Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Gail Jones, “Desolation”

This is a deliberately wordy story about unspeakable shame and the silent metaphysics of dislocated experience. In every large city there are diasporic lost souls, and in cities, too, there are pleasure seekers and wanderers. I wanted-with as much concision as possible-to forge a meeting that tips from community, even possible romance, into sudden desolation. The Death in Vegas concert supplies a kind of aesthetic analogy to the struc- ture of the story in its alienated form, its repetitions, and its decontextual-ized images. For all this, “Desolation” is a kind of love story.

Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, The House of Breathing and Fetish Lives , and two novels, Black Mirror and Sixty Lights. She teaches in the Department of English, Communication, and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and lives “in the most remote city in the world,” Perth.

Caitlin Macy, “Christie”

In his introduction to the red book-his Collected Stories -John Cheever wrote, “My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and were often composed aloud.” After I finished my novel it took me a long time to get my short-story legs back. Then one day when I was toiling and sweating to get out some other story, “Christie” came to me almost whole. “Christie came from Greenwich, Connecticut,” I thought, “and that was all anyone knew of her background.” This original first line of the story was later edited for clarity but much of the opening passage remains intact, exactly the same as when I first heard it-“heard” because this was a rare instance for me of the composing aloud that Cheever describes. Because I had a lot of fun writing the story, it amused me that readers’ reactions were largely of the “chilling,” “incredibly depressing,” “disturbing,” “sad,” “scary” ilk-a clear instance of one's story having a life of its own, and one that its author could not have predicted. As for the subject matter, I have always been fascinated by girls like Christie Brue-wald née Thorn who move to New York, dye their hair blond, eat frozen yogurt for dinner, snag a man. I hope my soft spot for the Christie type comes through even the angst-y, bitter, teeth-gnashing voice of the narrator.

I am fond of the story for another reason: it proved to me that the daily forced march over the blank page is not necessarily in vain because inspiration may be more likely to come out of it-out of one's daily work- rather than out of a passive, here-I-am-waiting-to-be-inspired stance, something that I had never clarified for myself.

Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel The Fundamentals of Play. She is at work on a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Spoiled. Macy lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Michael Parker, “The Golden Era of Heartbreak”

This story arose out of the usual straddle: one leg in experience and the other, more weight-bearing leg in a calculated exploitation and exaggeration of same. As always I started with music-the rhythm of the narrator's desire-and landscape-the flat, bleakly beautiful Sound country of northeastern North Carolina. Two other things helped this story along: a Whis-keytown song called “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight,” and the fact that, while writing it, I was training for an Ironman triathlon, and had self-inflicted suffering on the brain.

Michael Parker is the author of four books of fiction, including the novel Virginia Lovers. His short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, The Black Warrior Review, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2002, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parker lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Dale Peck, “Dues”

This is a funny story. I wrote a preliminary version while housesitting in upstate New York for a friend of a friend. I was in the middle of the country with no one around, and I fell into a pattern of sleeping for two or three hours and being awake for four or five hours, so that I’d find myself waking up at three in the morning and reading and writing until eight and then going back to bed-a staccato rhythm echoed in all the starts and stops in the story. I was also reading a lot of Coetzee at the time (Boyhood, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians) and so much of his terseness crept into the story that it ended up stymieing me. I put the manuscript away until July 2002, when, through a tangential impulse, I was inspired to pull it out and rewrite it as a September 11 story. My inspiration was the mining accident in Quecreek, Pennsylvania. Nine miners were trapped for three days after an underground stream flooded the shaft they were working in; by the time rescue workers managed to drill into the shaft it was assumed the miners would all be dead, but they all made it. I think the experience reawakened the sense of helplessness many Americans had felt about not being able to rescue anyone from the World Trade Center, and rechanneled it into the herculean efforts that led to the miners’ rescue, and it's this idea-of looking for someone who's dead but finding someone who's alive-that became central to “Dues.” There's actually a second half of the story planned (or a second story with the same character) which takes place at the site of the mining accident, but that's still in note form, and will probably decide to get written, like “Dues,” when I least expect it.

Dale Peck is the author of three novels, Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures , and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; a memoir, What We Lost; and a collection of essays, Hatchet Jobs. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of New School University. Peck lives in New York City.

Frances de Pontes Peebles, “The Drowned Woman”

The idea for “The Drowned Woman” came to me during a plane ride with my mother four years ago. It was a nine-hour flight from Recife to the United States, and neither of us could sleep. The cabin was dark. A movie played. A few restless people padded up and down the aisle in their socks. I don’t know what triggered her memory, but my mother turned to me and said that once, as a little girl, she and her friends saw an unknown woman washed up on the beach with her arm petrified from rigor mortis. I asked questions, and all my mother said was, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then she fell asleep.

Sitting in that dark plane, I was amazed by the drowned woman, by the stiff arm. But later, I was more amazed by my mother, by the fact that, as a child, she had seen a corpse, washed up and rigid, and had never mentioned it. I started writing about the drowned woman, creating a name and a story for her. After several drafts, the story became less about the woman and more about the little girl.

Frances de Pontes Peebles is a recipient of a Sacatar Artist's Fellowship and a J. William Fulbright Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in Indiana Review and Missouri Review. Peebles lives in Pernambuco, Brazil, with her dogs Oscar, Lorenço, Negão, and Xuxa.

Ron Rash, “Speckle Trout”

When I was a child, I loved to fish the small creek on my grandparents’ farm. Brook trout was the technical name for the fish I caught, but in the North Carolina mountains they were called speckle trout. My grandparents loved to eat them, and I was expected to bring back what I caught for supper. They were beautiful creatures-red and olive spots on their flanks, orange fins-and I always felt some sadness as I slipped them onto my stringer. I was especially haunted by how quickly their bright colors faded. These trout were also rare, found only in small, isolated creeks. As I got older I searched for them in places sometimes a mile or two away from any road, places where a rattlesnake bite or broken leg could have life-threatening consequences. I also ignored a few No Trespassing signs. Unlike the young man in my story, I was never caught, but that fear was always present.