Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Your Father Sends His Love’ by Stuart Evers

This story – about events leading up to the death of comedian Bob Monkhouse’s estranged son – socked me in the stomach when I read it and Evers’ description of the cheap Thai hotel where the son dies of a heroin overdose left a lingering bruise: “He liked the clatter of the next-door cafeteria, the low honk of voices, the pouring of liquid, the flames and the fire.” ‘Your Father Sends his Love’ is the title story from Evers’ second collection; almost every story is about a father who loses his child in some way; none of the fathers’ stories are simple, and none are allowed the luxury of self-pity. Because I did not grow up in the UK, I had to learn who Bob Monkhouse was from a search engine; the sad comedian and his doomed son existed for me only in Evers’ world of fiction.

First published in You Father Sends His Love (Picador, 2015) You can find Stuart Evers’ blog here.

‘Treats’ by Lara Williams

“Treats could save a person,” the protagonist in this story, Elaine, thinks. But her life is filled with empty pizza boxes, birthdays unacknowledged by those around her, a job making coffee and filing papers for others. Elaine tries to look on the bright side though: her pleasure when the man at the sandwich shop throws a French tart in her bag, the joy she gets from anonymously buying a cinema ticket for the young woman in the queue behind her. Still, you realise Elaine’s just scrunching up her eyes, not wanting to see how bad the big picture is. And because she is so deserving of something more, you find yourself wanting to scrunch your eyes up too. I came across ‘Treats’ in Best British Short Stories 2017 (it is also in Williams’ debut collection). This is the story that has stayed with me the most from this year’s anthology, hovering around like a vulture.

From Treats (Freight Books). Also available in Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt). You can find Lara Williams’ website here

‘Elba’ by Abraham Rodriguez

All of Rodriguez’s stories in his first collection, The Boy Without a Flag, are set in the desolate and destroyed South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s, when cheap strong heroin was everywhere on the streets, apartment buildings succumbed to arson and accidental fire, and America’s poorest congressional district (located next to the richest) literally looked like a war zone. Elba is a teenage girl wanting a normal courtship. “Danny took her to the empty lot on Fox Street. Their sneakers struggled over jutted bricks and crackling wooden beams while a red sun splattered the sky and filtered through gaping windows.” Two years later, Elba is a mother in an almost empty apartment, abandoned by her parents and young husband, trying to drown out the sound of the crying baby. The scariest thing in this story isn’t anything that you read; it’s what you don’t read, what you imagine will happen.

From The Boy Without a Flag (Milkweed Editions), originally appeared in Story Magazine, November 1999.

‘The Mysteries of Ubiquitin’ by Andrea Barrett

Rose is eight years old when she first meets, Peter, an entomologist in his late 20s. Her parents laugh at her passionate crush on their dashing and charismatic contemporary, but Rose is furious that she’s not taken seriously. More than two decades later, Rose runs into Peter in an airport. She is a celebrated biochemist, he is less accomplished, and the connection they feel to one another is intense and reverberates – it is rooted in their shared history as well as a contemporary attraction. It is easy for them to begin a relationship, but Rose begins to see what their age different means as time goes on. “When she returned to Boston Peter had bronchitis and emerged from the shower hacking and coughing, each cough making the loose flesh around his nipples shimmy,” we’re told. Their parting – just like their coming together – is complex, bound up with other memories and other griefs that (like ubiquitin) are ubiquitous.

From Servants of the Map (W. W. Norton & Company). You can find Andrea Barret’s website here

‘The Ant of the Self’ by ZZ Packer

All the stories in ZZ Packer’s debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, are mesmerising. In this one, a teenage boy is dragged along to the Million Man March — 1995’s gathering of African-American men in Washington, D.C. – by his self-absorbed and reckless father. Along the way, they stop in Indiana to pick up some macaw parrots, which the father plans to sell during the march. The father’s sometimes girlfriend, Lupita, has looked after (and grown fond of) the birds. “You are never thinking about what Lupita feels!” the girlfriend shouts, as they take the macaws. The boy thinks she’s going to come after him and his father when they take the birds, “but all she does is plop down on her porch step, holding her head in her hands.” And so the men continue on to DC, with the macaws echoing phrases they have learnt. When the boy is let down by his father again and sits alone in a DC train station, he watches another father and his son who have come to the march: a man who treats his toddler son with playful tenderness.

From Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books), originally appeared in The New Yorker, November 25, 2002 and available online here

‘N2’ by Zoe Wicomb

A well-off white couple are driving back to Cape Town from a winery tour in Rondebosch on the N2. It is the mid-1990s, the Apartheid regime recently ended. In Crossroads, the black township that the highway cuts through, a group of young men are beginning their initiation ceremony. “The bush,” explodes a mother, when she hears where her son will go as part of the initiation. “Call that strip along the N2 a bush? Just a rubbish scrap of trees left there to keep our place out of sight.” Themba, the son, can hear the white couple who have pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway above him, cursing because they are unable to deal with a tyre puncture. When Themba climbs up onto the highway, they panic and pull a gun on him. Once he persuades the couple he can change the tyre for them, he helps them, then finds himself asking them for money. I first came across this story when Zoe Wicomb read it to an audience in Cape Town, and I can still hear her reciting the words that echo in Themba’s head as he approaches manhood: “Please sir please madam have you please got some rand some rand some rand…

From The One That Got Away (New Press), originally published in Stand, August 1999

‘Beisbol’ by Richard Elman

In Managua in 1978, a journalist watches a group of teenage boys playing baseball. It is many years after the earthquake, but the city still lies in ruins. The boys have grown up in shanties among the rubble – their pinstriped uniforms, with their names and numbers printed on them, are incongruously new and clean. One day, the journalist notices that the boys are all gone, replaced by younger boys wearing the same uniforms with the same names and numbers on them. The uprising that will turn into the Nicaraguan revolution has begun. The boys that were playing baseball have become combatants; the younger boys are there to act as decoys so that the military and security forces will think that life is carrying on as before. Elman is a fiction and feature writer who went to Nicaragua on assignment for Geo Magazine, arriving as the conflict there began to peak; he had no experience as a war correspondent. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction set in Nicaragua during and just before the revolution. In ‘Beisbol’ his journalist narrator looks back and notes that: many of “the Nicaraguan ‘boys of summer’ … died fighting in the streets of Managua, Esteli, and Matagalpa. Some are minor bureaucrats of the new regime. Some married, some went abroad to join the Contras, or remain uninvolved, draft dodgers in Miami, Houston, or San Jose, Costa Rica. ‘Beisbol’ was published ten years after the baseball players would have gone to battle, when the hopefulness of those fighting the dictatorship was long gone, and the US-sponsored civil war had left most Nicaraguans to deal with brutal violence and grinding poverty.

From Disco Frito (Gibbs Smith), originally published in Syracuse University Magazine, December 1988, and available online here