The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  When I am reading fiction, I am not always looking for the political. First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don’t know and need to know about the lives of others.

  One of the first novels I read and recognized as political was Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, a flawed but beautiful, unforgettable story, a sequel of sorts to The Color Purple, that deals with the repercussions of female genital mutilation. It is a novel about grief and trauma, as Tashi, the protagonist, grapples with the mutilation of her body as a young girl and years later trying to live in the world as a woman and wife, trying to make herself whole again. One of the most startling aspects of the story is the graphic way in which Walker details what Tashi endures as a young girl, the sheer physicality and pain of her experience. Because of those narrative choices, I understood exactly where the author stood on the issues she was addressing. This was not just a work of fiction. It was an indictment. It was a condemnation. It was the work of a writer using her craft to take a stand. When I read that book, I wanted to develop the confidence and skill to take such stands in my own fiction.

  In the spring of 2017, I taught a graduate workshop on writing the political novel. I did so because I was still reeling from the results of the 2016 election and couldn’t fathom teaching a regular fiction workshop, pretending everything was just fine when such was not the case. The classroom felt like an ideal place to use my own craft to take a stand. It was a small act of defiance, if not resistance, but I needed to do something. I scrapped my original plan for the course and quickly developed a new syllabus. I was nervous about how students would respond to the course’s theme, having two years earlier taught a fairly disastrous workshop on writing “difference” and encouraging writers to use fiction to create interesting characters beyond their subject position. During that workshop, the students resented what they saw as a restriction of their creativity, and so this time around, I construed the political as broadly as I could without rendering the concept meaningless.

  Our first task was to try to answer the question “What is a political novel?” The truth is, nearly anything could be considered political writing, given the right framing. We did, over the course of the semester, manage to come up with some interesting answers to this question. We identified common themes in political writing—protest, social critique or commentary, engagement with the world as it is and how a writer wants it to be, bearing witness, social responsibility, and, of course, creating accountability for those in power. We read several political novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, all novels that are explicitly political and beautifully crafted. We talked about strategies for balancing political ambitions and finding what Achebe so aptly termed “the felicity of language.” We also talked about the limits of the political novel and how to manage expectations about what literature might accomplish, thinking about the challenging but mindful arguments James Baldwin made in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” where he worried, understandably, about the idea that books could provide salvation simply by existing.

  Alongside this reading, where we explored the political ambitions of each work and what it taught us about writing a political novel, the students wrote political novels of their own. They engaged with the Cuban diaspora, the natural world and its endangered status by way of global warming, how soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress when returning to their lives after war, technology and reproduction, the oppressive cultural norms women navigate, and homosexuality in China. The students produced astonishing work in such a short amount of time. They each wrote a story where something important was at stake for the characters and the world of their novel and the world into which they might someday publish that novel. They did so without compromising the level of craft demanded of a good novel. I couldn’t have been happier with how the workshop progressed and the ways in which these writers were willing to take their own stands.

  As I considered the 120 stories I read for The Best American Short Stories 2018, I thought about this cultural moment and what it means to both write politically and read politically. If writers have a responsibility for how they narrate the world, certainly readers have a responsibility for what they consume and from whom. I wanted to read through these stories with as open a mind as possible, but I also wanted to make sure I was as open to stories from smaller, lesser-known magazines as I was to the reliably excellent stories published in The New Yorker and Granta and Tin House. I wanted to make sure that the diversity of identity was represented in terms of the writers I selected and the stories they told and how those stories were told. Reading for this year’s anthology was as much a political act, and a way of taking a stand, as my writing. I was comfortable reading this way because the excellence of these stories was the one known quantity.

  The twenty stories I finally chose, after no small amount of tense deliberation, are all stories I still remember with distinct admiration, months after first reading them. They are stories that engage with the world and reflect the diversity of the world. They are stories that offer fascinating insights into the human condition and the terrible ways people can treat one another and how beautifully people can love. These writers accomplished great feats of imagination and wrote stories that surprised me in the most unexpected ways. These stories challenged me and reminded me of how vibrant the short story form can be.

  In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans writes a sly, subtle story about friendship and grief, but also about race and youth and small transgressions that become unintended acts of damage and defiance. “Boys Go to Jupiter” is one of the finest short stories I’ve ever read, and it embodies the ways in which fiction can be political without being heavy-handed or unnecessarily didactic. Esmé Weijun Wang wrote the one story in this year’s anthology that explicitly addressed the 2016 election: “What Terrible Thing It Was.” The story is about far more than the election, but it captures so well the chaos and confusion of that November night when so many things changed, while also capturing the chaos and confusion of a woman dealing with mental illness.

  I am always drawn to darkness in fiction, and “The Brothers Brujo,” by Matthew Lyons, did not disappoint with a story about dark magic and two hardscrabble brothers trying to survive their abusive father. The prose is brutal and bold. The story itself made me uncomfortable. It made me cringe. It made me read it three times, four, as it got under my skin. In “The Art of Losing,” by Yoon Choi, there is tenderness and poignancy as the author details a man losing his memory but trying hard to hold on to what he knows and who he is. “Control Negro,” by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, depicts a father using his son in a social experiment to challenge what he knows about race in America. The story is strange but funny in that way where you laugh rather than cry through painful truths. “Everything Is Far from Here,” by Cristina Henríquez, takes on immigration detention centers, where people are housed until the government decides whether or not to treat them like people. Many people are willfully excluded from the American dream because they have brown skin, and this story serves as a necessary reminder. My expectations were brilliantly upended by Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife,” and when I finished the story, I was forced to consider the assumptions I make when I am reading a story and think I know everything I need to know about a narrator.

  In everything I read and ultimately selected for this year’s Best American Short Stories, writers were engaging with the political, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, always brilliantly and creatively. These writers used their craft to take a stand,
and how. They represent the best of what short fiction can be.

  Roxane Gay

  Maria Anderson

  Cougar

  from The Iowa Review

  Our trailer sat on cinder blocks in a half-acre lot a four-cigarette drive outside of town. There wasn’t much else around except Jenny’s trailer and forest that started at the end of the lot and went on for as far as you could see, dim and impenetrable. Dad kept pink healing quartz on the porch steps, rocks he’d found in the deepest parts of forests, back when there was still old-growth forest to be logged. He was a sad, quiet guy. Never argued with me or knocked me around like dads of guys I used to know. We played cards with his old logging friends when they came through town. Summers we shot coyotes in the Rattlesnakes. Slept outside without tents or bear spray. I never felt safer. We hunted elk and deer. I loved having my hands deep inside something just barely dead, seeing what organs and muscles and fat looked like from the inside. Better than any science class. We had a decent, quiet life in that trailer.

  Dad’s logging operation went under. He got even quieter. When he wasn’t sleeping, he would drink Heinekens and sit in the living room, which was really just a wide hallway between the bedrooms and kitchen, and watch the forest through the window. Most dads I knew drank Bud, but mine liked Heineken and was okay with paying more for it. Koda would sit protectively next to him. She was a mute Pyrenees, who like my father was parted from her natural vocation—her ancestral duties were keeping livestock alive—and so cared for us instead, herding our trucks out of the driveway and guiding them back in whenever we returned, that kind of thing.

  What was Dad thinking about when he sat like this? Just going over things in his head? All the trees he’d run chainsaws through with crews of guys from all over, the few women he’d slept with, wobbly nights driving back from Bonner bars with old logging buddies. Dad loved the woods, and, I think, for him, felling the oldest trees in the oldest forests didn’t mean he loved them any less. Maybe he was thinking about my mother, who left when I was two. Maybe he was just watching the trees and not thinking about anything at all. Maybe he was hoping to spot the cougar I’d seen a few times now, the one folks were saying killed Shively’s new colt and came back for the rest of her before they could get her buried.

  Dad disappeared the day I got my senior pictures back. Late April. His wallet on the table with everything still in it, empty Heinekens in the sink. I checked the closet and was relieved to see the rifle and shotgun. His truck was still there, key in the ignition, old Copenhagen cans on the floor, orange juice bottles half-full of his spit, SunChip bags crammed into the seats. I touched the chewed passenger’s-side seat belt where Koda had worked on it all the way home from the pound. I pulled out my senior pictures. I was eighteen, but in them I looked like a kid. A dumb, smiling kid, because when people asked me to smile, that’s what I’d do. I spat on the shiny surface, rubbed the water around, and scratched off all my mouths.

  Search and rescue never found a body. One member of the search committee, a homeless asshole there for the free lunch, pulled me aside and told me it was “them aliens” who took my father, the ones who doodled on all the trees. He pointed at a larch.

  “That’s Dutch elm,” I said.

  He nodded. Licked a yellow stain at the corner of his mouth and wiped the area dry with his sleeve. “Nope,” he said. Before he took off, he pressed fifteen dollars and the Snickers bar from his sack lunch into my hands.

  The rifle was a gentle-looking black .22 semiautomatic. Polymer plastic blend. I associated it with the peaceful feeling of completing a hunt, the comfort of fresh-cooked meat. I carried it into the living room and pointed it out the window, hoping the cougar would choose this moment to stroll through. I peeled off a sock and clicked off the safety and aimed at my big toe. I stood there for what felt like hours, wondering what kind of hurt could come from something small as a toe. I tried to think about all the places Dad could have gone and might still be. Tried not to think about how he might have offed himself, if that’s what he’d done. I clicked on the safety, turned the gun around, and swung it from the barrel like a golf club into my ankle.

  The pain felt like something else in the dark room, dim and sweet.

  For weeks I searched the woods, ignoring my busted foot. Hoping to find what search and rescue couldn’t. Koda followed, licking the scabby blood off my ankle whenever I stopped to rest. She started sleeping in my bed at night instead of Dad’s, arranging herself in the center of the mattress at crotch-level, so I’d have to lie on one side around her or else sleep with legs spread. She’d close her eyes but was awake in a way and watching me. Any time I got up during the night, she’d snap open her eyes and follow me to the bathroom or kitchen, making sure I returned to bed. There her rib cage rose and fell slower than I thought possible. Watching her breathe reminded me of the one girl I’d slept with. I used to watch that girl’s belly go up and down and press my hand into it. Her stomach went concave when she inhaled, and my hand was sucked into her by her breathing. It was strange, pressing my hand into Koda’s long white fur and feeling the same thing. That girl now sold eight-dollar coffee in Williston to creepy oil field guys.

  A hawk or something that sounded like one made a long, ugly noise in the distance.

  In June I went full-time washing dishes at one of Bonner’s worst restaurants, a Chinese place by the interstate. Bonner was an old logging town, population 1,600 and shrinking. Business was usually slow. Even when we were busy it felt slow. And the food was rough. Real rough. Greasy piles of chicken or beef probably slaughtered years ago, thawed and slopped with sauce that left orange residue on the plates. I’d turn down a free ticket to China if anybody ever offered me one. They’d go, “Here, Cal. Round-trip to Beijing. On me.” Thanks, but no fucking thanks. The only places Dad ever traveled were logging camps in Washington and Oregon. Except one time he’d gone to California, where a kid tried to grab his wallet. Hit him in the face with a busted lightbulb when Dad wouldn’t give it up. The bulb nicked the artery in his cheek.

  Washing dishes wasn’t bad. You could go the whole day without talking to anyone if you didn’t feel like it. A lot of jobs weren’t like that—you had to bullshit with customers or your coworkers whether you liked it or not. Here you just stuck in your headphones and everything disappeared. Some days, though, I was happy to have company. I’d smoke a cigarette with the old grandma whose son and daughter-in-law owned the place. She chain-lit stale Montanas she got cheap off the rez, squinching her eyes shut and breathing the smoke in deep.

  Slow days the owners had me drive trash to the Clark Fork and throw it in. They didn’t want to pay for a dumpster. This got me out of the restaurant, but I hated leaving garbage in such a beautiful place. The river was so blue and clear I didn’t have words for it. Dry heat wagged the horizon. I’d smoke on the muddy bank and stare at the water. Once a moose and her calf were drinking from the far shore. I wanted to shoot them, thinking of the nice, oily meat. The calf walked underneath its mom to get to the other side of her, then looked up at her to see if she’d noticed, but the mom was watching me. Other times I’d see what I thought were probably their heart-shaped tracks on my side of the shore, the toes splayed in the mud. After seeing the moose, I threw the trash in the back of my truck to ditch on my way home from work. I’d toss it in one of the abandoned sawmills, where the flies and bees buzzed so loud in the heat that I could hear them before getting out of the truck.

  The owners of the Chinese restaurant, who were actually Korean, kept a quiet shrine on the floor in the corner of the dining room. The shrine had a picture of a sad-looking man with a dented head, a bowl of bruised clementines, and a plastic cat that waved its paw at you. An up-and-down wave. Maybe that was how Korean people waved. The cat waved at you like it was waving away all the stuff you thought about. Like it was urging you not to think, not to worry about being able to buy food or pay rent or feel like you should try to make some friends or have sex again because th
at was what eighteen-year-olds did. I sometimes stole clementines from the shrine. At home I peeled them and gave half to Koda. She’d accept them and gravely spit out the pulpy mess.

  After Dad disappeared, Jenny would come over to pick up the rent. He’d trip on the quartz in the dark and cuss his way up the porch steps. The old Indian had a fat, long, gray rattail that looked like it was feeding on his brain. He lived across the lot in a trailer that was out of earshot but close enough for me to see the shape of him moving around, trimming the bushes around his property, dragging long, limp branches inside for his stove, pounding some skinned animal into the side of his shed. I’d heard Jenny had some kind of cancer, or some other disease. Something eating him from the inside.

  “Met these women on the internet,” he told me once, a few months after Dad left. We were on my porch again. He tucked the rent into the pocket of a grimy, striped T-shirt. His armpit skin was tanned and saggy, but the skin on his face was pale and smooth. I didn’t know about meeting women online. Seemed desperate. If I met a girl, I’d want it to be in person. But then again I wasn’t meeting anyone at all.

  From the restaurant parking lot, I’d sometimes see Jenny pull into the Super 8 across from the Chinese restaurant and sit at the lobby’s guest computer. What kind of picture was he showing these ladies?