Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Read online

  There was the unceremonious discarding of the double bass, which MacHale had said he would come back for but which instead became the property of a disadvantaged District high school’s music department. MacHale’s left-behind shirts and pants, the ones he wore to gigs, a spare collection of twenty or so all-black garments, were swept from the master closet and sent to the Salvation Army. MacHale’s Copper Pony went down the toilet and the bottles into the trash can, leaving the bar cart empty. For a short time they lived as in a sanitarium, every word anyone spoke echoing disconcertingly off the bare walls.

  It did not last. Soon enough Lee filled the closet with more clothes of her own; the extra space seemed to give her the feeling that she could now acquire as many impractical garments as she wanted, new things from department stores and all the leftover inventory from the consignment shop. Bolts of cloth found all over the place, wrapped around her body in ridiculous ways but still drawing street whistles that burned her sons’ ears. She began wearing her turquoise Afro pick again, sometimes in her hair, sometimes tied to a length of cord and worn above her cleavage as a statement necklace. She spray-painted the bar cart magenta and gold and filled the top half with the priciest of each kind of spirit, the bottom with bottles of wine brought to the house by her consignment-shop employees and other friends when they visited.

  She collected stacks of papers that nearly reached the ceilings. Recipes torn from health magazines; drawings the girls did that she could not bear to throw away; Miles’s and Theo’s schoolwork, which miraculously had not lapsed. When mail arrived bearing MacHale’s name, she quickly spirited it away, envelopes and all, to places unseen, sometimes returning the most boring contents—old invoices, typewritten correspondence from the city—to her stacks of papers. Lee’s treatment of MacHale’s more personal mail infuriated Miles: sometimes he’d see the scraps of ripped-up letters in the trash can and want to explode.

  Once she opened a check from MacHale and laughed aloud as she crumpled it into a ball before Miles’s horrified eyes.

  If I threw this on the ground, it would bounce right through the ceiling, she said with a cackle, dropping it into the pocket of her carnelian skirt.

  There was no more jazz; she played terrible music on the tape player and then on the CD player, and cheered the children through their homework with that imbecilic tambourine.

  Look what I found! she crowed one day, and to Miles’s horror she pulled from her satchel two sets of hand cymbals to give her daughters. Their small hands barely fit into the straps, but they screamed with happiness anyway, filling the room with noise.

  SHE GAVE MACHALE’S entire vinyl collection to a man she met at work, and for the first time in a while Miles and Theo had something to talk about.

  She gave Daddy’s records to that guy, said Miles, barging into Theo’s room and finding him there with his head in a textbook. I think they might be dating or something.

  Theo lifted his head, looking sick. Oh, that’s nasty, he said.

  A silence hung between them. After a time, Miles cleared his throat. Do you ever, he asked carefully, think about that one time when Daddy sent us with her to Safeway?

  And then bought us the Nintendo.

  Yeah.

  Yeah.

  MILES HAD DECIDED immediately upon receipt of MacHale’s only letter to him that he would neither mention nor show it to Theo. It went on for five pages and did not once mention MacHale’s younger son, nor either of his daughters. The return address, to which Miles sent multiple overeager replies, had turned over to another renter mere days earlier, with no hints as to where MacHale might have gone. Anyway, the letter itself was more than good enough, even the revelation of seeing MacHale’s quirky handwriting up close an unexpected joy. Whatever unease he had felt seeing it inked on Theo’s arm was repaired by knowing its less-than-honorable origins.

  Their exit loomed. “Will Lauren and I see you again soon, then?” asked Miles, flicking on his turn signal.

  “Don’t know,” said Theo.

  Miles thought of Mariolive, who by Lauren’s report was holding on to her shithead college boyfriend even though she should know better by now, all those letters after her name. Maybe they’d be hitting Safeway again soon, for her.

  Into the shabby, wire-crossed neighborhood, he steered the car. Beside him, Theo was silent but alert, scanning the boxy little houses of Lee’s neighbors, his phone inert in his pocket.

  The grass was freshly cut, a touch that struck Miles as the work of a much craftier adversary than all the sloppy past boyfriends. A dog, chained to Lee’s wrought-iron fence and unsurprisingly not wolf-size, slept under Mr. Signet Ring’s black sedan. Its collar was turquoise and spattered with glitter and seemed to have sprouted a number of multicolored feathers.

  They retrieved the cardboard boxes from the trunk and walked shoulder to shoulder up the walkway, Theo hunching just the tiniest, barely perceptible bit, which Miles appreciated. A hideous summer foliage wreath hung from the front door, and the faintest four-on-the-floor seemed to pulse through a downstairs window.

  Both brothers lifted their fists. Theo dropped his, and Miles knocked.

  Lee herself opened the door, a fuchsia scarf tied around her silver-and-copper hair. The synthesized sounds of disco music flooded out into the front yard, rousing the dog. Shades of excitement and then concern passed over her expressive face in an instant. “Boys?”

  Behind her, sitting on the couch in veritable purple jeans, the Post spread out before him, his ringed little finger keeping time against the edge of the newspaper, sat Mr. Signet Ring himself, looking at the brothers with only mild curiosity.

  “You,” said Theo, maintaining eye contact with the boyfriend as he stepped around his mother, while Miles began the work of containing her in the foyer. “We need to talk to you.”

  Shannon Sanders is a Black writer and attorney, and a graduate of Spelman College and Georgetown University Law Center. Her fiction appears in One Story, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, SLICE, Strange Horizons, Joyland, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 finalist for One Story’s Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship and has placed in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award contest. Find her at ShannonSandersWrites.com, on Twitter @ShandersWrites, and on Instagram @i.exaggerate.

  ABOUT THE JUDGES

  TRACY O’NEILL is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. She has been named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and awarded the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and VQR. She attended the MFA program at CCNY and the PhD program in communications at Columbia University.

  NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and an Audie Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, and BuzzFeed Books. She teaches creative writing at Cornell University.

  DEB OLIN UNFERTH is the author of six books, most recently the novel Barn 8. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, VICE, Tin House, The New York Times, NOON, and McSweeney’s. An associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She also teaches creative writing at a penitentiary in southern Texas.

  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 America’s 2017 Literary Awards cycle.

  The twelve winning stories are selected by a committee of three judges. The writers of the stories each receives a two-thousand-dollar cash prize and is honored at the annual PEN America Literar
y Awards Ceremony in New York City. Every year, Catapult will publish the winning stories in Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize.

  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 fiction writer.

  LIST OF PARTICIPATING PUBLICATIONS

  PEN America and Catapult gratefully acknowledge the following publications, which published debut fiction in 2019 and submitted work for consideration to the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

  805 Lit + Art

  Alaska Quarterly Review

  American Literary Review

  Anomaly

  Apogee Journal

  The Bare Life Review

  Barrelhouse

  Belmont Story Review

  Black Warrior Review

  bluestockings magazine

  Boston Review

  Cagibi

  Carve

  Chicago Quarterly Review

  The Cincinnati Review

  Conjunctions

  CRAFT

  Cricket

  Deep Overstock

  deLuge

  Doek!

  Driftwood Press

  Dryland

  Emrys Journal

  The Fiddlehead

  F(r)iction

  Foglifter Journal

  Granta

  Into the Void

  Hawaii Pacific Review

  Hot Metal Bridge

  The Iowa Review

  Jelly Bucket

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  The Literary Review

  The London Reader

  The Meadow

  Menacing Hedge

  Michigan Quarterly Review

  Mount Hope

  New England Review

  The New Guard

  New Ohio Review

  October Hill Magazine

  Orca, a Literary Journal

  Outlook Springs

  Oyster River Pages

  Paper Darts

  The Paris Review

  Puerto del Sol

  Quarterly West

  The Rumpus

  The Rupture

  Scribble

  So to Speak Journal

  The Summerset Review

  The Threepenny Review

  Trouble Child

  Vestal Review

  Washington Square Review

  The Write Launch

  ZYZZYVA

  PERMISSIONS

  “Bat Outta Hell” by Damitri Martinez. First published in Foglifter 4, no. 1 (April, 2019). Copyright © Damitri Martinez. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Cats vs. Cancer” by Valerie Hegarty. First published in New England Review 40, no. 1 (March 2019). Copyright © Valerie Hegarty. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dog Dreams” by Sena Moon. First published in Quarterly West, no. 97 (2019). Copyright © Sena Moon. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Don’t Go to Strangers” by Matthew Jeffrey Vegari. First published in ZYZZYVA 35, no. 115 (April 2019). Copyright © Matthew Jeffrey Vegari. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Evangelina Concepcion” by Ani Cooney. First published in Epiphany 15th Anniversary Issue (Spring/Summer 2019). Copyright © Ani Cooney. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Failure to Thrive” by Willa C. Richards. First published in The Paris Review no. 231 (Winter 2019). Copyright © Willa C. Richards. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Gauri Kalyanam” by Kristen Sahaana Surya. First published in The Rumpus (August 14, 2019). Copyright © Kristen Sahaana Surya. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Good, Good Men” by Shannon Sanders. First published in Puerto del Sol: Black Voices Series (March 12, 2019). Copyright © Shannon Sanders. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Madam’s Sister” by Mbozi Haimbe. First published in Granta (June 24, 2019). Copyright © Mbozi Haimbe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Other Child” by David Kelly Lawrence. First published in The Threepenny Review 39, no. 4 (December 1, 2018–March 1, 2019). Copyright © David Kelly Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Summertime” by Mohit Manohar. First published in Michigan Quarterly Review 58, no. 4 (Fall 2019). Copyright © Mohit Manohar. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Water Tower and the Turtle” by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton. First published in Granta (September 2, 2019). Copyright © Kikuko Tsumura.

  PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free 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. Learn more at PEN.org.