PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Read online

  PEN AMERICA BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Catapult

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  Please see Permissions on page 205 for individual credits.

  ISBN: 978-1-936787-93-7

  eISBN: 978-1-936787-94-4

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938839

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Yuka Igarashi, series editor

  SIX MONTHS

  Celeste Mohammed

  from New England Review

  CANDIDATES

  Megan Tucker

  from Washington Square Review

  VIDEOTECA FIN DEL MUNDO

  Ava Tomasula y Garcia

  from Black Warrior Review

  BRENT, BANDIT KING

  Grayson Morley

  from The Brooklyn Review

  ZOMBIE HORROR

  Drew McCutchen

  from The Baltimore Review

  BLACK DOG

  Alex Terrell

  from Black Warrior Review

  NEW YEARS IN LA CALERA

  Cristina Fríes

  from Epoch

  APPETITE

  Lin King

  from Slice

  1983

  Elinam Agbo

  from The Baltimore Review

  STAY BRAVE, MY HERCULES

  Ernie Wang

  from McSweeney's

  BELLEVONIA BEAUTEE

  Lauren Friedlander

  from The Rumpus

  THE CRAZIES

  Maud Streep

  from One Story

  About the Judges

  About the PEN/Robert J. Dau

  Short Story Prize for

  Emerging Writers

  List of Participating Publications

  Permissions

  INTRODUCTION

  THE STORIES IN this anthology are by writers whose fiction appeared in print or online for the first time in 2017. They were selected for publication, out of thousands of submissions, by magazine editors who likely had never read the writers before. They were then chosen for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, from 150 nominations, by three judges who have recently written their own award-winning story collections. They represent the newest fiction being published today that has made the most lasting impression on a chain of careful readers. Ezra Pound wrote that literature is “news that stays news”; these stories bring us the latest news.

  Each piece included here is surprising and unique in approach and effect. Still, when read collectively, certain themes emerge. I noticed that there are a lot of performers in these pages. Some are in costume: Jeremy, dressed as a Hercules mascot at Magic Kingdom in Ernie Wang’s “Stay Brave, My Hercules”; the couple in Maud Streep’s “The Crazies,” who play a corset-wearing whore and a chaps-wearing cowboy in a ghost town in Montana. There are singers and dancers, vulnerable and triumphant and memorable: in Lauren Friedlander’s “Bellevonia Beautee,” two young “beautees” practice kicks and shimmies and vocals for what is supposedly a singing group led by a man named Andy; in Cristina Fríes’s “New Years in La Calera,” a young “campesina” in a remote valley in the Andes dances to cumbia while guerrilla soldiers point guns at her.

  Even characters who aren’t playacting or putting on a show are concerned with scripts, with hitting the right notes. “Zombie Horror” by Drew McCutchen is narrated by a caseworker for the recently undead. He doesn’t have much experience with zombie counseling, so he relies on pamphlets and weekly training emails from his department to tell him what to say to his dirt-covered, half-decayed clients to help them readjust to being alive. (“You must talk to them quietly. They’ve been used to quiet for so long.”) He does intake in front of a one-way mirror so his colleagues can watch his technique—his audience.

  Three pieces frame migration as a performance. Ava Tomasula y Garcia’s “Videoteca Fin del Mundo” is about migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border while escaping violence in their home countries. In many cases, they are incarcerated in “hieleras” (freezers) and “perreras” (doghouses) and offered no legal help as they face their asylum hearings. The piece came out of the author’s real-life work with the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, where she saw firsthand how individuals are made to “audition for the part of Refugee.” “Can you play the character they are looking for at your Credible Fear interview?” Tomasula y Garcia writes. “This is the only time your humanness will be based on your dehumanization, so barter for it and say only what they want to hear.”

  In “Six Months” by Celeste Mohammed, another “illegal” finds himself auditioning to stay in the country. After losing his engineering job and running out of options for supporting his common-law wife and two sons, Junior flies from Trinidad to New York to live with a cousin and work at a supermarket. When he notices that Becky the cashier has a crush on him, he embarks on an ethically compromised, strategically dubious plan to seduce and marry her before his temporary visa runs out—all while keeping her a secret from (and continuing to provide for) his family back home. If the refugees in “Videoteca Fin del Mundo” are required to display the correct kind of desperation, Junior’s act is about concealing desperation—being the blank slate we often want our immigrants to be. “You just have this gut feeling things will go better for you, in America, if you hang a fuckin’ sign round your neck: COME IN. I OPEN . . . TO EVERYTHING.” The immigrants in Megan Tucker’s “Candidates” also invent more acceptable, less precarious versions of themselves for the world, though they do it by adding to rather than subtracting from their family. The story is told from the point of view of two sisters who are waiting at home for a man to come over and buy a used crib. Their mother has turned the TV on in the empty den and closed the door, to make the buyer believe there’s a father in the room.

  We typically think of a performance as something that happens within a limited time frame—an intake interview, a furniture sale. It’s a heightened state, set apart from “ordinary” life. But what’s most interesting in these stories is the way a performance seeps into life. The frame blurs and the stage dissolves. Back at Magic Kingdom, when Jeremy-as-Hercules makes friends with a wheelchair-bound Make-A-Wish kid, he’s thinking about his partner, dying of cancer at home; when he smiles and flexes and repeats Disney-approved messages to “be strong” and “be brave,” he’s also talking to himself. Once summer ends, the ghost-town cowboy and whore from “The Crazies” settle down in a house in the mountains and continue their reenactment for each other: “I had wanted to be the kind of wife who’d bring down an elk one day and cook it the next, in lingerie and a flannel shirt,” the narrator says.

  Another character in a wife costume appears in Lin King’s “Appetite.” Shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, Mayling’s mother demands that she find a husband from among the “optometrists, patent lawyers, accountants, chemical engineering PhDs” that make up her family’s social circle in Taiwan. She finally chooses Shutian, a dentist. On their wedding night, she’s in a crisp white nightgown like “a heroine from a Gothic novel”; she tries kissing her husband “as she had seen kissers do in countless Hollywood films.” The soft rock piping through the couple’s home obscures the lack of conversation; soon enough, children arrive, and decades pass as Mayling dutifully plays the roles expected of her in her marriage and her family.
/>
  Mayling’s lifelong costume does eventually show its seams, just as the “Dale Evans drag” starts to slip for the narrator in “The Crazies.” If the stories here reveal how we become the selves we perform, they also reveal the instability of that becoming. The self is an ever-changing construction, continually attempting and faltering at coherence. There is a visual manifestation of this in Alex Terrell’s “Black Dog”: the protagonist, Io, is followed around wherever she goes by other phantom Ios—Io-Leather-Skirt, Io-in-Jeans, Io-in-Red at a rooftop party; Ios dressed in white as she wanders into the woods. Elinam Agbo’s “1983” describes a different kind of fractured self. The story begins with the narrator walking through fog, squinting at a hazy figure down the road. She’s in a village in Ghana during a famine, and she vaguely remembers a husband, work in the city, a missing aunt—but the holes in her mind prevent her from knowing any more about who she is.

  But there is freedom and possibility in not knowing. “Brent, Bandit King” by Grayson Morley is narrated by something called a Facilitator—the artificial intelligence of a computer program that adaptively responds to the actions chosen by players of a role-playing video game. The Facilitator is aware of all the branching story paths and outcomes available to the players inside the game, but it is limited by what [Brent], its player, wants to do—and [Brent] only wants to pick up weapons and kill other bandits. Of all the characters and performers within this book, the Facilitator is the only one that can’t, and doesn’t, ever deviate from script. All it can do is keep reminding [Brent] that [Brent] can: “I was hoping that, together, we might break free of the likely actions. We might traverse a less probable narrative path, find ourselves an [Uncommon Ending].” In one way or another, every story in this collection is reminding us of this too. I’m grateful to the Dau family, to PEN America, to our judges, to the original editors of these twelve exceptional works, and, finally, to the writers themselves, for helping to deliver this good news.

  YUKA IGARASHI

  Series Editor

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Experience tells us it’s probably not going to work out. Yet every time we open a new submission, we bring fresh hope to the page along with some measure of hesitation. Every one of us who read “Six Months”—beginning with our fiction editor and a couple of crackerjack interns—found our way past that hesitation after the first few lines, and by the end we were in knots. Luther’s visa was just about to expire and his two worlds were on the verge of a collision that would ruin them both. Here was a story we were all excited to publish in NER. But did we trust ourselves; had we really just struck unsolicited-submission gold? Who was this writer? Was this dialect accurate, or even authentic? In the end, none of that even mattered, because by the time we finished reading we were entirely convinced by the story itself. It was as if we’d just spent time in Luther Archibald Junior’s presence as he told us about his harrowing misadventures in New York. We believed him, and we believed in this writer.

  As it happens, Celeste Mohammed, who was born and raised in Trinidad, had to overcome some internalized censorship of her own to get this voice onto the page, and we think she succeeded beautifully.

  It also seems worth noting that we accepted this story—a highly empathic story about “illegals”—on inauguration day in 2017.

  Carolyn Kuebler, editor

  New England Review

  SIX MONTHS

  Celeste Mohammed

  WHEN OIL DROP to 9US$ a barrel, man, you know you getting lay off. The only question is when. Like everybody else in the industry, you wait.

  It come like the worst thing that could happen, when they announce people going “in tranches” every month.

  At first, every time you don’t get a envelope, you breathe a sigh of relief. After a while, though, you start feeling like a death row inmate in a cell near the gallows; like these bitches want you to witness everybody else execution. Soon, the fact you still working come like a noose swinging in front your face, grazing your nose. You start to wish they just get it over with.

  And when it happen, you rush home to Judith, your common-law wife, mother of your two children, and give her the news. She put her hand on her heart and say, “We could breathe easy now, Junior. We could move on.”

  You and Judith cling to each other there in the kitchen. You feel your prick resurrecting like Lazarus. Is months since the last time. You know Judith feeling it too. She pulling away? No, she gripping on tighter.

  You’s a trembling schoolboy again, mouth watering over hers as you grab deep inside that housedress like is a bran tub. You find her panty-crotch and rake it aside. Right there on the counter, next to the toaster, it happen. Two jook and a tremble and everything done. But Judith don’t seem to mind. She patting your back, stroking your hair, till your breathing slow down. Then she whisper she going for the boys.

  You swagger to the bedroom. Dive on the bed, hug the pillow, and smile. You not too worried. The severance pay was a good chunk—it’ll hold you for a while. Besides, you tell yourself, it don’t matter how low oil go; Trinidad need man like me. They can’t shut down every rig, every factory. Nah! METs will always find work.

  But then April turn to May, May turn to June, and still nobody hiring mechanical engineering technicians. The talk everywhere is recession, recession. Judith still have her receptionist job in the doctor-office and y’all could probably manage a li’l while longer. But what really starting to hurt is your pride. You’s a big, hard-stones man and watch you: every day, waking up with the house empty and a note from Judith on the table. Cook, clean, wash, iron—you do everything she say.

  Until one night, when Judith squat over your face and say “suck it,” you shove her off and say, “Suck it your damn self. I’s not your bitch.”

  YOU CALL YOUR cousin Rufus, in New York. America have the most factories. Rufus name “citizen,” he must know somebody to offer you something under the table.

  Three days later, he call back. Good news. If you organize your visa and ticket and get there by September month-end, they’ll squeeze you in at the S-Town Supermarket near his house, in Queens. “Engineering work?” you say. And the man say no, is the meat room. You tell Rufus, “Yeah,” but, same speed, you hang up and tell Judith, “He mad or what? I have education!”

  You plan to wait couple weeks, then say you didn’t get the visa. Meantime, you drop your tail between your leg and call your eighteen-year-old baby sister, Gail.

  “You think you could ask that old man something for me?”

  “A job, nah?” Gail say, like she was waiting on the call.

  “Yeah, girl. Things hard. You know I’s not the kind to ask Mr. H for favors. But them Syrians, they own everything. See what you could do, nah?”

  Imagine you asking Gail for help. After you never do one ass for her. After you did move out and leave her with that drunk skunk, your father, Luther Sr.

  When she first hook up with Mr. H, that married asshole, it did make you feel to vomit: your li’l sister spreading her legs for him, for his money. You did tell Judith as much and she say, “Well, talk to Gail. You’s she big brother.”

  But you did say, “Nah, is not my place.” And is true. Gail was fuckin’ for betterment. How you coulda ever face her and say, Don’t, when Mr. H was the one minding her: putting a roof over her head, food on her table, clothes on her back, making she feel classy, giving she a start in life. That’s more than you—Mr. Big Brother—or your waste-a-time father ever do for the li’l girl. Shame!

  Next day, Gail call back: “Sorry, boy. Hard luck.”

  You wonder if she even ask.

  One night, after everybody fall asleep, you packing away the school books your son Jason leave on the dining table. Flipping through his sketch pad, a heading in red catch your eye: My Family. Four stick figures in scratchy crayon clothes. You’s the tallest and next to your watermelon head it have a arrow and a label: Luther Jr. Stay-at-home Dad. In your hand it have something
that resemble . . . a axe? a boat paddle? Nah, you realize is a spatula.

  “Fuck,” you mumble, pulling out a chair and sinking in it. Your son gone and ask the teacher what to call you, now that you’s scratch your balls for a living.

  “JUNIOR, YOU SURE you want to do this?” Judith say. She straining macaroni in the sink; you grating cheese. “America ain’t no bed-a-rose, nah!” she add.

  You argue back and forth ’bout all the people she know that gone America and dying to come back.

  Then—thunk!—Judith rest-down the strainer hard in the sink. You glance across. She staring out the window.

  “You go miss me? That’s what it is, ain’t? Tell me.”

  “Don’t be a ass!” she say. “I’s a big woman, I could handle myself. But, is the boys . . .”

  “Let we cross that bridge when we get to it,” you say, a tightness in your chest like you just bench-press 150. “I don’t even have a visa yet.”

  You go down a li’l stronger on the grater. This fuckin’ woman hard! Harder than this old, dry cheese. It woulda kill her to say she go miss you?

  The two of you was seventeen, in the last year of technical school, when she get pregnant with Jason. Y’all wasn’t in love or nothing, but her parents put her out, so you had to band together. Your parents was a disgrace: Luther Sr. drowning in puncheon-rum, and your mother, Janice, ups-and-gone with a next man. Three years pass you straight, like a full bus. Then Judith find out she pregnant again, with Kevin. You and Judith, it come like y’all grow up together. And, although you’s a big man now, twenty-four years, you never had to face the outside world without Judith. She raise your babies and, in a way, she raise you too.

  She never been the lovey-dovey kind but, man, she get more colder lately. She dropping words for you; saying things like, “People can’t make love on hungry belly.”

  YOU PAY FOR the appointment, fill out the form, take the picture. You photocopy a bank statement, fake a job letter. You line up in the road at 5 a.m., in front the US Embassy, with a sandwich and a juice box in your jacket.