by Laura Furman
But the most captivating trait of the story, for me, is the voice—it comes from the belly of a timeless and placeless place, from the nowhere/everywhere where fables get forged. Its authorless authority means that its demands, which are great, must be met within the sphere of its own rubric and logic. That’s a lot to ask of a short story, which is to say, this story asks a lot of itself, but it succeeds prodigiously. The starting point here is a mother’s love writ as spectacle, as atrocity: love and madness as bedfellows in a tiny bed.
We say that a mother’s love is all-consuming, but here, we see it enacted almost in reverse—the love is the children, embodied in the figures of Rosa, Marco, and Dolly, and the love is a hunger, a sickness, something threatening, so that Leonora’s only mode of survival is to try to eat them. First, in playful nibbles, and gradually, in fervent, frightening bites. When they, along with her husband, leave her, the radios that used to bring her comfort start taunting her—through the static she hears the whinny of their voices, “cuddled up together in one frequency,” as though they have formed a team against her.
After the children’s quick, tragic death—dying as they lived, as a unit—Leonora’s hunger becomes a feral grief. She turns more and more animal, “humped with ursine fat,” “bearlike,” “panda-eyed,” and pronounces herself dead. But her hunger outlives her, gnaws like a second animal within her. To quell it, she turns to bread, that first, fundamental food: “Yeast, warmth, sweetness, a very child.” The pared-down language manages to stay rich and evocative without cushioning or embellishing Leonora’s anguish. The challah is as vivid as if it were painted and comes as much as a palliative to us, the readers, as it does to Leonora—“the sheen of the egg wash, its placid countenance.” Her ritual, buying and eating a daily loaf, soothes her, saves her—which is what all of our rituals are meant to do.
Perhaps the most satisfying element of this story occurs toward the end, when Leonora sits face-to-face with the father of the girl who killed her children, along with herself, in the car accident. Unkempt, unhinged, unwanted, Leonora sees in this broken, polite, civilized man a shard of her own reflection. Her way of reaching out toward it is to reach for more bread, giving it to him in an effort, it seems, to both massage and aggravate her own agony. It is an invitation to partake in the feast of her misery, or to create from the crumbs of their collective sadness a trough where they may feed side by side. Leonora recognizes that if she “accepted his sympathy she would have to feel sorry for him. She would have to transcend”—but she is unwilling to do this, unwilling to rise over and above the pain that has forged her, the children who have nourished her. And so the question becomes—and it’s such a good one, for a short story, since short stories have long been saddled with the burden of redemption—what if someone doesn’t want to be saved? Leonora’s transformation is not static but rather infinite, holographic—from human into monster, monster back to human. For some of us, and certainly for her, sorrow is the beginning, the denouement, and the end.
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Kristen Iskandrian was born and raised in Philadelphia. She received her BA from the College of the Holy Cross and her MA and PhD from the University of Georgia. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Memorious, La Petite Zine, Fifty-Two Stories, PANK, Tin House, and many other places, both in print and online. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
Michael Parker on “Cabins” by Christopher Merkner
Since I read and comment upon stories to put bread on my table, I am forever making lists of Things I Need for Stories to Do in Order to Win Me Over. Although the items on my list often change, there are staples, mostly obvious ones: I need to be surprised; I need to be invested in all that is at stake for the characters; I need to be able to follow the access road so that it will lead me, surely and subtly, to the astral plane; I need for the rhythms of the story, in both sentence and form, to convey the desire that drives it. I need to, as Flannery O’Connor said, “feel the extra dimension that comes about when the writer puts us in the middle of some human action as it is illuminated and outlined by mystery.”
“Cabins” satisfied all my requirements. It had me by the third line. The slip into present tense from the established past, the sudden truncated rhythm of the sentences, the repetition of certain words: Something’s up here. Sit up, slow down, pay attention. On the first read my footing was unsure. The numbers preceding each section might imply linearity, but the story roots around in the manner of memories involuntarily assembled. The structure perfectly mimics the narrator’s anxiety. He has a lot to be anxious about. He and his wife of six years are expecting a baby. He’s recently had a heart attack and bypass surgery. He is involved in a lockdown while visiting a prison, during which he witnesses an inmate kicked repeatedly in the head. Everyone he encounters—most of them acquaintances rather than close friends—is getting a divorce.
“Cabins” is not short on dramatic action, but the deepest and most satisfying tensions occur when the reader, along with the narrator, attempts to construct some logical narrative from these disparate scenes. Of course the narrator is a step ahead—he has, after all, selected and distributed the interactions and details of the plot. But he’s also confused, aimlessly in search of assurance, if not certainty, that his marriage is safe. When he visits the prison with a former neighbor who has started a therapy group for “inmates who were, had been, or feared they would soon be divorced by their partners or spouses,” he listens to his neighbor thank the prisoners for “their willingness to ‘see the world beyond love.’ ” The narrator, so aware and fearful of the fragility of marriage, attempts to see the world beyond love, but his fantasies of a remote cabin where he might live apart from his wife are, however distracting, ultimately empty.
All of the above makes the story sound terribly serious. In fact, it’s a scream, though our laughter is of the uneasy variety. The narrator has ridiculous conversations with his friends in hookah bars and on basketball courts. The details of the narrator’s imagined cabin are hilariously absurd. The narrator and his friends are melodramatic if not bathetic, but their inflated emotions arise out of their vulnerability.
What moved me most about “Cabins” was the way its shape offered resolve from a situation forever unresolvable. There are no glib attempts at answers here, only the mysterious transformation of doubt into brittle but vigilant faith.
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Michael Parker was born and raised in North Carolina. Twice an O. Henry Prize winner, he is the author of two story collections and six novels, including, most recently, All I Have in This World. He is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He lives in North Carolina and Texas.
Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015
The Writers on Their Work
Molly Antopol, “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story”
My relatives love to tell stories, but the one place I never heard about was Antopol, the Belarusian village, virtually destroyed in World War II, where my family originated. A little more than a decade ago I was living in Israel and wound up at a holiday party in Haifa where I met an elderly woman from Antopol who had known my family. It was an extraordinary moment in my life. She led me to an oral history book about the village, written in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. The moment I finished reading it, I began working on this story.
But it ended up taking me almost two years to get the story where I wanted it to be. I read every memoir and biography of partisan life near Antopol that I could get my hands on, spent months in different archives, and traveled to Eastern Europe to visit partisan bases and conduct interviews. But it was only when I realized, after more than a year of wrestling with the story, that the tension in the piece was as much about why the granddaughter was so obsessed with these dark periods of history (a question I’ve been struggling to answer about myself for years) as it was about the war that the story really cracked open for me.
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Molly Antopol was born in Connecticut and raised in California. She was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees, and her debut story collection, The UnAmericans, was longlisted for the National Book Award. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and is at work on a novel. She lives in San Francisco.
Russell Banks, “A Permanent Member of the Family”
Sometimes a work of fiction can be too closely based on reality. I wanted to write this story decades ago, when my children were young and their parents’ divorce was still a fresh and painful memory for everyone involved. But the accidental death of the family dog, the central event in the story, as I understood it back then, was too punishing, for me as much as for my children and ex-wife. So, yes, it actually happened pretty much as the story has it. But I had to wait until all the principals had forgiven one another before I could subject the material to the pressures, needs, and requirements of fiction. Perhaps I also had to wait until I could forgive myself, so that I could imagine the father as a sympathetic character without sentimentalizing or judging him.
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Russell Banks was born in Massachusetts. He is the author of eighteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Lost Memory of Skin, as well as six short-story collections. Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was New York State Author (2004–08). He lives in Miami, Florida, and in upstate New York.
Lydia Davis, “The Seals”
I had written a very different version of this story five years earlier, much shorter and angrier in its tone. The general situation was the same: the narrator, presumably an office worker of some kind, traveling by train on Christmas Day and musing on her older sister and Christmases past. But I allowed her to be—as she seemed to want to be—narrow and resentful, unwilling to admit that she was angry with her sister for dying.
Although the story was effective in that form, I was not satisfied with it—I felt it could be larger in every sense, more generous in spirit and embracing more of the positive as well as the negative in her memories of her sister. It could also extend further back in time, to include the years when she was much younger. And so I decided to write a longer story based on, or starting from, the shorter version. I let it grow quite freely. What surprised me then was that, as though unbidden, the narrator’s father, who had died soon after the older sister, entered the story too, as though of his own accord, so that as the story evolved it embraced the two of them, and even their relationship, as the narrator imagines it, after death. It is most moving to me, as a writer, when that happens—when a piece of writing goes in its own direction, of its own volition.
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Lydia Davis was born in Massachusetts and grew up there, as well as in New York City and Vermont. She is the author of seven collections of stories and one novel, The End of the Story. She is also the translator of many works from the French, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and, more recently, from the Dutch, the stories of A. L. Snijders. She is a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, and she was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit medal and the Man Booker International Prize, in 2013, among other honors. She lives in upstate New York.
Percival Everett, “Finding Billy White Feather”
This story grew out of my short time living in Wyoming and on the Wind River Indian Reservation of the Arapaho and Shoshone peoples. While there I listened to the way mundane stories can become spiraling tales. I am always interested in how language and stories shape identity. I never say what I have meant to do in a story because that doesn’t matter. Meaning gets made over and over again, differently each time depending on the reader and the circumstances of the reading. This is an obvious and pedestrian idea, but no less exciting for that fact. I will say that for me the birth of the twin horses in the story is the most intriguing part. Make of that what you will. I like horses.
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Percival Everett is author to more than twenty books, among them Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. His latest story collection is Half an Inch of Water. Everett lives in Los Angeles.
Lynn Freed, “The Way Things Are Going”
Almost everything I’ve written seems to center around place and displacement, home and exile. I don’t know how to account for this story other than to say that South Africa is a country that has always been fraught with irony. And that of all the people I know in post-apartheid South Africa, of any race, there is not one who has not personally known someone who has been murdered. Their stories haunt me. And so does what becomes of them when they decide to leave.
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Lynn Freed was born in Durban, South Africa, and came to the United States as a graduate student. Her books include six novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of essays. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Narrative, Southwest Review, and The Georgia Review, among others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two O. Henry Prizes, and fellowships, grants, and support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. She lives in Northern California.
Becky Hagenston, “The Upside-Down World”
My husband and I were in the South of France in 2010, visiting friends who live in Aix-en-Provence. We took a bus to Nice and wandered around that bright, gorgeous city—we swam in the Mediterranean, walked in the heat to the amazing Chagall museum, had an insanely overpriced drink at the Le Negresco hotel bar. We were walking down the Promenade des Anglais—the beach boulevard—and witnessed the aftermath of what looked like a horrifying accident. All we could see was a smashed car windshield and a woman’s shoe. I kept thinking: Who was that person? Could she possibly be okay? Later that day, we found out that a couple staying at our B & B had been pickpocketed in broad daylight and had to go to the embassy in Marseille to get new passports. Everything suddenly seemed so precarious, so dangerous, even in that beautiful city.
I took a lot of notes, but all of this information and strangeness was completely unfocused for a long time. I tried to write about a couple in the South of France—first a young married couple, then an old married couple—but nothing happened until I realized they were middle-aged siblings. Why would middle-aged siblings be in Nice? That’s when the story took off. When Gertrude’s bag disappeared from the beach, I needed to know who took it, and that’s how Elodie came about.
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Becky Hagenston grew up in Bel Air, Maryland. She received her BA from Elizabethtown College and graduate degrees from the University of Arizona and New Mexico State University. Her first collection of stories, A Gram of Mars, won the Mary McCarthy Prize; her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories 1996. Her awards include the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Julia Peterkin Award. She is an associate professor of English at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi.
Naira Kuzmich, “The Kingsley Drive Chorus”
When I was growing up in East Hollywood, a lot of young men from my Armenian community were finding themselves in trouble. These were cousins, neighbors, classmates. This story was born out of the love I had for the mothers of these boys, women I had long admired and feared in equal measure. Because I was so young, there was much I was unwilling to ask these women and much they were unwilling to tell me. I was forced, then, to wonder. Now I still wonder, but also imagine. Now I write and try to empathize. Only now have I begun to understand.
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Naira Kuzmich was born in Yerevan, Armenia, and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, West Branch, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She lives in Missouri.
Elizabeth McCracken, “Birdsong from the Radio”
On the most basic level, this was an assignment: The wonderful Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review, asked me to contribute to a collection of stories based on myths. For a long time I cast around wondering what myth I might choose. Many of the myths that really meant something to me seemed too obvious—Icarus, for example—and then one day my children suggested that my New Year’s resolution might be biting them less. They said this in a cheery way, in the same cheery way, in fact, that I bit them, a progression from the usual way a lot of parents threaten to eat their babies up. Before I had children, I’d always found this proposed cannibalism unfathomable, but now: Well, I never sunk my teeth in when I bit, but I would bury my face in their necks and know that at some point they’d grow out of it and I never would and they were the ones who got to decide. I got to thinking about Lamia—I’d loved the rather glamorous Keats poem about her—and when I read more and learned that in some versions she was a woman who’d gone mad from grief after the death of her children, and therefore turned into an animal, well, it all made sense to me. Also: I’d always wanted to write about the end of the trolleys in my childhood neighborhood.
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Elizabeth McCracken is the author of two story collections (Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry and Thunderstruck & Other Stories), two novels (The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again), and a memoir (An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination). She teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Austin, Texas.
