PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  Copyright © 2017 by Catapult

  All rights reserved

  Please see Permissions on page 209 for individual credits

  eISBN: 978-1-93678-769-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941699

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Yuka Igarashi, series editor

  TELL ME, PLEASE

  Emily Chammah

  from The Common

  GOLDHAWK

  Katherine Magyarody

  from The Malahat Review

  GALINA

  Angela Ajayi

  from Fifth Wednesday Journal

  1,000-YEAR-OLD GHOSTS

  Laura Chow Reeve

  from Hyphen

  EDWIN CHASE OF NANTUCKET

  Ben Shattuck

  from Harvard Review

  A MESSAGE

  Ruth Serven

  from Epiphany

  THE HANDLER

  Amber Caron

  from Southwest Review

  THE MANUAL ALPHABET

  Samuel Clare Knights

  from Fence

  STATE FACTS FOR THE NEW AGE

  Amy Sauber

  from The Rumpus

  THE ASPHODEL MEADOW

  Jim Cole

  from The Summerset Review

  SOLEE

  Crystal Hana Kim

  from The Southern Review

  A MODERN MARRIAGE

  Grace Oluseyi

  from Boston Review

  About the Judges

  About the PEN/Robert J. Dau

  Short Story Prize for

  Emerging Writers

  Permissions

  Introduction

  “Best” is a funny label to put on any piece of art; it requires contesting. Whenever a jury of more than one person gathers to choose winners for a prize anthology like this, it’s typical to hear how embattled the selection process was, how hard it was to come to a decision. So it’s surprising, and interesting, that for this inaugural edition of PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, our three judges agreed on the final twelve stories easily. “I don’t think I can emphasize enough how similarly minded we were,” Marie-Helene Bertino wrote. “It was the most satisfying judging experience ever.”

  This doesn’t mean the other stories they considered—150 of them, nominated at the end of last year by the editors of print and online magazines around the world—were not worthwhile. “Every story was good,” Nina McConigley wrote. “A lot of people talk about how so many short stories are becoming too workshopped, too MFA, too a certain kind of story. All I can say, after reading all the entries, is they are wrong.”

  But what made the judges stop and single out the works collected here? I think the word “stop” is important, actually. It’s an idea that came up a few times in their comments. These were stories that caused an interruption; they arrested. Here’s Marie-Helene:

  When I read, I’m always (like it or not) guessing what's going to happen at the end of the line, the scene, on the plot level. The stories we chose were those that forced me, a relentless overthinker, to stop thinking.

  It’s also important that what these three readers felt when they stopped thinking was not immediately pleasant. Marie-Helene was “roundhoused” by some of the stories; Nina mentioned being “upset.” Here’s Kelly Link:

  When I sit down with a short story, I’m hoping to be surprised, or unnerved, or waylaid. The best stories are almost otherworldly in their dimensions, as if I have opened a suitcase left on my front door, only to find three geese, a small child, a jewel thief, and her mother emerging.

  Just as I am by the contents of Kelly’s suitcase, I’m waylaid by what I find inside this book. Each story starts by taking me somewhere vividly specific and, each in its own fascinating way, precarious. In Emily Chammah’s “Tell Me, Please,” it’s a city in Jordan where a teenager is secretly Facebook-messaging a cousin she’s in love with. In Amber Caron’s “The Handler,” it’s the woods of New Hampshire where a man, his daughter, fifty-seven dogs, and their handler are training for the Iditarod. In Angela Ajayi’s “Galina,” it’s an exclusion zone near a nuclear power plant in Ukraine where a woman and her aging mother sit in a kitchen drinking tea, looking at the enormous leaves of an irradiated cherry tree.

  They go on to reveal unsettling depths. Missing fathers haunt the postwar landscape of Serbia (Ruth Serven’s glancing, evocative

  “A Message”) and of eighteenth-century New England (Ben Shattuck’s exquisitely detailed “Edwin Chase of Nantucket”). In two masterful stories, two women—Dinara in Katherine Magyarody’s “Goldhawk” and Anu in Grace Oluseyi’s “A Modern Marriage”—conceal reserves of strength and cunning beneath their self-effacing exteriors.

  These are debuts that ask a lot of their reader: to sense what’s unwritten in the time gaps between scenes in Jim Cole’s disquieting “The Asphodel Meadow”; to accept that memories can be pickled in jars like vegetables in Laura Chow Reeve’s mournful “1,000-Year-Old Ghosts”; to see language in an entirely new and beautiful way in Samuel Clare Knights’s “The Manual Alphabet,” the only story I’ve ever read told partly in American Sign Language.

  Even the more straightforward-seeming narratives offer their own challenges. They leave room for mystery. “Solee” by Crystal Hana Kim inhabits the instantly endearing point of view of a young girl with a crush on a family friend—but what do we really know about that family and that friend? “State Facts for the New Age” by Amy Sauber follows a sardonic, recently dumped middle-school teacher as she inexorably and very entertainingly unravels, and yet it’s hard to tell whether she’s saved or doomed in the end.

  There’s much more to say about how each story accomplishes its singular disturbance, but I think it’s the original editors of the pieces who have the best insights about that. They are the ones who first discovered and published these stories in their own magazines, and then submitted them to this prize. Their comments about why they made their choices are included with the stories, and to me these notes are themselves arresting, revelatory.

  Every editor will tell you that the most rewarding part of her job is reading a writer she’s never read before and being moved to share this stranger’s work with others. Somehow, though, getting to this moment involves patient, private hours of doing other things, and also of resisting the constant call to do other things—for example, to read writers she already knows, writers that someone else already knows, or writing that leaves her with more familiar feelings. To not be disturbed. I think of this collection as a celebration of editors as much as it is of the new writers they published, because in different ways they are engaged in the same task, which is to gather together and put a frame around some small part of the world. Look at this.

  It sounds like a simple task, but it isn’t. There are many things to look at and time is limited, for every one of us. It’s not always easy to decide what to pay attention to, what to value—in other words, what to love. I am grateful to our collaborators at PEN America, to the Dau family, to our judges, to the magazine editors who brought us these twelve writers, and to all editors and writers for stopping to do this work. And I’m grateful to you, the reader, for doing it too.

  Yu
ka Igarashi

  series editor

  Editor’s Note

  Emily Chammah’s “Tell Me, Please” is a love story that is a triumph of subtlety. All the concentrated yearning of adolescence is contained in these pages, provoked by everyday events and conversation. Amal, the younger daughter in a traditional Arabic family living on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, reminds us how intensely we observe our families to learn how to live, and how painful it can be to desire to break from expectations. Amal’s increasingly complicated understanding of intimacy with her cousin Omar is woven against the warm backdrop of a loving family, and these pressures, from without and within, crystallize in piercing hopes and disappointments. Chammah’s language is rich, detailed, elegant, and specific; not for a moment do we forget whose mind and heart we are embodying. It was a privilege to encounter this story again and again through the editing process, and to publish it for others to dwell in Amal’s world and relish all of its keen sensation and life.

  Jennifer Acker, editor in chief

  The Common

  Tell Me, Please

  Emily Chammah

  I wouldn’t say that Omar is my best friend, because I like to think we are closer than that, that there is something bringing us together more than any friendship could. While it is true that he is my cousin, I never feel as connected to the others—to Muhammad or Nour or Ahmed or Anais—or even to my older sister, Sousan. They don’t know, for example, that I prefer to drink my orange juice without sugar, that I’d rather eat falafels straight out of a paper cone than smashed inside a pocket of bread.

  Omar’s mother and mine are sisters, and every afternoon before our fathers come home from work, they visit in the family’s sitting room with sugary tea and cigarettes. Omar and I sit on the carpeted floor at their feet. We draw pictures of pigeons and kites, or turn the pages of my father’s atlas, making up stories about the kinds of people who live in Greece and Turkey and Japan. For us, everyone is like our parents, drinking thick cups of coffee and praying five times a day. The differences between one people and another are often small and silly—Omar once said that children in Japan wear only yellow shoes and orange socks, and I once said that the women in Greece wear crowns of leaves on top of their hijabs. We roll on the carpet and laugh until our mothers tell us to hush, sending us to the roof, where we try to smoke the cigarettes we’ve pinched from their purses and practice calling our own azans.

  Omar and I write each other notes in English, a language our parents cannot read. The letters are too rigid, too angled for them to see properly. My mother doesn’t know the difference between l’s and i’s, and though my father knows a handful of words—hello, thank you, no, yes—he hasn’t tried to sound out letters on a page since he was in school many years ago.

  Which is lucky for Omar and me. We can tell stories and share secrets and dreams without the risk of being found out. But our English is weak, we do not know as many words as we do in Arabic, and, because of it, our secrets aren’t really secrets at all.

  Hello, sir! My name is Amal. What is your name? I once wrote.

  Or, Jordan: The Diamond in the Desert, which is something I saw the only time my mother and father took me to Amman. We had visited the Citadel and the Roman Theatre and sipped cups of lentil soup from a cart. As we walked back to the bus station, we passed a travel agency whose posters and signs were in English, and I saw the beautiful description written on a postcard. How true, I thought to myself, though when I tugged on the fabric of my mother’s dress to show her, a taxi hit a man crossing the road, and everyone’s attention turned to the old man, his body still, and the driver, standing nearby, holding his head between his hands. A crowd began to form, and a young man selling newspapers covered the body with the day’s news, with King Abdullah waving to all of us from the front page. Now, whenever I bring up that day, my mother shakes her head and says, I swear to God I will never go back to Amman.

  

  Once, Omar wrote, My mother has green eyes and I have brown eyes. But my eyes are brown, not his. His are the color of honey, liquid and warm like molten gold.

  Another time: My name is Omar. It is nice to meet you, Miss Amal. This note I keep under my pillow, though sometimes, after Sousan turns out the lights, I like to unfold the square of paper—now soft from all of my handling—and hide it under my pajama top, next to my skin.

  Eventually, Omar and I stop spending our afternoons together. We no longer take the long route to the market where we buy mint for our mothers’ tea; we no longer whisper into each other’s ears stories about people from faraway lands.

  It is indecent, my mother says. What will the others think?

  I say, They will think that we are cousins, that we are friends!

  Heat radiates from my cheeks.

  No, habibiti, she says, shaking her head. No, they will not. You are a woman now, and he is becoming a man. It isn’t proper for you to be alone with him.

  But, Mamma, I—

  I don’t finish my sentence, because my chest is pounding and my face is wet.

  Sousan adjusts the hijab she’s just wrapped around my head. She curls her arms around my waist, rests her chin on my shoulder. Don’t worry, Amal. You’re one of us now. He’s just a silly boy.

  That’s not true! I say, and storm into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I stare into the mirror, into my own eyes, bloodshot from the tears. My lips are swollen, my stomach churning. Sousan and my mother knock on the door, try to coo me out, but eventually let me be.

  

  How strange it is to rethink your understanding of a person overnight. How strange it is to go to bed a girl, and wake up a woman. How strange it is to feel like everyone around you knows your secrets.

  Oh, Amal, what is it you hope for?

  Where, in the whole wide world, would you like to go?

  What do you think of when you are alone?

  These are the kinds of things I wish Omar would have asked me.

  Omar grows, and so do I.

  I no longer know, for example, if he plays soccer in the street. I do not know if he prefers meat over chicken, his coffee sweetened or plain. I do not know if he remembers our stories about people in foreign lands, if he looks back on those orange afternoons with the same fondness I do.

  I’m not going to say my decision to study English was purely motivated by Omar. It wasn’t, of course. But I will say there was a time when English felt like a secret, a sacred thing only we shared. I will say there was a time when I thought that if I were to study as best as I could, if I were able to speak and write clearly and beautifully in this language so different from my own, that no matter how much we would change or grow apart, Omar and I would still be connected.

  Omar’s mother and mine continue to visit every afternoon. I still join them on the carpet, though now I’m the one to make the tea—with sprigs of mint in the summer and velvety ears of sage in the winter. Now, I don’t hide the fact that I know how to hold a cigarette, that I am able to pull a column of smoke through my teeth without coughing.

  Where did she learn this? Aunt Hanan asks. She is clever, this one.

  I blush, and return to my book.

  Is it possible she tells Omar this about me? That I continue to sit at her and my mother’s feet, though instead of reading my father’s atlas, I read Dickens and Wilde and Woolf?

  Yes, she is clever. But don’t tell her father about the cigarettes, my mother says.

  Or the books.

  Aunt Hanan laughs, and so do I.

  My father isn’t opposed to my reading; no, not at all. It is more that he doesn’t like me to read something he cannot himself. So, he insists that for every book I bring home, I also find a translation in Arabic, one that he can skim or read along, if he’d like. (Though he doesn’t often like.)

  One afternoon, Aunt Hanan walks in overflowing with joy, ca
rrying plates of kunafe and flaky pastries soaked in rosewater.

  Omar, she explains, has been given a scholarship to study at the University of Jordan. He is going to study medicine, become a doctor.

  We all embrace and sing praises of Omar. Omar, the one with perfect marks, the one with the kind soul, the one with honey eyes.

  But where will he live? my mother asks. Not in Mafrag?

  My heart falls into my stomach.

  What is it, my dear Amal, that you want?

  No, no, of course not, Aunt Hanan goes on. They will pay for a dormitory in Amman.

  My mother shakes her head. Inshallah he will be safe in that city, she says.

  

  Before Sousan is married and moves to the other side of town, she and Ahmed are able to visit once a week for thirty minutes, alone.

  He brings her chocolates.

  He brings her small teddy bears.

  He stands nervously in the guest sitting room, waiting.

  My mother watches when they first greet. They shake hands, lean their bodies close to each other. He hands her flowers, she beams. My mother, holding a wooden spoon, pats me on the small of my back.

  Let them be alone, she tells me, nodding toward the door that separates the guest space from our family’s. But be sure to listen.

  She turns off the television and returns to the kitchen, where she prepares a tray of snacks and juice.

  The thing about Sousan having time alone with her fiancé is this: While they could be kissing or touching, at any moment, anyone—me or my mother—could enter through the sliding door. And, since the front door does not lead to the family’s quarters but to the guests’, my father, scheduled to arrive home any time now, could walk in.

  And, if he caught them embracing in any way, it could mean that the wedding would be off, that ties would be severed between the families, that a war might ignite within the clan.

  No wonder Ahmed is nervous.

  I tell my mother that I’ll keep my ears open, but, to be honest, it doesn’t matter much to me. They’ll be married soon enough, and when we slide the door closed and my mother retreats into the back of the house, all I can think about is the thirty minutes I will have, alone, on the computer.