even cynical, when I read. But sometimes a story presses a spot on my ribs, and I start to cry over a sentence that isn’t really that big a deal, a sentence about sending a message back, or forward, from the time when it is discovered to the time when it is needed. And if everything exists all the time, that can’t be that hard to do, can it?
I have to admit that this story arrived in a particular time when I was vulnerable to it, that it might not have made much of an impression, beyond the telomerase, a year ago or a year from now. I recently experienced a loss that enveloped me in my own past. Like Xuan-Xuan, I lost my mother when I was a child. Though I was significantly older than she when my mother died – I was nine – I remember far less about her than Xuan-Xuan does about her mother, primarily because, as a deliberate choice, my family removed all reference to her from physical surroundings and conversation, ostensibly so as to not upset sensitive children. Why they didn’t consider that sensitive children might be more upset to discover that when one dies, one disappears completely and is never mentioned again, I’m not sure. But I’ve learned since that when anyone says, “We don’t want to upset her/him/them,” what they mean is, “I don’t want to be upset.” It’s a forgivable sin. But it leaves a wad of grief behind.
And, coincidentally – I again say, I love a good coincidence – I just discovered the TV series Six Feet Under was again available on Netflix, a series that’s 40% about death, 40% about sex, and 20% about everything else. The idea about the fluidity of time comes up a lot. So I was primed for this story, and primed for the tears.
I love the biographical part of Da-Lin’s contributor note, which is a bit lighter than most. She also gives great credit to Mark Haddon (of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time fame) for his story “The Gun,” which I immediately crawled the web to find, and acknowledges that she mimicked his closing sentence – with his blessing. Let’s face it, nothing new has been written in a few thousand years, so choosing among options becomes creativity.
* * *
Jake Weber was not impressed; in fact, it’s the story that broke him as a BASS blogger. You can find out why at his post on Workshop Heretic. Obviously, I disagree (I’ve disagreed with him about Andrea Barrett before as well), but that’s what makes this so interesting, and so productive.
The author’s website can be found here; I’m looking forward to her novel-in-progress.
For the hopelessly curious, Jackson Labs has a brief video explaining the basics of telomeres and telomerase on Youtube.
…I volunteered to teach creative writing at an overnight camp for youth who’d survived suicide loss. While I spent only a couple of days after the camp, the experience shook loose so many memories of my one summer serving as an overnight camp counselor in New Hampshire. Even more significantly, seeing these young campers bond and support one another, while lugging around such heavy burdens of grief, reminded me that the human connections I find most magical are the ones that occur in hard, dark moments when people on the verge of sinking still manage to lift each other up.
Taryn Bowe: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
In her Foreword to this volume, series editor Heidi Pitlor refers to this story as “truly gorgeous.” I’m never quite sure what people mean when they say that – beautiful phrasing, a rhythmic musicality? – but in this case, I can see how well-constructed it is as a story.
It’s a story of grief and loss, and ways of coping; or, for some, not coping. Libby’s a teenager whose eight-year-old sister died three years ago. Her parents have spent that time suing the hospital, and now, with their two million dollar award, have set out to transform a ramshackle camp into a summer treat for sick kids. Hey, Paul Newman did it, why not?
My dad planted something of Emeline’s in every cabin; the rabbit stuffy she’d rubbed furless, a nubby yellow blanket, now no more than a tangle of fuzz and string. Eli and I joked that the cabins might be mucked up with pine needles and squirrel shit but at least each one had a freaky shrine to a small dead girl.
My first reaction to this was: Boy, is this a bad idea. In real life, it is, but it turns out to be a great frame for the story, which takes place between their arrival, and, a month later, the arrival of the first campers. This frame not only sets the timeline and provides a backbone of action – clearing downed tree limbs, repairing buildings, evicting vermin, adding adaptive features – around which the thematic and emotional events can take place, but it includes its own tension. Can they get it all done? What if they can’t?
It also provides ready-made symbolism: turning something that’s horribly broken into something that works. That is, perhaps, the core mission of grieving. But only if one does it. It seems the parents haven’t read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; they’ve channeled their grief into, first, the lawsuit, and now, the camp. It’s not clear what’s up with brother Eli; he seems fairly unscathed. But Libby, our first-person narrator, is struggling. At least she knows it.
I stared at the fire’s edges, trying to see things that weren’t there. Before we’d come to the lake, I’d had this dumb idea that it would be easier to spot signs sent by Emeline in nature. In the wild, there were more messengers. Moths, dragonflies, pockets of cool air, blankets of mist. Off in the distance, I heard a woodpecker drilling into a tree. But I didn’t think Emeline would send me a woodpecker. I was waiting for something brilliant.
The two teenagers pair up with two people hired to work the camp: Reid, a high school student, “diabetic golfer” – ? – and soon-to-be senior counselor; and Lawn Boy, a 24-year-old guy who came with the camp, so he says. Yeah, Libby wonders about that, too; is he a hermit? He claims to be “more like a landscaper” but she has her doubts. Libby’s no fool.
There’s tension in these relationships, too. The kids are surprised to find Reid has a plastic leg, but they take it in stride. He and Eli hit it off, with some hints that they’re gay. More built-in tension: Is this going to be a problem, or a good thing? Of more concern is Libby and Lawn Boy: that could go dark really fast. All four of them are wounded, and none of them seem to want to inflict more damage on anyone else. Still, Lawn Boy buys all the beer Libby asks for, and the four of them meet every night lakeside; the potential danger thrums through the camaraderie.
Eli slung an arm around my shoulder. He helped me up the hill. At the bathhouse, he steered me into the girls’ section, where he cupped his hands beneath a faucet and caught a small pool of water for me to drink.
This is one of those lovely little gems dropped in there. Eli’s concern for Libby, way more drunk than she should be, includes this scene of taking her to the girls’ section of the bathhouse, even though the place is empty. I was struck by the image of him holding handfuls of water to her lips: caretaking, in its purest form.
We never know Lawn Boy’s real name. Libby knows it; by keeping this secret from the reader, she both displays her emotional intimacy with the man, and does a little caretaking herself. One night, during their beer party, the two take the canoe out onto the lake. It’s a marvelously written scene:
Somewhere in the dark middle, Lawn Boy said, “Everything okay with your parents?”
I said, “Probably not. It’s like we are all ghosts, and she’s the one who’s still here.”
“Yeah,” he said, as if he’d already drawn the same conclusion.
I heard a fish leap out of the water. I tried to spot it moving, flashes of silver, shimmers of green. I waited for Lawn Boy to tell me something, to explain why he was here on a canoe at a camp on a lake in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t think he was a landscaper. When we’d arrived, nothing about the camp’s grounds seemed cared for or maintained. Maybe he’d simply needed a place to stop, to rest, to figure out where to go and how to get there. That didn’t sound so strange to me….
…I said, “my parents filed this crazy lawsuit. There was a bump on her head that got infected. She showed it to me, and I felt it and then forgot it. The next day she was in the ICU. Maybe they should have sued me, for like negligence or manslaughter for whatever the fuck?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. He peddled some more, and the Christian camp’s lights receded. “You live long enough, you learn that for every person that’s ever died there’s a story about how they didn’t have to. Oh the people I’ve lost,” he said, “someone should have been able to save. Couldn’t. Pills. Then other stuff. Nothing to do but watch and wait.”
I stared at my fingers, coiled around the oar’s grip. It felt like we were entering a new body of water, an atmosphere of horrible truths. I wanted to reach back and pat his knee, but I didn’t want to tip us. I didn’t know how to flip a boat upright if we capsized and needed to turn it over to get back in. “I haven’t figured out how to make myself strong again,” I said.
He said, “Me neither.”
So we see Libby has an extra burden of guilt around her sister’s death. And we learn something about Lawn Boy’s damage. But there are so many subtle touches: the lights from the neighboring Christian camp get farther away, as they descend into a kind of hell of grief, of horrible truths, as Libby says. She wants to touch him, but worries that might capsize the boat, and she wouldn’t know how to fix that; all this, right before she admits she doesn’t know how to recover. Closeness causing chaos; fear of the potentially unfixable loss. Is this what “truly gorgeous” means? I’d agree, but it has nothing to do with beautiful language, but with imagery and delving deeper into these characters. Maybe that’s what beautiful language is.
On the last night before the campers arrive, she and Lawn Boy spend some time alone in his shack. Here’s where the story could go all wrong, but it goes very right. And the next day, as Mom’s forced cheerfulness welcomes the campers, Libby deals with the aftermath she somehow expected. At first, I thought, this is a survivable loss, a way to learn how to mourn for her sister. But then I thought, maybe it’s the other way around: maybe she’s learned, by watching the dysfunctional grief around her, that the first step in recovering from a loss is to truly feel it.
We don’t see the end result; that would be a cheat on the part of the story, a forced closure like the final three minutes of a bad drama series, where Everything Turns Out All Right. But there’s a definite sense that Libby will, eventually, be ok, regardless of how ok or not her parents are. Maybe Emeline sent her a sign after all, but instead of something brilliant in the woods, or a woodpecker, it was a wounded landscaper.
I’m particularly happy that this story worked so well because the author, Taryn Bowe, is a Maine writer. In fact, she’s the Associate Director of the Maine Writers & Publisher’s Alliance, a group that offers numerous programs including, most recently, a evening of conversation between Celeste Ng (Our Missing Hearts, Little Fires Everywhere) and Maine’s own Lily King (Writers & Lovers, Euphoria), right here in Portland. Maine writers, like all writers who aren’t located in publishing hubs, always deserve a little extra shout-out.
* * *
In his post at Workshop Heretic, Jake Weber makes some great observations about story elements, including an intriguing link between ghosts and loons.
“His Finest Moment” grew out of the dismay I felt when an old writer acquaintance – “Friend” is too strong a word, but this is someone whose career I played a role in advancing – was accused of violent, predatory behavior by a number of women. First came my initial shock: how could this man have done what he was accused of doing? This was followed by a more disquieting realization: it was, in fact, incredibly easy to believe he’d done what he was accused of doing. His self-professed libertinism, his wild stories of affairs and chance encounters – he’d been telling people who he really was all along. We just chose not to hear it.
I found myself fixated on how a man like my erstwhile acquaintance would begin to explain to his teenage daughter what he was being accused of and why. How would that conversation go? What could he possibly have said? Soon I was wandering the haunted house of an imagined mind.
Tom Bissell: Contributor Note, BASS 2023
In 2020, I referred to the BASS volume of that year as a collection of “Men Behaving Badly.” It seems we have an entry that was too late for that year. The unnamed protagonist of this story behaved badly in the past, and now that history is catching up with him, behaves even more badly in the present.
It’s pretty much a case of FAFO. The most egregious Fuck Around:
The Incident – that’s how he referred to it in his head, almost as if it had been something that happened to him, rather than something he’d done – involved a young woman he met during his last book tour, in Madison, Wisconsin, the day his most recent novel debuted at number three on the bestseller list. That didn’t excuse his behavior, certainly, but it helped explain it, at least to himself. It just wasn’t a night he wanted to hear no, in the end.
The Find Out is the reporter who is about to release a story about his licentious behavior in general, and, in particular, The Incident. This used to be called chickens coming home to roost, but that lacked a catchy acronym, so it’s been updated for the SMS generation.
The progression with the reporter follows an interesting path, one that reveals their relative characters, both in terms of their moral centers and their personhood as captured in the story. First he thinks she’s joking, because the first call came on April 1. Then he figures he can “charm or bully” her because she’s young and inexperienced. When that fails, he decides he’ll get the name of the informant and send a few emails to ward off disaster. And finally, he resorts to begging. Alas, the young, inexperienced reporter is too honest, smart, and determined to fall for any of these maneuvers.
The protagonist’s behavior throughout is one long stretch of excuse-making and self-pity. Even his description of his work seems to exonerate his behavior:
His novels were complicated. Emotionally complicated, anyway. He prided himself on that. He gave his characters, no matter how foul, a fair shake. He loved complicated. You can’t write about what you don’t understand – he couldn’t, anyway – so that meant, for him, becoming a living complication. Formally speaking, though, his novels weren’t complicated at all.
“I had to rape her, Your Honor; it was research.” I’m not sure that’s going to fly. As self-excuses go, it’s one for the, ahem, books. But then there’s that admission that, formally, his work is simple. So is grabbing women by their pussies. Nothing complicated about that.
He even uses his work as a pretext of exposure: his editor and publisher should have known the kind of life he led, since it was in his books, his “thirty-year, multivolume confession had sold hundreds of thousands of copies.” As Bissell says in his Contributor Note quoted above, after Maya Angelou: he kept telling them who he was; they just didn’t believe him.
And now, on the eve of the article’s release, he’s trying to prepare his wife and teenage daughter. The wife’s frequent “Oh God” exclamations from behind the closed door give a good clue to how that’s going. As for the daughter, that’s going to be even more challenging.
His daughter had been in an uncommunicatively foul mood for the last few months, which was almost certainly creditable to the awkward phase she was going through: braces, acne, a recent weight gain. Truth be told, his daughter’s awkward phase was pretty perfectly timed, if only because there was no beast more hormonally feral than a fifteen-year-old boy. He wanted to protect his daughter from that. Thus, when his daughter pranced up to him, a few months ago, with a pamphlet advertising expensive laser-based acne treatment, he balked at the price…. She had the rest of her life to be attractive.
I’m not going to climb up on my soapbox and preach about how the burden shouldn’t be every woman’s responsibility, at every age, to put up barriers to prevent assault; to demand that men need to be held accountable for their behavior, and, if unable to control it due to biology, treated as dangerous until they can prove they can behave themselves. I’ll just let it sit there that he views acne as a strong enough deterrent.
Maybe we’re supposed to feel sorry for him – for him? – as he goes to warn his daughter of the storm about to break. He never does actually tell her what’s about to happen, just says it’s news about his book, and she assumes the movie deal has fallen through.
“Oh,” she said. Then: “That would be too bad.”
“Yes,” he said. “It would.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so. I just knew that – I knew you’d be disappointed to hear.”
“I mean, if it doesn’t happen, I’d be sad for you, but …”
It occurred to him, then, that he’d be having some version of this conversation for months, even years. He’d have to explain, over and over again, to himself and others, why things didn’t work out, hadn’t worked out, wouldn’t work out. To fight the tears forming in his eyes, he willed himself to think of his daughter, as a child, selling lemonade in their driveway, the sunshine streaming through her pitcher, the pure scalpy smell of her unwashed hair, their life together still an endless meadow of possibility. “But what?” he asked, his voice breaking.
“That’s it. I’d be sad for you but.” She shrugged and then smiled, but tentatively. She knew something was wrong. When she put her hand on his knee, the love he felt from her: It was real. It was real.
That’s a nicely written passage. Even I am a bit torn. At first, it’s still all about him, realizing he’ll be dealing with this forever, but he does eventually get around to the realization that he stands to lose something a lot more precious than career opportunities.
And maybe that’s a turning point. It dovetails nicely with his description of his own work: it’s the meta-author, giving the protagonist a fair shake. Letting him be just a little complicated. Just for a minute, as his daughter reaches out to him.
As he leaves her room, he says, “Take care.” A formula phrase, but it resonates for him.
He’d think about that a lot in the coming months. The last thing he said to his daughter: Take care.
Two things leap out of this simple sentence: first, he’s not going to see his daughter for a while, which is reinforced by the sounds of Mom packing in the other room.
And second: Take care, dear, because there are men like me out there.
I find myself puzzling over the title. I suspect it’s a truncation of two phrases, the first used to describe “The Incident” itself – “What happened next was not, admittedly, his finest moment” – and the second, to describe his follow-up email when the shit started hitting the fan, a move his lawyer finds damaging – “Again, not his finest moment.” These lines fit with his tendency to minimize his bad, in this case quite possibly criminal, behavior. To use only the positive form as a title seems like misdirection: but I think it’s just the opposite. His interaction with his daughter was, again, not his finest moment. Except, perhaps, for that “Take care.” That might be the best advice he could give her. But, of course, it was, at best, accidental, and required a great deal more to support it. But it again hints at the albeit weak complexity of the character. Somewhere, he knows what he is.
In a story like this, it’s hard to separate my disgust for the character from my sense of the story. I initially compared it to last year’s Pushcart story, “Ambivalence” by Victoria Lancelotta: a man using a teenage prostitute thinks of his own daughter, yet is unable to make the obvious leap that the girl he’s boffing in the cheap motel is somebody’s daughter. The inclusion of that story, and particularly its use as the lead-off story, tainted the volume for me (though I recovered when later pieces redeemed it). I have to wonder: do writers think this is some kind of warning to libertines about the collateral damage they’re about to inflict? Or is it merely a way to show the power of the penis to override such concerns when opportunity presents itself?
As I was preparing this post, I was all set to list the stories of sexual misconduct featuring characters that were, in fact, more complex: Mary Gaitskill’s “This is Pleasure”; Carolyn Ferrell’s “Something Street”; Emma Kline’s “The Nanny,” all just from that 2020 “Men Behaving Badly” edition of BASS. But this story surprised me by having a form of complexity that, while delicately deliberate, appears unconscious. I’m undecided if that counts.
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Jake Weber also deals with complexity in his post on Workshop Heretic.
My father is very mysterious. When I was a child, he told me stories about when he was a child, almost all of which he made-up. The stories weren’t lies. They helped contextualize the stories that were true, which I could hardly believe. Had he been orphaned? And then imprisoned? His old life looked nothing like my young life, but I sensed that my father still had something to do with me, and that the connection between us would be forged through language. I tried to make my writing tell me the stories I knew he wouldn’t…. In trying to imitate my father, I produced someone else, a character familiar and also surprising…
Maya Binyam, Contributor Note, BASS 2023
I’ve been staring at my computer screen for a couple of days now, trying to figure out how to write about this story. It’s a complicated, bewildering story, further complicated by old and ongoing discussions with my blogging buddy Jake, and by what I discovered when I poked around to see if I could find some guidance to understand the story. In fact, I was (yet again; this happens to me a lot) more excited by what I read about the story than by the story itself. But I still don’t know where to start. So I suppose I’ll just start with the story itself, and hope some direction emerges as I write.
As I mentioned, it’s a bewildering story. Let’s start with the first two paragraphs.
In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door. Waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but by the time I reached security I was hungry. Inside my carry-on I found two apples and a croissant, which tasted like nothing. The security agent asked me for my name. I gave him my driver’s license, walked through the metal detector, and then my body went away.
Before takeoff, a flight attendant announced our destination. Everyone cheered. The passenger to my right asked if I was happy to be going home. He didn’t speak our destination’s national language, which had become the language of the plane. I told him I was neither happy nor unhappy. He said he understood where I was coming from, because his work had introduced him to people like me. He said that people like me had changed him. It was true that they needed money, but the fact that he gave it to them had nothing to do with who they were to each other.
A man is going on a trip. We don’t know why, where he’s going, or where he’s coming from. That’s not so unusual; a lot of contemporary stories start out mysterious and fill in the details. It sounds like maybe he’s some kind of spy: all the arrangements have been made for him. But it’s the voice, and the other details, that make this seem like something else. He hears an announcement about traffic, but there is no traffic. Are we in a gaslighting world, a la 1984? And what’s this about not feeling he has a body, not tasting? Is he ill, or just detached from reality?
The conversation with the fellow passenger is right on the edge of not making sense. He asks if our narrator is happy to be going home. Home? So he’s been away and now he’s going back? He doesn’t answer directly, but denies feeling any way about it, again fitting with a certain detachment. The passenger picks up on this; he gives people money? He doesn’t speak the language? What kind of person is this, giving money to people he can’t speak to? We’re left with the thought that money doesn’t impact some people, their relationships. That’s a valuable insight. But without context, what does it mean?
The passenger talks about his own life, his needs being met by “an unseen force.” Everything he desires was available to him, resulting in a sort of anhedonia. He doesn’t even feel lust for his mistress. The passenger starts watching a movie on his DVD player, and our narrator surreptitiously watches along: it’s a film about a man asking random people on the street, “Do you belong to anybody?” Eventually the DVD player goes to sleep, the passenger seems to be asleep, and the narrator decides it would be rude to wake him up to keep watching the movie. This begins to feel a little absurd. Then the flight attendant discovers, while asking the man if he prefers chicken or fish (our narrator considers that he has no desires so what will he choose?) that the passenger is, in fact, dead. The absurdity grows: the flight attendant wraps the body, puts a pillowcase over his head, and leaves it in the seat. Absurdity culminates when the narrator deplanes:
When we landed, I was the final passenger to leave the plane. I wanted to look out the window, but the line to exit had become a procession, and everyone wanted to tell me they were sorry. I’m so sorry, said a man with a backpack. The next guy said sorry in a different language and it seemed like he was going to cry. I wondered if I knew him. I didn’t like that possibility, so I said thank you and waited for the next. Outside was the country I had left twenty-six years prior, and everyone I knew there. And yet I had to sit and receive condolences for this dead stranger with a pillowcase on his head.
We don’t know where we are, but we know the narrator left this country a quarter-century ago and is now returning. We don’t know why he left or why he is returning; from the first paragraph, it seems he had little choice in the matter. He seems to be unable to resist or refuse social expectations of the moment, receiving condolences, which are based on a faulty premise, that he knew the dead man. The pillowcase adds a comic touch, but… is it appropriate to laugh? Talk about resisting social expectations. And, by the way, this is way outside the scope of the story, but it’s the second story in a row to involve a pillowcase over someone’s head (though, I’ll admit, the prior one was imaginary).
I’m… disconcerted.
The story continues along these lines as our narrator continues his travels to whatever destination lies ahead for him. At each step along the way, there are peculiar circumstances, a conversation of some kind either participatory, recollected, or observed, and some revelation filling in the narrator’s purpose, origin, and destination. He continues to seem disconnected from everything, including his own body, preferences, and emotions. It’s a bit like watching a movie on an airplane over a dead man’s shoulder: everything feels muffled.
First he takes a cab to a bus depot. The narrator reveals he’s going to see his brother, who has a heart problem but lives on top of a mountain and can’t get to a doctor. He seems irritated with his brother, though he’s travelled at some inconvenience to, presumably, help him. I’m relieved to know the purpose of his travel, though I’m still not sure I get the whole picture. He loses his luggage, either because he forgets it, or because the driver steals it, it’s not clear which.
The bus depot presents more absurdity:
I tried to go inside the bus depot, but there was no inside. The depot was a patch of dirty grass that looked like any other patch of dirty grass, except that it was surrounded by a similarly dirty grouping of buses. The next bus was not due to leave for two hours, and the ticketing agents wouldn’t let me into the waiting area, which was just a sectioned-off portion of the dirty grass with some folding chairs.
This goes a bit more Kafka, man at the mercy of arbitrary officialdom. Then we move to an internet café that doesn’t do café, only internet. After our narrator emails his wife to find out where his blood pressure medicine is – ah, oh, so she packed his bags for him, it wasn’t some anonymous or authoritarian institution sending a hapless citizen away, he’s just a guy going to visit his brother, but the sense of external imposition or coercion remains – he re-reads the emails his brother sent him. After a monologue about the comparative health care systems in the narrator’s vs brother’s countries, his brother asked a US entry visa – ok, so the narrator has been in the US for twenty-six years – or a Swiss bank account with $2000 so he can see a doctor. Instead he’s getting his brother. You can’t always get what you want.
Next we have the bus ride, which starts off with vomiting and a bus that wants to roll over. “I saw the carcasses of other buses that had tipped over and rolled onto their backs.” Comforting. The narrator gets into a conversation with a woman who apparently works for an NGO of some kind, working with farmers. She makes some very astute sociopolitical observations, including the fact that she doesn’t have the correct degree to solve any of the farmers’ problems. “Unfortunately, her degree was in anthropology, which helped her understand the problems but did not give her the tools to fix them.” Yeah, we’re in Kafka territory now.
But we head back to our emotionally-estranged narrator pretty quickly when she asks if he has children.
I didn’t want to talk about that, so I told her I wasn’t sure. She laughed, thinking I was making a joke about being a man, but I wasn’t making a joke about being a man come on I was just trying to avoid answering her question. I guess that gave her the impression that she should ask again, because she did ask again. I didn’t like to lie, but I worried she would never stop asking me her question. I decided to make something up and told her I had a son. Unfortunately, I had messed up, given that that was not a lie….
My mind wasn’t able to think of any fake things, so I had no choice but to tell her things that were true. On the day he was born, I said, no one died, so we named him Revolution. The woman, looking past my eyes, told me to go on. I didn’t want to go on, but I did.
Imagine being so full with truth, you can’t make up any lies; imagine being unaware how filled with truth you are.
The strange repetitious syntax, the sense of the previously mentioned “unseen force,” gives this section depth power beyond the obvious humor, a depth that becomes important when we learn he was in prison at the time:
After my son’s mother left the hospital, I said, she brought him to the fence. The woman asked me why there was a fence around the hospital. I said the fence wasn’t around the hospital, it was around the prison. She looked confused by that idea, prison, but a prison wasn’t an idea, it was a place. She asked, what business does a baby, a good baby, have a prison? I didn’t have the answer to that question, so I told her to disregard the prison, which had significance only insofar as it was the place where I had been sent to die. I hadn’t died, so it was insignificant. Anyway, I said, I introduced him to everyone in the insignificant prison, even the ones who had been executed already.
The woman that looked as if she had been abducted to a place where she didn’t want to go.
It’s not clear why the man left his son behind at some point, but apparently he did, and now he carries his son with him in this part of him that he only shares by the coercion of a woman with the wrong degree. Although I’m still confused, I’m also intrigued.
We’re now at the town that was our narrator’s destination, and he observes men sitting on stools that aren’t there (in other words, squatting) having the same political arguments he had when he lived here twenty-six years ago. Then they start referring to an upcoming funeral and an uncle, long gone, who is supposedly arriving for the ceremony. We start to get a glimpse of what’s going on.
And there the story ends. Of course.
I had two ways to go from here. I could put it down and write a short post about not knowing what was happening, or I could try harder. A re-read helped a little in terms of getting the structure down – a series of scenes involving revelations, conversations, and development of the estrangement of the narrator – but gave me little real insight. The Contributor Note didn’t help much.
That brought me to Jake Weber’s post (link below), which turned out to be a gold mine with varied treasures. Treasures about the story, which he analyzes in detail; and even more importantly, the information that this is an excerpt from Binyam’s novel, Hangman, published this past summer. Treasures about the setting; it happens that he has some specialized knowledge of the unmentioned location of this story, and recognized it from the events recounted in the various conversations. And treasures about reading stories set in unfamiliar locations, which for many US readers means anything outside their own immediate sphere of reference, and for most means anything outside the US. And it continues a longstanding conversation we’ve had, referenced in a comment on the Introductory post to this volume, about “The story must stand on its own” (the cry of the MFA) and those of us who are just trying to understand a story – and how it works – so need as much help as we can get.
The tip about it being the initial chapter of Hangman was particularly useful because I was unable to find any commentary about the story itself. But about Hangman, there are reams, and in particular, two interviews with Binyam stood out in terms of shedding light on what the story is doing.
First I found an interview in, of all places, Vogue, that discusses individuality vs community and the process of going from a communal society to an individualistic one, then back again. This seems central to the title question, “Do You Belong to Anybody?” and to the narrator’s passivity, muffled embodiment, and bewildered communicative style. But what interested me more specifically at the moment was Binyam’s decision to forego names: of places, of people.
I don’t think I began the book with an idea that the narrator’s name would never be revealed, but as I kept writing, it became clear to me that he didn’t have a name…. And I became really interested in how to conjure character and psychology and geography without the usual identifiers that serve as a kind of shorthand and that maybe would trigger a particular kind of association in readers.
Interview with Maya Binyam: “Maya Binyam’s Debut Novel, Hangman, Is a Dryly Funny Examination of What It Means to Go Home”, by Emma Specter, Vogue
There are certain associations we make with places, with names, and one way to bypass that is to eliminate the references. It does add some confusion, but in this case, the confusion is part of the story, as the narrator himself is confused. I would quibble with the characterization of the story as “darkly funny” – there are certainly humorous elements, and they’re absolutely dark, but I’m not sure I’d call it funny, which makes me wonder where the line would be – but I’ve only read the first chapter, so maybe the absurdity leans less towards painful and obstructive and more towards humorous as it progresses.
The second interview explains more about the passivity and confusion of the narrator; it’s a cultural feature:
There’s a very performative set of mourning rituals that are traditional, most of which are designed around revealing the fact of the death at the most opportune moment. For example, if someone close to me were to die, it’s not like someone would call me and say, “Oh, so-and-so has died, you need to come home and arrange for the funeral.” What would happen is that I would go about my day unaware, and then I would arrive home and all of the people closest to me, friend, family members, whoever, would be gathered at my house an would all tell me together. So it’s a highly performative moment, that moment of reveal, because it’s been scripted in a lot of ways. But I think there’s something really beautiful about it to, the care work that’s put into revealing to someone that they’re about to start grieving.
But that process can become really protracted and strange when someone is living in diaspora. When someone’s living in the US and someone in Ethiopia dies, it’s sometimes the case – I don’t know how often this is or if it’s just my deranged family – it’s sometimes the case that you’ll find out that have to travel home for a funeral, and you don’t know exactly who the funeral is for, or maybe you haven’t been told that it’s a funeral, maybe you’ve been told that so-and-so is sick, and you have to go see them, but the subtext, the unspoken thing, is that that that person has already died, and you’re on this journey to become acquainted with the fact that you’ve lost someone.
….There’s a way in which having all these things organized around your ignorance can start to feel like you’re being scripted into a play, or that you’re on a journey to your own funeral. I became interested in that as a kind of narrative mode, to have this central organizing principle be unacknowledged but totally determining.
Interview with Maya Binyam: “Maya Binyam’s Debut Novel, Hangman, Is a Dryly Funny Examination of Marble House Project interview with Maya Binyam
This made the whole story snap into place for me. He is under the control of an unseen force; he isn’t sure what’s coming. It also gives me some hint about what happens next, about where the conversation between the two men on invisible stools is going to lead. It made me want to read the book, in spite of my longstanding resentment towards novel excerpts as short stories.
I do think this ends in an odd place for a story, that it isn’t complete enough as a story. Given how ambiguous it is, however, I can see that it might fit the bill as being open-ended, with some insight, via the final conversation, as to where it goes.
I’ve been recently dealing with my own little crisis of estranged bereavement in the form of a brother who died and an agency who dealt out the bad news in carefully measured parcels, so maybe that affected my read of this story. It certainly affected my impression of the Marble House Project interview, and its importance.
I agree with Jake: it’s probably not the story for a casual reader. That’s ok, though. As I’ve said before, one of the hallmarks of BASS is variety. This story is a bit of connoisseur fare; those of us who prefer steak and potatoes will find plenty to suit us as well. And as it happens, the tone of the story, the strangeness, the absurdity, the emotional undercurrent masked by all that emotional estrangement, was enough to pull me in.
* * *
Jake Weber’s blog Post on Workshop Heretic is a must-read for anyone trying to better understand what’s going on here.
Maya Binyam’s interview with Vogue – “Maya Binyam’s Debut Novel, Hangman, Is a Dryly Funny Examination of What It Means to Go Home” – was surprisingly (forgive my snobbery) helpful.
Maya Binyam’s Vimeo interview with the Marble House Project is very much worth listening to.
A Just Recompense 