PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Page 17
Jake put both his hands on the table and stretched out his fingers and closed them up again. He took a breath as if he were dealing with a little kid.
“That seems like a big leap,” he said. “Did they say it was human-caused?”
“It’s still under investigation. But come on, did you notice any lightning out there? It’s November.”
“I think we should let them investigate. We don’t want to confuse things.”
“It seems like relevant information that we were in the area the day the fire started, and you know, had a fire going.”
“Everybody’s hunting right now. I seriously doubt we were the only people up there,” Jake said. “Did they get more specific about where it started?”
Outside the window, snow blew by. I wondered if it melted down to water when it neared the flames or went straight to steam.
I said, “I don’t understand why we shouldn’t at least tell them we were in the area.”
Jake chewed the skin by his thumbnail. “What’s the damage looking like?”
I tried to keep my voice even as I told him about the historical society. I like old things. I like people trying to preserve what’s past. We’d driven by it on our way back, and I’d wanted to stop. It was a beat-up, whitewashed, one-room schoolhouse, worn and Western in exactly the way that used to catch me up. The real-life evidence of our costume drama. The papers said some photographs had been on loan to the neighboring library, so at least they were saved.
Jake came around the table. He held my head against his belly and stroked my hair. I let him take me upstairs.
I WOKE IN the night, surprised I had fallen asleep at all. The maple out back banged against the house, and the moon was white across our bed. The wind had carried the snow to someplace else. Jake pushed himself up next to me. We sat side by side, cross-legged under our bright comforter.
“I can’t remember putting out the fire,” I said.
“You did. I saw you.” He rubbed his face. “Listen, it’s like this out here. Things burn.”
When we bought the house, Jake told me settlers had planted the maples to remind their East Coast wives of home. I suspected the men holding the money planted the trees for their own benefit, and I didn’t see why they were the settlers while their wives were just wives, but I hadn’t asked questions. I liked his story, the snug nesting boxes he built for us.
“Show me exactly where we were on the map.” I swung my legs out of bed, but Jake put a hand to my back.
“You know they fine like a million dollars for this kind of thing? Is your inheritance gonna cover that too?”
“Seventy-two cows,” I said.
“Jesus, what an overdeveloped sense of guilt. I bet you’ve eaten that many in your lifetime anyway.” His mouth stayed tight but his eyes lit for a moment, pleased at his own humor.
“There’s something wrong with you,” I said. “You’re morally deficient.”
Jake chewed at his thumb. The maple drew wild, shifting lines across our legs. From the beginning, I’d believed that when we peeled back the cowboy and the whore, the waders and Wranglers and whiskey, at the center we’d be there, together, outlines bold and clear.
Here we were.
“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s get drunk in some motel room out in the middle of nowhere.”
I went downstairs to look at the map alone.
IN THE MORNING, I showered and dried my hair, put on a nice sweater, and drove to work at the doctor’s office. I parked in the lot but left the engine running. When I called Debbie, the other receptionist, to say this fever was still going and would she be willing to cover for me again, she said, “Oh, honey. You bet.”
I drove with the heat on and the windows cracked, winter hitting my face. A few miles out of Big Timber, I smelled it. Since moving out west, I’d gotten used to the summer fire season, the heavy air and blurred sun, the headaches and the lethargy. Hanging in the cold sky, this smoke smelled different. It smelled cleaner, more benevolent, like campfire. I followed the haze up the smaller highway that Jake had taken. It got thicker, and the smell did too. Near Melville, I stopped the car and pushed open the door to watch ash fall around me, like snow.
No one was at the spot where the historical society used to be. Its charred stubs rested on charred ground, protected by yellow tape and a fine white dusting. I’d expected crowds and urgency, something I could help with, maybe. A ranger to tell me they’d found the culprit and guess what, it wasn’t me. I picked at the loose threads of my coat cuffs. My throat got small. I wondered how long it would be before the tall grass moved back in, remembered gold stalks closing behind that bear. I took a little burnt-up stick and put it in my pocket.
THE DIVORCE WAS about as cut-and-dried as those things get. He’d wanted to drive to Reno, pull some Merle Haggard if-we’re-not-back-in-love-by-Monday stunt, but I insisted we file in Bozeman: I was done with country romance. He kept the house, and I kept what was left of my inheritance. I flew to San Francisco, stayed with Liza until I got my feet on the ground.
THIS WAS ALL years ago. My second husband and I live down in L.A. now. Is that what I ought to call him? Current husband? Forever husband? We have good friends, a 1920s cottage, a garden filled with drought-resistant plants. He’s a screenwriter, and I’m a specialist at an auction house. I got the long-intended art history degree, fulfilled the familial destiny. I never became a vegetarian. When the forever husband asks me for a Montana story, I know what he’s looking for. He wants horses and high plains. He wants me in Dale Evans drag, suede skirt swinging.
I tell him about a DMV where everyone is pleasant and the entire errand, whatever the errand may be, takes only half an hour.
That winter—after the fire, before the divorce—I retreated indoors. I spent hours googling wildfires, negligence, fines, then made sure to clear the search history so Jake wouldn’t see. I could feel him tugging and pushing at my edges, trying so hard to fit us back into the people we thought we were. By the time the rivers melted, he settled on his official response—talking points about the lodgepole pine and fire-dependent ecosystems—and I stopped bringing up the fire.
Once, I drove to the police station and sat outside in my car. I told myself I’d follow the first person I saw go in, then the third, then the fifth. I watched people move in and out until my fingers went bloodless and yellow on the wheel. When I started the engine, I believed it was for Jake.
Once, I put an anonymous tip in an envelope and stood in our kitchen with the glue’s dry sweetness on my tongue. Out in the yard, matted grass showed through the thaw. Bear, ground squirrels, artifacts, cattle. I lit the envelope in our sink. Fire shot up so fast I had to jump back, and my fingertips felt hot and solid where I’d held on too close. I smelled the match, but no smoke. The flames ate the paper down to a curled ghost.
Maud Streep is from Nyack, New York, and lives in Brooklyn. A 2017 NYC Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, Djerassi, and Yaddo. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana.
ABOUT THE JUDGES
JODI ANGEL is the author of two story collections, The History of Vegas and You Only Get Letters from Jail, which was named a Best Book of 2013 by Esquire. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her short story “Snuff” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She lives in northern California with a pack of dogs.
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH is a Nigerian writer born in the UK and currently living in Minneapolis. She won The 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the John Leonard Prize, and was named a “5 under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation for her debut story collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s M
agazine, Granta, Catapult, and other publications, and she has received grants and awards from Commonwealth Writers, AWP, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and others.
Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island–based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and the story collection Intimations.
ABOUT
THE PEN/ROBERT J. DAU
SHORT STORY PRIZE
FOR EMERGING WRITERS
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes twelve fiction writers for a debut short story published in a print or online literary magazine. The annual award was offered for the first time during PEN’s 2017 awards cycle.
The twelve winning stories are selected by a committee of three judges. Each winning writer receives a $2,000 cash prize and is honored at the annual PEN Literary Awards Ceremony in New York City. Every year, Catapult will publish the winning stories in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories.
This award is generously supported by the family of the late Robert J. Dau, whose commitment to the literary arts has made him a fitting namesake for this career-launching prize. Mr. Dau was born and raised in Petoskey, a city in Northern Michigan in close proximity to Walloon Lake where Ernest Hemingway had spent his summers as a young boy and which serves as the backdrop for Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring. Petoskey is also known for being where Hemingway determined that he would commit to becoming a writer. This proximity to literary history ignited the Dau family’s interest in promoting emerging voices in fiction and spotlighting the next great American fiction writer.
LIST OF PARTICIPATING PUBLICATIONS
PEN America and Catapult gratefully acknowledge the following publications, which published debut fiction in 2017 and submitted work for consideration to the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.
805 Lit + Art
African Voices
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
American Chordata
Apogee
Atlantis Short Story Contest
The Baltimore Review
Bellevue Literary Review
Black Warrior Review
Bomb
The Brooklyn Review
Carve Magazine
The Chattahoochee Review
The Cincinnati Review
Cleaver Magazine
The Collagist
Conjunctions
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores
Cosmonauts Avenue
Crab Creek Review
Culture Trip
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Epiphany
Epoch
Evergreen Review
Exposition Review
Fields
Fifth Wednesday Journal
Fireside
Fiyah
The Forge
F(r)iction
Fugue
FWJ Plus
Glimmer Train
Gravel
The Greensboro Review
Harvard Review
Hunger Mountain
The Inquisitive Eater
Jelly Bucket
J Journal
Joyland
Juked
Kenyon Review
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
The Literary Review
Longshot Island
The Malahat Review
The Massachusetts Review
The Masters Review
McSweeney’s
Moonchild Magazine
The Moth
New England Review
New Limestone Review
Nimrod
Ninth Letter
NOON
North American Review
One Story
One Teen Story
Outlook Springs
Oxford American
The Paris Review
Philadelphia Stories
Ploughshares
A Public Space
Reckoning
Recommended Reading
Rigorous
The Rumpus
Slice
Somesuch Stories
Sonora Review
Straylight Magazine
Subtropics
The Sun
Tennessee Bar Journal
Tin House
The Tishman Review
Tupelo Quarterly
Washington Square Review
Western Humanities Review
Wigleaf
Witness
PERMISSIONS
“1983” by Elinam Agbo. First published in The Baltimore Review, Fall 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Elinam Agbo. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Bellevonia Beautee” by Lauren Friedlander. First published in The Rumpus, April 12, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Lauren Friedlander. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“New Years in La Calera” by Cristina Fríes. First published in Epoch Volume 66, Number 3, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Cristina Fríes. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Appetite” by Lin King. First published in Slice Issue 21, Fall 2017/Winter 2018. Copyright © 2017 by Lin King. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Zombie Horror” by Drew McCutchen. First published in The Baltimore Review, Spring 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Drew McCutchen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Six Months” by Celeste Mohammed. First published in New England Review Volume 38, Number 1, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Celeste Mohammed. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Brent, Bandit King” by Grayson Morley. First published in The Brooklyn Review, Spring 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Grayson Morley. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Crazies” by Maud Streep. First published in One Story Issue 234, November 14, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Maud Streep. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Black Dog” by Alex Terrell. First published in Black Warrior Review, Fall/Winter 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Alex Terrell. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Videoteca Fin del Mundo” by Ava Tomasula y Garcia. First published in Black Warrior Review, Spring/Summer 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Ava Tomasula y Garcia. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Candidates” by Megan Tucker. First published in Washington Square Review Issue 40, Fall 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Megan Tucker. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Stay Brave, My Hercules” by Ernie Wang. First published in McSweeney’s Issue 51, December 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Ernie Wang. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. The organization champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Its mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
PEN.ORG
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1 Dvera I. Saxton, “Strawberry Fields as Extreme Environments: The Ecobiopolitics of Farmworker Health,” Medical Anthropology 34, no. 2 (2015): 166–83.
2 Statement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement public affairs officer on the massive hunger strike at Hutto Detention Center, trans. Rankin Kenrya and Yirssi Bergman, “Why 27 Women in Hutto Immigration Detention Center Won’t Eat,” ColorLines, October 29, 2015.
3 Questions based on those asked by Homeland Security border patrol agents at the border patrol station in McAllen, Texa
s, when a migrant is first detained and the agent (usually without a translator) takes a “sworn statement” to determine if the person entering the country can be immediately deported or not. From the author’s work with the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) at the Urban Center for Justice.
4 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press), 1996.
5 Letter from Lilian Oliva Bardales, held in Karnes Detention Center, June 9, 2015.
6 Declarations of detainees from a human rights report published by the American Immigration Council, “Hieleras (Iceboxes) in the Rio Grande Valley Sector,” December 2015.
7 “Why 27 Women in Hutto Immigration Detention Center Won’t Eat,” ColorLines, October 29, 2015.
8 Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA). “The Connecticut Wage Theft Crisis: Stories and Solutions,” March 2015.