‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by ZZ Packer

“Sharp episodic phases of people” is a good description of this beautiful tale, the title story in ZZ Packer’s only collection to date, and which I came to through a 2018 episode of Backlisted in which Nikesh Shukla had chosen it as the main book. All eight stories are knockouts, but this one stayed with me because it manages the seamless movement from humour to pathos: one of the hardest literary transitions of all. Dina is a black A-student from Baltimore in her first year at Yale. A flip remark during an orientation game gains her a year’s worth of psychiatric counselling, she withdraws into her room, until Heidi, a white girl “dressed like an aspiring plumber” ends up sobbing at her door. Their friendship crackles with repartee and slowly deepens: they sleep together but don’t have sex. In the stories central set-piece, they strip and hose one another down in the dish room at the college dining hall they have just cleaned. Dina recognises her love for Heidi in that moment: “I sprayed her and sprayed her, and she turned over and over like a large, beautiful dolphin, lolling about in the sun”. This briefly promises to dissolve all the tensions of race, class, sexual orientation and body-consciousness that threaten them, but we know it can’t last. It isn’t until near the end of the story, when Heidi has come out as queer and Dina has let her down, that we see where Packer is taking us. Dina imagines them meeting again and consoles herself with the thought that: “In that future time… your words can always be rewound and erased, rewritten and revised.” Except they can’t, save in stories, of course. Which is why we write them and why we read them. I really hope ZZ Packer writes more.

First published in The New Yorker, June 11 2000, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003

‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn’ by Alice Jolly

My last five choices are all stories I’ve read for the first time in the past year. Often new stories fade, but not these. Alice’s story was selected for the prestigious O Henry Award in 2021, an annual collection of the year’s twenty best stories published in the US and Canadian magazines. It is an unforgettably powerful account of a real event – the Cavan Orphanage fire of 1943 in which 35 children and one adult died. There’s a particular responsibility in imaginative reconstructions of historical events and Alice weaves a compelling narrative out of her research, much as she did in her historical novel, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, which Unbound published in 2019. It reconstructed the inner life of a servant in mid-19th century rural Gloucestershire in the form of an exquisitely written monologue. ‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn’ uses a similar device – but to reveal much more would risk spoiling the story’s devastating cumulative impact. Suffice to say, the description of the progress of the fire scorches off the page: I think it’s destined to become a classic. It also prompted me to ask Alice if she had enough stories to make a collection – she did and that book – called From Far Around They Saw Us Burn – is currently funding on Unbound and scheduled for publication in Summer 2023.

First published in The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Jenny Minton Quigley, Anchor Books, 2021 and available to read here

‘Nostalgie’ by Wendy Erskine

This story is taken from Dance Move, the smoking hot second collection by Wendy Erskine. As in many of her stories, it begins with a beguilingly simple premise. Drew Lord Haig, a one-hit wonder from the eighties – now just Drew Haig running a successful IT company – is asked by a battalion based in Belfast if he’ll come and sing at their centenary celebration. Unexpectedly, one of his B-sides, a “nihilistic affair” called ‘Nostalgie de la Boue’ – meaning the attraction to what is depraved or degrading – had become the battalion’s anthem. He is flattered, and after a cursory search of the battalion’s history on Wikipedia agrees to perform. Often in Erskine’s stories, it is these small moments of vanity or sentimentality which become the cracks that let in the pain and so it is here. The past – particularly Belfast’s troubled past – has a way of infecting the present. The performance hits a magnificent crescendo with the whole hall – “which resembles a downbeat high school prom” – singing along. They know every word; Drew is genuinely moved by the passion in the room. It is only afterwards, still buzzing as he drinks at the bar, that he learns the true dimension of his mistake. Erskine is the least sentimental of writers and she refuses to spare Drew his discomfort. His pretentious song title becomes self-fulfilling; our sympathy is limited. No one is writing better stories than Wendy Erskine.

First published in the Irish Times, Feb 17, 2022 and collected in Dance Move, Picador, 2022

‘How to Gut a Fish’ by Sheila Armstrong

Another astonishing short story collection from Ireland; another writer finding an arrestingly original way to write about the way the past disfigures the present. This is the title story from Armstrong’s debut collection and it is divided into twenty-seven numbered paragraphs in which the second person narrator, kills, guts, cooks but fails to eat a mackerel. The precision of the descriptive language (“the black tube of intestine, the white swell of swim bladder”) is counterbalanced by the associative swell of unconnected thoughts (“Nothing you do tonight will make you retch, you try to convince yourself”). As the boat bobs on the sea waiting for a rendezvous, dread mounts. Despite our best intentions, our attempts to do things in the proper order, life has a way of undoing us. “Look your fish in the eye: they say the last thing a man sees is imprinted on his pupil. You check every catch this way for your own reflection, but there is only a dark hole of fright.” To say more would be unfair: just read it. This is a magnificent story. In the acknowledgements, Armstrong says she is a member of a writing group called ‘Chekhov or Fuck Off’. Love her.

First published in the collection How to Gut a Fish, Bloomsbury Publishing 2021

‘A Day in the Dark’ by Elizabeth Bowen

I only discovered this story last week when Tessa Hadley recommended it during our discussion of Bowen’s novel The Death of the Heart on Backlisted. In her introduction to her own selection of Bowen’s stories, Hadley calls it “a brilliantly suggestive scrap of a story” and so it proves. I’d read and enjoyed other Bowen stories before our discussion, but this one packs a novel’s worth of emotional insight into a few short pages. Set in a small Irish town, the fifteen-year-old Barbie is sent by her uncle to return a magazine to his brother’s widow. The conversation that runs between the young girl and old woman reveals to Barbie that she has fallen in love with her uncle, while simultaneously destroying her innocent enjoyment of it. “My conversation with Miss Banderry did not end where I leave off recording it. But at that point memory is torn across, as might be an intolerable page.” When she next sees her uncle: “He was not a lord, only a landowner. Facing Moher, he was all carriage and colouring: he wore his life like he wore his coat”. The pain of the door to her childhood slamming behind her is still fresh in the narrator’s heart and mind: “Literature, once one knows it, drains away some of the shockingness out of life. But when I met her I was unread, my susceptibilities were virgin. I refuse to fill in her outline retrospectively: I show you only what I saw at the time. Not what she was, but what she did to me.” That’s what only the greatest stories do, and I’m delighted to have been introduced to this one.

First published in Botteghe Oscure, 1955 and in the collection A Day in the Dark and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1965 and available in Selected Stories, edited by Tessa Hadley, Vintage Classics 2021

‘The Last Heat of Summer’ by Percival Everett

I’ve become addicted to the work of the American writer and academic Percival Everett. He has a near-magical capacity for combining absurd humour and with trenchant political satire, and for reconciling clever literary experiment with the simple pleasures of character and plot. To attempt to summarise what happens in this unnerving story runs the risk of making it sound silly or pretentious. Let’s just say it’s set in 1962 in a small town in the American southwest and that it is divided into twenty sections, each set on 1 September. Our narrator is the only child of a black family; his best friend Errol is a Kiowa Indian. They watch coyotes, catch fish, discover a cave full of bats, try to track a mountain lion. At one point the narrator kisses Frannie Dawes, which causes some friction between the boys. Then the circus comes to town… I’m obsessed with this story. Everett has delivered a fable that builds through repetition so that by the end the resonances he creates are deafening. Our failing relationship with nature, the stain of slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the sudden logic of violence, the fragility of family life. It’s about all these things and none of them. My kind of short story.

First published in Ploughshares, Spring 2003, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Damned If I Do, Graywolf Press 2004/Influx Press, 2021

Introduction

A raven on a bust of Pallas. A giant cockroach. A gun on a wall. So many images from ‘classic’ short stories (of one literary tradition, anyway) loiter in the imagination. Visions which have escaped their original boundaries to become, well, iconic. Motifs. Craft short-hand for specific techniques or structures, or simply images so powerful they lodge in the mind’s eye long after the plot has resolved, the page turned, the book relegated to the dusty corner of the shelf.

A confession. With the classics, I don’t always get these shorthands, these shared symbols. Without the background of formal study of The Short Story, I still need time to explore the canon(s). But even in a few brief years of my writer-reader pootling around in the form, I realise I’ve already collected an array of images which linger: from those so-good-you-could-frame-it ‘shots’, to reframed realities, to just darn clever ways of writing the visual. So, for my anthology, I thought I’d let you see what I see…

‘Rain’ by Eloghosa Osunde

Wura Blackson designs dresses specific to the pains of each client. “The sharper the pain, the more dramatic the fabric; the deeper the cuts, the louder the sleeves; the weightier the story, the more precise the tail.” Fashion as healing, beauty as distraction from sin. The Lagos élite queue “the length of two anacondas” for her creations. She has the adoration of the ruling classes, the loyalty of her clients (of all genders). Yet she will never, ever, repeat a design. This is a brand so tantalising the reader wants to elbow in the door, to visit this tired and dying Oracle before it’s too late.

And yet the image that floored me in this story is the little detail of where the clients go when Wura refuses their custom: she has Security escort them to “the crying room”. A place where those refused can lie on imported Italian sofas in the smoky dark, with noise-cancelling headphones so as not to hear each other weep. With this “crying room” Osunde makes space – on the page, and in the imagination – to map a site of exclusion from the fictional world she’s just created.

By building this room she strengthens the overall story, and grants a deeper kind of power to her protagonist (who, we find, remakes her world in many ways). There’s so much more to this story – Wura’s daughter, her impending death, doubt and duty… but those people weeping in the dark are always there. Osunde is a glorious storyteller, with so many pieces like this which witness rooms and realities and bodies and obsessions which so many refuse to see.

First published in Catapult, February 2021, and available to read here, and collected in Vagabonds!, Fourth Estate, 2022

‘Cauliflower is Just What Happens to Broccoli When it Dies’ by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow

Wife is holding cauliflower skull in her palms, cutting into it, and trying not to think about how it has lobes. Hemispheres. A stem.

Writers of flash fiction are expert users of space. Powerful images can make an impact, but arguably (“discuss”) you must still provide a story, some change in character or reader, so there’s a real balance needed of economy, structure, focus. The words you choose to build the image must do a lot of work, carry a lot of weight, and yet still feel seamless and original.

This is a story about a wife struggling to prep and cook cauliflower. It is also about loss, and death, and how we interpret the look and feel of the world around us. It’s about trying to see each other’s visions of the world, and how we bridge those gaps with our loved ones, even when it hurts. Holding on; holding each other. Picking up the knife.

First published in Jellyfish Review, 2022, available here

‘Bulk’ by Eley Williams

There is a heart there big enough for me to lie upon and sleep and not touch the rocks if I curled up with my knees tucked under my jaw.

I like socially observant writers: those with a sharp eye for absurdities, an ear for the fall of different kinds of silence, a feel for the heated cheeks of the unsaid. I like very clever writers too: people who can play with words, tease them and weave them into a seriphed wink. But to find someone who can blend those talents with such gentle compassion for the queer delicacies of the world…well, that’s a rare treat. Enter Eley Williams. Yet with such a wordsmith it’s important not to forget her exquisite imagery. Fighting pelicans in Hyde Park. Boiling birds for haute cuisine. Unfortunate walrus videos.

The beached whale of ‘Bulk’ lies stubborn in my mind. It sits heavy across the entirety of the story, the characters’ thoughts and actions and interactions clambering on and around it. It’s a physical space to anchor the gathering crowd’s fears and foibles. Its silhouette contains overlapping symbolism, and decaying certainties. It is also just too big a thing, an awkward affront, an interruption to the way things are (“do you think we can push it back?”).

To balance a story in, on, and around such a beast should be tricky. Williams makes it look effortless.

First published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Monologue of a pirate ship that doesn’t have a figurehead, or maybe it did, long ago, but it’s hard to tell now because its bow is encrusted with these ossified clam shells and barnacles, which, during a storm, scuttle about and open up and scream, as though they had mouths’ by Jiaqi Kang

Even the title makes an awe-inspiring vision.

Everything about this piece is exquisite, a raw and raging kind of beauty. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it – okay, first person narration from the perspective of a ship, that’s clever – the author just keeps troubling our certainty of what that perspective should or could be. In one line we feel that tumble and flip: “my captain shares his rum with me and sometimes falls out of his bed so I can feel his skin”. Worlds turn. Hearts wring. And then in the full breadth of horizons and materials and uses and abuses, come sudden gaps and blank spaces: “I know that the color purple exists, though I have never seen it”. A story of love and loyalty. Poetry on the page.

Published in X-R-A-Y, 2021, and available to read here

‘The Factory by The Sea’ by Joseph Fink

A pattern is made up of many parts. ‘Factory by the Sea’ lives in my head as a perfect stand-alone short story, despite being an early chapter of a longer audio drama. A truck driver (voiced by Jasika Nicole) makes a delivery to a strange ugly factory on a beach. She enters, but only sees one worker at any one time: the same worker, only progressively older as she moves through the rooms. Revelations about the factory (“machine after machine, Alice. Imagine the scale of them. Picture it for me”) – and the true nature of the trucker’s delivery and thus, complicity – are alternated with her memories of her missing wife, and their own rituals: more human, more colourful, more crafted with love. This story is all iterative process, parts into parts, an unthinking making. All themes which Fink introduces for us early using form: repetition and the juxtaposition of grey mundanity and red warning.

There was a young man there. Very young – 18, at the most. Probably less. Probably less. The kid was wearing this gray factory jumpsuit with the company’s logo on it in red. The logo was a dog cringing in pain.

The factory becomes its own symbol of unavoidable destiny: a process of self-created endings, and a final image which clicks into place with a terrible oh. Question upon question of what parts make a whole life, and a life whole.

Episode 4 of Alice Isn’t Dead, Night Vale Presents, 2016. Available here, and transcript here

‘Folk Noir’ by Helen McClory

“Spies smile with fresh eggs held out in one hand, a pistol in the other.

Genre is created and sustained with careful choice of images: cues, views, intertextual nods. Yet the fiendishly talented Helen McClory toys with our constructed boundaries in this six paragraph story: her ‘hard-boiled’ detective narrator (“take a drink. It ain’t tea in that cup”) dropped into rural countryside to create an air-punchingly perfect ‘folk noir’.

“There was code here. It said always close the gate behind you. It said don’t trust anyone but yourself”.
McClory takes the symbols of stone and gates and fen and darkness and imbues them with a sly deviance, heavy with threat and guile. The final image focusses our threat into the danger of a liminal locale: “And nothing in this places flickers like a match struck”.

In Mayhem & Death, 404Ink, 2018

‘The Hares’ by Frederico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft

For a different idea of how incongruence – or overlap – plays out, have a read of the opening story of this excellent collection, and how it uses shape. The opening paragraphs suggest a strange place of myth: a ‘king of the hares’ finishing his coffee, moving through forest and meadow to an altar, upon which he places new offerings of feather and bones. Then the hares arrive and “[line] up in a half-circle”. It’s a fabulous little detail: in just a few words we have not only a suggestion of order imposed on an otherwise wild landscape, but the creation of a stage. What unfolds there is a curious and beautifully written (and translated) tale which moves further and further away from the tranquillity of the opening sentences.

Collected in A Perfect Cemetery’, Charco Press, 2021, and first published in Spanish in Un cementerio perfecto, Eterna Cadencia, 2016