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Before longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj works on his writing projects, he seeks inspiration by reading and sharing short stories that are freely available on the web. In 2023, he posted 256 stories to X, tagged with #Longreads, from “The Big Quit“by David Means at Harper’s Magazine to “Bitch Baby” by Helle Hill at Oxford American. Of that 256, here are the 10 he loved most.

“Make it Black” by Andre Dubus III (Narrative Magazine)

Andre Dubus III’s immersive novella is about a couple that lives separately in the densely forested acreage they co-own.

Through the screened windows of her bedroom she can hear them, hundreds, maybe thousands of them munching on the leaves of her oaks and maples and other trees she cannot name, even though she has lived in these woods for over twenty years. It’s after midnight, and beside her in the darkness Michael sleeps, his big hairless chest rising and falling. When they made love earlier, his smooth back had felt like rubber to her and she imagined that he was not real, that this man she’s been seeing for over a year now is just some device she bought to ease her loneliness, to ground her away from the nagging sense that she’s hanging as still in the air as a nightgown on a branch.

Some nights she asks him to go sleep at his own place, and she wished she’d asked him that tonight too. If only so can be alone as she listens to the gypsy caterpillars decimate her trees. Their tiny waste rains down through the branches, and she does not know why she wants to listen to this, but she does.

It is late May and the air coming through the screens is cool. She can smell her magnolias and cherry blossoms but also the broken green of leaves that had only just begun their season, and now a hot anger opens up in her at these tiny fuckers that her husband Kai had warned her were coming again. It had been almost nine years since the last generation of them, and Kai had missed the signs then but not this time.

“I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami (Granta)(Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell)

Hiromi Kawakami has won several Japanese literary prizes and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors. This story’s plot reveals her fascinating imagination.

I came by something strange while I was travelling. This was what Enomoto had said to me about two months ago.

Enomoto is a painter-slash-high school teacher who lives in the apartment directly above mine. We met when we both served on the local residents’ association, and have been friendly ever since. He would call me on the phone every so often and say, I’m brewing some nice coffee. I would traipse up the stairs to Enomoto’s apartment to enjoy his delicious coffee. We would make small talk and then I would trudge back down the stairs and return to my own apartment. That was the extent of our relationship.

Enomoto’s apartment is exactly the same layout as mine, but it has quite a different feel. It’s tidy, for a bachelor’s flat, but what with his painting supplies and his hobby cameras and his magazines on those subjects, there were things all over the place. Interestingly, though, his apartment gave the overall impression of being much more clearly delineated than mine.

Enomoto only ever referred to the coffee that he brewed as ‘nice’. He would grind the beans on a hand-operated coffee mill, and use a cloth filter. Then he would gently pour it into warmed coffee mugs. The aroma and the taste were both extremely sophisticated. Which is why, whenever Enomoto called me for coffee, I would abandon whatever I was doing and traipse up the stairs to his place.

Lately, though, there haven’t been any invitations from Enomoto for ‘nice coffee’. Ever since the call, two months ago, when he mentioned that he had come by something strange, he hasn’t invited me over.

“That Particular Sunday” by Jamel Brinkley (Guernica)

A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s first short story collection, was a finalist for a National Book Award. His 2023 collection, Witness—in which this story appears—has received strong reviews.

There are times when a family has an aura of completion. Remembering such a time feels like gazing at a masterpiece in an art gallery. You might find yourself taking one or two steps backward to absorb the harmonious perfection of the entire image. Or you may be lured by it, drawn to it, inching closer to study every fine detail of composition, the faultless poise with which each element confirms the necessary presence of the others. Take the figure of the son, who hurtles into the foreground of the picture, claiming his position in a web of femaleness, affixing himself to the very center of its adhesive heart, because he belongs there, or so he believes with the wild unblemished certainty of a boy’s imagination. Like everything else in the image, he never changes. Yes, that is my mother, his presence announces. And those are my aunts, he seems to say. And this—of the girl closest to him, her expression as breathless as his own—this is my cousin. My companion. My closest friend. Her soul is the identical twin of mine. The absence of the father doesn’t matter one bit. The absence of the siblings doesn’t matter much either, even though the son will love them hopelessly. Recklessly. They belong to a different elsewhere, a time yet to come, with another father to come, and the circumstances of their lives will frenzy the family, purpling it, cloying it until it is spoiled. Then it will be no different from any ordinary clan. Unpleasant to regard. An eyesore.

“Splashdown” by Jonathan Escoffery (Oprah Daily)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You—short-listed for the Booker Prize and long-listed for a National Book Award—is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami.

The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.

More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.

“The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” by Kelly Luce (Colorado Review)

A new short story by the author of the novel Pull Me Under and the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.

After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would have learned in Jacksonville while married to Carl. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being. The first trade that came up was in Happy, Texas, a town of 603 souls outside of Amarillo. The carrier there was eager to move to Florida to be near his twin grandsons. My new route consisted mostly of cluster boxes I could drive right up to.

Happy’s motto was “the town without a frown.” I set up a bank account at Happy Bank, got my Texas driver’s license at Happy City Hall, and waited for a line of pickup trucks to follow a hearse into Happy Cemetery. I found an apartment on Happy’s main street, Main Street, above an event hall called Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion. The apartment had two bedrooms—plenty of space for my equipment. The stove didn’t work and there were no closets, but the ceilings were high and there was a filthy skylight in the kitchen that Randall, the property manager, told me was put in after a meteorite came through the roof in 1999. The meteorite sold me on the place.

“The Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of the Town” by Manuel Muñoz (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the story collections Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, The Consequences, as well as the novel What You See in the Dark. He received a 2023 MacArthur fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American community of California’s central valley.”   

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves. By spring, he’d return to a pueblito called Pozos, which made everyone ask why he’d go back to a hole in the ground. A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat. That was El Sapo, leaving sometime in early April before the heat came. And then the others would arrive. Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason was several inches shorter than him. Jerónimo, quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio, but nobody knew for sure. Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted that he was the one who had shown the others how to start with a bus in Celaya, take it to the outskirts of Tijuana, and, right over there, at a llantería owned by his old friend Raimundo, you could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo’s old tires and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot, and, if you were smart enough to hide your money, catch a Greyhound to a place called Goshen, where you’d go to the phone booth outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo that you’d made it across. A cousin by way of another cousin. A friend of the family. From Celaya. From Ojo de Agua. From La Cuevita. From Charco Blanco. Yes, yes, of course. A third yes if you promised you had the money to pay a little rent for a month. That’s how Eliseo showed up. And poor Casimiro, who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees with his whole face to see what he was picking. But you’d have to know Spanish to know why all the other men laughed at his name.

“Love Machine” by Nic Anstett (Passages North)

In a doomed world in which robots are taking over, a lonely transgender woman explores her sexuality.

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

“Is it Too Late?” By Pegah Ouji (Isele Magazine)

An Iranian immigrant remembers a retirement community resident she cared for during her early years in in the United States.

The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?

We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.

“Different” by Sindya Bhanoo (The Masters Review)

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. “Different” appears in this collection.

For three decades, Chand gave his Indian graduate students his house keys when he and Raji left town. He told them to relax and use his spacious home as a place to rest and study, to use the hot tub in the back, and the grill, as long as they did not put beef on it. “Sleep in the guest bedroom,” he said. “Escape your dreary apartments.” It gave him pleasure to offer comforts that graduate student stipends could not afford. In his home, students could watch satellite channels like Zee TV and TV Asia and catch up on episodes of Koffee with Karan and Kaun Banega Crorepati. Before Skype and WhatsApp and FaceTime, some students made long distance phone calls from his landline. Chand never charged them for it. He treated them like family, because their own families were so far away.

He had been a graduate student once, in a small town in Montana, tens of thousands of miles away from Vellore, his hometown in South India. Things were different then. When he moved to America, he called his parents once every three months, and was careful to think through what to say before dialing. Back then, calls cost three dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter. He remembered the loneliness, the immense sorrow that came from going months without uttering a word of Tamil. There was no way for him to express certain thoughts, certain feelings, in the English language. He remembered the warmth he felt when the one Indian professor on campus, a Punjabi chemical engineer named Dr. Gupta, occasionally invited him to his home for dinner.

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker)

For Pravesh, this story was love at first read.

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

Check out all of Pravesh’s previous story recommendations:  2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

What does training horses teach you about writing a novel?

Patience. Not to get stressed out. It never pays to get excited around a half-ton animal. It’s not going to calm the animal down, and it’s not going to do you any good. With novels, it is the same thing. Why get stressed about it? And even after you publish it. What if nobody likes it? What are you going to do? Maybe somebody will enjoy the next one.

Are there any rules that you follow in terms of writing? A road map for success or knowing that the project is going where you want it to go?

No, not really. I try to be honest in terms of my vision. I never think about readers — not to say I don’t want to be read. But there’s no profit in imagining some ideal reader when everyone is different. So, I’m the reader I’m trying to appeal to. Which, sadly, explains my book sales. [Laughs.]

What’s the writing routine, the schedule?

I work all the time but only sometimes. It comes from ranching and training horses. I wake up, feed, fix stuff, write for about 20 minutes, train an animal, fix stuff, and write for 20 minutes. Constitutionally, I’m lucky, because when I sit down, I’m immediately working. I don’t have to clear the deck, and I don’t go online, surf the web, or anything like that. I don’t sleep a lot.

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Throughout the year, Pravesh Bhardwaj posts his favorite short stories on Twitter, and then in January, we get to share his favorites with you to enjoy in the year ahead.

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This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Starting with Kevin Barry’s “That Old Country Music” from Electric Lit to Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls” from The Baffler, I posted 276 stories in 2021. Here are the ten I most enjoyed reading.

“Prophets” by Brandon Taylor (Joyland)

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2020. He followed it with the short story collection Filthy Animals, published in June, 2021. The following story is set in the world of academia — Brandon Taylor’s Macondo.

The famous black writer was in town to give a reading, and Coleman was not sure if he would go. He had known the famous black writer for a few years, but only indirectly. They had many friends in common and had gone to the same university, though years apart. The famous black writer had a kind of totally useless fame, which was to say that he was notable among a small group of people interested in highly experimental fiction that was really memoir but also a poem. The famous black writer had built a reputation for pyrotechnic readings that sometimes included slideshows of brutalized slave bodies and sometimes involved moan-singing. Coleman had watched videos of the famous black writer and had felt a nauseating secondhand embarrassment, thinking Is this how people see me?

The famous black writer was handsome—tall, with striking bone structure, and a real classic elegance. He looked like an adult, like a finished version of an expensive product. His hair was quite architectural. The night of the reading, he wore a mohair coat and slim-cut, all-black ensemble right out of a photograph from the 1950s.

“Muscle” by Daniyal Mueenuddin (The New Yorker)

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a sensational debut collection of short stories. Since reading it, I have been looking forward to his next work. The following story appeared in The New Yorker.

Back in the nineteen-fifties, when old Mian Abdullah Abdalah rose to serve as Pakistan’s Federal Secretary Establishment, a knee-bending district administration metalled the road leading from the Cawnapur railway station to his Dunyapur estate. They also pushed out a telephone line to his farmhouse, the first phone on any farm in the district. Even now, thirty years later, there was no other line nearby. A single wire ran many forlorn miles from Cawnapur city through the flat tan landscape of South Punjab, there on the edge of the Great Indian Desert, then alongside the packed-dirt farm tracks laid out in geometric lines, and finally entered the grounds of a small, handsome residence built in the style of a British colonial dak bungalow.

Now, for the second time in a month, the Chandios had stolen a section of the telephone wire, which served for all the area as a symbol of the Dunyapur estate’s preëminence. The Chandio village sat far from the road at the back end of the estate, buried in an expanse of reeds and derelict land, dunes that had never been cleared. Testing Mian Abdalah’s grandson, Sohel, who had returned from college in America six months earlier and moved onto the estate, they had been amusing themselves and bearding him by cutting out lengths of the wire that passed near their village and selling them for copper somewhere across the Indus.

“The Great Escape” by Hilma Wolitzer (Electric Lit)

The current pandemic has changed our lives; I am one of those who felt that 2021 was tougher than 2020. Hilma Wolitzer’s story, published in her collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket tells a tender but sweeping story of a decades-long marriage.

I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board. Lately, though, with the children long grown and gone to their own marriage beds, I found myself glancing over to see if Howard was still alive, holding my breath while I watched for the shallow rise and fall of his, the way I had once watched for a promising rise in the bedclothes.

Whenever I saw that he was breathing and that the weather waited just behind the blinds to be let in, I felt an irrational surge of happiness. Another day! And then another and another and another. Breakfast, vitamins, bills, argument, blood pressure pills, lunch, doctor, cholesterol medicine, the telephone, supper, TV, sleeping pills, sleep, waking. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn’t; everyone knows that.

“Witness” by Jamel Brinkley (Lithub)

This story was selected as an O. Henry Prize winner in 2021.

My sister threw upon the door so that it banged against the little console table she kept by the entrance. “Silas,” she said breathlessly, before even removing her coat, “I have to tell you something.” Which was enough to make me feel trapped, as though the words out of her mouth were expanding and filling up the space in her tiny apartment. I told her to calm down and apologized, and then I began making excuses for myself. I had assumed she would be angry at me because of the previous night, so I was primed for what she might say when she got home from work.

“Don’t be so defensive,” Bernice said. “I’m not talking about that.” She tapped my legs so I would move them and then plopped down next to me on the love seat. The chill from outside clung to her body. I saved my reformatted CV, set my laptop on the floor, and listened.

The man who sang out of tune had been waiting for her again. He had started standing near the card shop on Amsterdam Avenue during her lunch hour two weeks earlier, and she had quickly noticed his repeated presence. As she passed him that afternoon, he faced her directly and gave her a meaningful look, which was more than he had ever done before. “But all he did after that was keep belting it out in that terrible voice,” she told me. “A sentimental song, you know? The sweetness of making love in the morning.” Even though he was thin and light skinned and wore those big, clunky headphones—“ Not my type at all,” she said—Bernice did find him somewhat handsome. But since he didn’t say anything, she just went inside the shop.

“The Wind” by Lauren Groff (The New Yorker)

Lauren Groff had a lovely novella What’s the Time, Mr.Wolf? published in The New Yorker as well, but this story is special and carries a punch.

Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.

So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road.

When they stopped by the mailbox, the younger brother said in a very small voice, Is she dead?

The older boy hissed, Shut up, you’ll wake him, and all three looked at the house hunched up on the hill in the chilly dark, the green siding half installed last summer, the broken front window covered with cardboard.

The sister touched the little one’s head and said, whispering, No, no, don’t worry, she’s alive. I heard her go out to feed the sheep, and then she left for work. The boy leaned like a cat into her hand.

He was six, his brother was nine, and the girl was twelve. These were my uncles and my mother as children.

“Forty-Two” by Lisa Taddeo (New England Review)

Lisa Taddeo won her first Pushcart Prize for this story. Her novel Animal was published in 2021.

In a small wooden box at her nightstand she kept a special reserve of six joints meticulously rolled, because the last time she’d slept with someone on the regular he’d been twenty-seven and having good pot at your house means one extra reason for the guy to come over, besides a good mattress and good coffee and great products in a clean bathroom. At home your towels smell like ancient noodles. But at Joan’s the rugs are free of hair and dried-up snot. The sink smells like lemon. The maid folds your boxers. Sleeping with an older woman is like having a weekend vacation home.

“A Dangerous Creature” by Mary Morris (Narrative Magazine)

Mary Morris’ story is one of heartache and loss, about a family and their newly found rescue dog.

The dog is a rescue. He was dumped from a moving car right in front of Dr. Katz’s office. Pete, the vet technician, was on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, when it happened. Dropped like a sack of potatoes, Pete told Dr. Katz. Pete picked up the dog—a mangy black-and-white with deep dark eyes—and brought him to Dr. Katz, who was finishing up a Rottweiler with glass in its paw. The dog is a mongrel—a Lab and something-else mix. Maybe shepherd or border collie. Dr. Katz isn’t sure. A gentle dog. About two years old. He is mostly white but with a black tail and black patches, including one that encircles his left eye. The minute Roger Katz lays eyes on the dog he knows he’ll call him Pirate.

Roger wasn’t planning on adopting a dog. It’s kind of a joke among his wife, children, friends, and extended family. The cobbler’s family has no shoes. The Katz family has no pets. They’d had the occasional fish and hamster—none of which had survived very long in that household. But never a cat and never a dog. In fact, Roger’s name is a bit of a joke for his line of work. Katz Animal Care. Danny, his middle child, had thought up the motto: “We do dogs. And Katz too.” But the family itself has never had either of these as a pet.

“The Hospital Where” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Longreads)

Nana Kwame Adjei-Breynah’s story about a father and his writer son is a part of his celebrated collection Friday Black.

“What are you looking for?” said a woman who I hoped knew I was already lost and scared. She stood in front of me in purple scrubs and colorful nurse-type shoes. Her brown hair was spun into something that let everyone know she was very busy and hadn’t slept in a long time. The tone of her voice, spiced with the Bronx, said I was one of many inconveniences in her life.

“I’m looking for my dad; he just came through here a second ago.”

“Is that all?” She tapped her clipboard with a pen. “What department?” I had no idea what department my father was looking for, so I told her the truth about that. “Well, I don’t know how you don’t know, but —” She was about to take great pleasure in telling me that I was in this situation due to my own incompetence and that even though she could not help me, she herself was very competent. I walked away from her before she could finish.

“Unread Messages” by Sally Rooney (The New Yorker)

Sally Rooney won an O. Henry Prize for this story in 2021. Her third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You was published last year.

At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city center, scrolling through a text document. She had very dark hair, swept back loosely into a tortoiseshell clasp, and she was wearing a dark-gray sweater tucked into black cigarette trousers. Using the soft, greasy roller on her computer mouse she skimmed over the document, eyes flicking back and forth across narrow columns of text, and occasionally she stopped, clicked, and inserted or deleted characters. Most frequently she was inserting two full stops into the name “WH Auden,” in order to standardize its appearance as “W. H. Auden.” When she reached the end of the document, she opened a search command, selected the Match Case option, and entered “WH.” No matches appeared. She scrolled back up to the top of the document, words and paragraphs flying past illegibly, and then, apparently satisfied, saved her work and closed the file.

At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a café near the office and sat at a table by the window, holding a sandwich in one hand and a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” in the other. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall, fair-haired man entering the café. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and was speaking into his phone. Yeah, he said, I was told Tuesday, but I’ll call back and check that for you. When he saw the woman seated by the window, his face changed, and he quickly lifted his free hand, mouthing the word Hey. Into the phone, he continued, I don’t think you were copied on that, no. Looking at the woman, he pointed to the phone impatiently and made a talking gesture with his hand. She smiled, toying with the corner of a page in her book. Right, right, the man said. Listen, I’m actually out of the office now, but I’ll do that when I get back in. Yeah. Good, good, good to talk to you.

“Shanghai Murmur” by Te-Ping Chen (The Atlantic)

Te-Ping Chen’s debut collection In Land of Big Numbers was included in Barrack Obama’s favorite reads of 2021. This story is about a flower shop assistant’s involvement with a professional who has a fountain pen that costs more than the assistant’s yearly salary.

The man who lived upstairs had died, and it had taken the other tenants days to notice, days in which the sweetly putrid scent thickened and residents tried to avoid his part of the hall, palms tenting their noses as they came and left. At last someone sent for the building manager, who summoned his unemployed cousin to break the lock and paid him 100 yuan to carry the body down the three flights of stairs.

There was a squabble as the residents who inhabited the adjoining rooms argued that they should have their rent lowered; the death was bad luck. Xiaolei stood listening as the building manager shouted them down. She felt sorry for the man who had died, whom she recalled as middle-aged, with tired, deep-set eyes, a chain-smoker who’d worked at the local post office. She supposed that if she ever asphyxiated or was stabbed overnight, the same thing would happen to her.

***

Be sure to check out Pravesh Bhardwaj‘s story picks from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

***

For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter using the #longreads hashtag. It’s a habit now. Before sitting down to write — I am developing an erotically charged drama about the relationship between two promiscuous people in South Mumbai — I look around for a story, read it, and share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether or not I am able to write.

Starting with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mother Nut” from The New Yorker, to Georges Simenon’s “The Little Restaurant Near Place des Ternes” from Electric Lit, I posted 304 stories in 2020. Here are the 10 that I enjoyed the most.

“Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu (Lightspeed Magazine)

Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction. As soon as my self-imposed embargo on buying new books is lifted, I shall pick it up from a local bookstore. The reason is not just the award but this fascinating story.

Don’t feel like having a bad day? That’s a line from one of our commercials. Let someone else have it for you. It shows a rich executive-looking-type sitting and rubbing his temples, making the TV face to communicate the stress of his situation. There are wavy lines on either side of his temples to indicate that the Executive is! really! stressed! Then he places a call to his broker, and in the next scene, the Executive is lying on a beach, drinking golden beer from a bottle and looking at the bluest ocean I have ever seen.

I saw this on American television at the lunch counter across the street that has a satellite feed. I was eating at the counter and next to me was a girl, maybe four or five, scooping rice and peas into her mouth a little at a time. She watched the commercial in silence, and after it was over, turned to her mother and softly asked her what the blue liquid was. I was thinking about how sad it was that she had never seen water that color in real life until I realized that I was thirty-nine years old and hey, you know what, neither had I.

“The Strange Story of the World” by Chigozie Obioma (Granta)

A delightful short story from yet another literary star of Nigerian origin. Chigozie Obioma has been called an heir to Chinua Achebe. His novel An Orchestra of Minorities was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.

The story of how my father became rich starts in 2002, shortly after Savannah bank, where he worked for nearly twenty years, closed down. Papa had gotten a job there as a junior clerk through the help of his uncle, even though all he had was a secondary school certificate. He’d gone on to become a chief clerk, but there was nothing else he could do when the bank closed. His uncle was dead and gone, and Papa had missed the chance to improve himself. ‘I should have gone back to school,’ he would say in those days, mostly to Mama. Often, Mama would shake her head and say, ‘No, no, Nathan. Don’t do this to yourself, ni to ri olohun.’ I suspect in those days that Papa liked to hear this. He liked to be consoled, petted and comforted by Mama, as if he were one of the children. Once, I saw Mama spoon-feeding him when he broke down one day, after Folu, my six-year-old brother, told him he wanted a bicycle like our neighbor’s sons had. The stupid boy, he hadn’t understood why we were only having boiled corn and groundnuts for dinner that night.

“House for Sale” by Colm Tóibín (The Dublin Review)

A recently widowed woman must deal with her kids and make arrangements to sell a country house in this story by Colm Tóibín, told in his lucid and straightforward style.

It was clear now that no one else would call. Nora was relieved that she would not have to entertain people who did not know each other, or people who did not like each other.

‘So anyway,’ May Larkin went on, ‘Frank was in the hospital bed in Brooklyn, and didn’t this man arrive into the bed beside his, and they got talking, and Frank knew he was Irish, and he told him he was from the County Wexford.’

She stopped and pursed her lips, as though she was trying to remember something. Suddenly, she began to imitate the man’s voice: ‘Oh, and that’s where I’m from, the man said, and then Frank said he was from Enniscorthy, oh and that’s where I’m from too, the man said. And he asked Frank what part of Enniscorthy he was from, and Frank said he was from Court Street.’.

May Larkin kept her eyes fixed on Nora’s face, forcing her to express interest and surprise.

‘And the man said that’s where I’m from too. Isn’t that extraordinary!’

She stopped, waiting for a reply.

‘And he told Frank that before he left the town he made that iron thing – what would you call it? – a grille or a guard on the windowsill there at Gerry Crean’s. And I went down to look at it and it’s there all right. Gerry didn’t know how it got there or when. But the man beside Frank in the bed in Brooklyn, he said that he made it, he was a welder. Isn’t that a great coincidence? To happen in Brooklyn.’

“Anything Could Disappear” by Danielle Evans (Electric Lit)

Electric Lit had a great year in their recommended reading section, where they drop a story every Wednesday. I have included two on my list. They published many good ones, especially stories by Leah Hampton, Shruti Swamy, Jenny Bhatt, Alejandro Puyana, and Mavis Gallant. In this story, a young woman on her way to New York City is asked to keep an eye on a 2-year-old boy while on a Greyhound bus. The mother disappears, leaving her child.

Vera was moving to New York on a Greyhound bus, carrying only a duffel bag. The morning she left Missouri, there was a heat advisory and an orange‑level terrorism alert. An hour outside of Chicago, there had been an older woman, crying and demanding that the bus pull over to let her off. From Chicago to Cleveland, she had sat next to a perfectly cordial man who had just finished a ten‑year prison sentence and was on his way home from Texas with nothing but his bus ticket and twenty dollars in his pocket. Between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, there had been a man who kept trying to get her to share a blanket with him, citing their proximity to the air‑conditioning vent, and between Pittsburgh and Philly, a teenage runaway had sat beside her and talked her ear off. And now there was this: a small, wobbly child whose mother had deposited him in the seat beside her with a simple “Keep an eye on him, will ya, hon?”

Vera tried to catch the eye of another passenger, maybe the woman two seats ahead of her on the other side of the aisle—she looked like the sort of person who would turn around and say, Keep an eye on him your damn self, lady; he’s yours, ain’t he?—but nobody looked up. The boy was around two years old, brown‑skinned with a head of curls that someone had taken the time to properly comb. He was dressed in a clean, bright red T‑shirt, baby jeans, and sneakers nicer than Vera’s. The mother was a thin, nervous white woman, with wispy hair in three shades of blond. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and chocolate milk. She had gotten on the bus with the boy and a girl, about seven, who looked like her in miniature. The little girl was chewing purple bubble gum with the kind of enthusiasm that would have prompted Vera’s own mother to ask, “Are you a young lady or a cow?” The mother had a cell phone pressed to her ear and was having a terse conversation with someone on the other end. She kept the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, even as she leaned over the baby to kiss him on the forehead before walking farther toward the back of the bus.

“When Eddie Levert Comes” by Deesha Philyaw (Electric Lit)

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies made waves last year. This story of an elderly mama waiting for her singer lover is told through the eyes of her daughter.

“Today is the day,” Mama announced, as she did every day when Daughter came to her room with the breakfast tray.

“Good morning, Mama.” Daughter set the tray on the padded bench in front of Mama’s vanity. She squinted at the early morning sun shining through the thin curtains. Mama’s vanity was covered with powders and bottles of fragrances that hadn’t been touched in months.

Mama brushed past Daughter without a word. She opened a chifforobe drawer and took out a navy-and-white-striped short-sleeved blouse. She carried the blouse over to her bed and placed it above a light-blue cotton skirt with an elastic waistband, smoothing down the fabric of both items with her hands, as if ironing. She frowned.

“Where did all my beautiful things go?” she asked Daughter, the room, the air. “My beautiful wrap dresses and my pencil skirts? I want to look my best for him. He’s coming today, you know. Where are my lovely sheer blouses and my pantsuits? Have you seen them? Did you move them from my closet? Are you stealing from me?”

“Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” by Haruki Murakami (The New Yorker)

Murakami crafts another unpredictable fable. This one is about a talking monkey a traveler encounters in a ramshackle inn. (It’s translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel.)

I was soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid the glass door open with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that he was a monkey. All the thick hot water had left me a bit dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t immediately make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. The monkey closed the door behind him, straightened out the little buckets that lay strewn about, and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, for all the world like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.

“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.

“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. It sounded almost mythological, not like my own voice but, rather, like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was . . . hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?

“Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice still low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a baritone in a doo-wop group. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice: if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.

“The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link (Small Beer Press)

This fantasy is about a girl and her eccentric grandmother, who has a community of fairies living in her black handbag. If you choose to read just one story from this list, let this be this one.

I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. “Guess what color this is.”

We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing, stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed, even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting caught.

One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

“Birdie” by Lauren Groff (The Atlantic)

A group of women who knew one another in childhood reunite in a hospital to deal with unsolved issues as Birdie is dying of terminal cancer.

The women were drinking peach schnapps, telling stories about the worst things they’d ever done. They had already skimmed through the missing years in haste, as though the past were gruesome, the two decades of lost friendship something untouchable and rotten. Maybe it was, Nic thought. Melodie had said she was a real-estate agent in San Luis Obispo, still playing the field. Her face was so artificially plumped and frozen that it resembled a Greek-chorus mask that had slid between genres and settled on tragicomedy. Sammie was overripe, a bruised apple. Five kids with Hank, she had said with a sigh, all seven of them packed into the little house her mother had left her, in the same little town where the women had all grown up. Birdie was dying, the reason they’d all been summoned. She had only her friends and her parents these days, because she had been a freelancer, working alone, and her boyfriend had taken off at the first diagnosis, stealing the cat. Only Nic was the same as she’d been when they’d last seen her, just a little more droopy and wrinkled now—a law professor, one kid, divorced, chunky jewelry, the whole shebang. In this room, she was hyperaware of how boring her life was, but also that she was the one who was clearly managing the best. A surprise; fortune favoring the brittle.

“All Saint’s Mountain” by Olga Tokarczuk (Hazlitt)

The modern and ancient interact in this tale, set in the Swiss Alps, by the 2018 Nobel Prize-winning author. (This is translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft.)

The plane arrived over Zurich when it was supposed to, but for a long time it was obliged to circle the city, since snow had covered the airport, and we had to wait until the slow yet effective machines had managed to clear that snow. Just as it landed, the snow clouds parted, and against the orange blazing sky there were contrails in tangles that transformed the firmament into a gigantic grid—almost as though God were extending an invitation to play a round of tic-tac-toe.

The driver who was supposed to pick me up and who was waiting with my last name written out on the lid of a cardboard shoebox was quick to state facts:

“I’m supposed to take you to the pension—the road up to the Institute is completely snowed under. We won’t make it to there.”

But his dialect was so strange I could barely understand him. I also felt like I had missed something. It was May, after all, the eighth of May.

“Flashlight” by Susan Choi (The New Yorker)

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise won a National Book Award in 2019. In “Flashlight,” a 10-year-old girl who loses her father in an accident deals with her grieving mother and a child-psychologist.

“One thing I will always be grateful to your mother for—she taught you to swim.”

“Why.” Not asked as a question but groaned as a protest. Louisa does not want her father to talk about her mother. She is sick of her mother. Her mother can do nothing right. This is the theme of their new life, in Louisa’s opinion: that Louisa and her father are two fish who should leave her beached mother behind.

They are making their way down the breakwater, each careful step on the heaved granite blocks one step farther from the shore. Her mother is not even on the shore, seated smiling on the sand. Her mother is shut inside the small, almost-waterfront house they are renting, most likely in bed. All summer Louisa has played in the waves by herself because her mother isn’t well and her father is invariably dressed in a jacket and slacks. Every day since they got here, four weeks ago, she has asked her father to walk the breakwater with her, and tonight he has finally agreed. Spray from the waves sometimes lands on the rocks, so he has carefully rolled up the cuffs of his slacks, though he is still wearing his hard polished shoes. In one hand, he holds a flashlight, which is not necessary; in the other hand, he holds Louisa’s hand, which is also not necessary. She tolerates this out of kindness to him.

My story picks from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

***

For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter. It’s a habit now: Before sitting down to write — my Hindi language ten-part Audible Original Thriller Factory is up and running, written and directed under series director and presenter Anurag Kashyap’s stewardship with narrators including Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu — I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write something or not.

Starting with Kristen Roupenian’s The Good Guy, to Etgar Keret’s Pineapple Crush, I posted 297 stories in 2019. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most:

The Pinch by Dina Nayeri (The Yale Review)

Four siblings of the Amirzadeh family plan to get together in Niagara falls to meet their elderly father who is traveling from Iran.

Parvin and Suraya rented a small but comfortable Niagara Falls cottage kissing the American border, just as their older sister Goli had instructed. Their father, Baba Ardeshir, had managed only a Canadian visa, so he wouldn’t be able to cross over to see their homes in Pompano Beach and rural Georgia. Instead, he would stay in Toronto with Goli, self-appointed matriarch since that 1972 day when their mother vanished into Holland or Germany, leaving Baba Ardeshir alone with four teenagers in Tehran–this was years before the Revolution, so Maman’s departure was no spectacle: no midnight Jeep ride into Turkey, no crossing borders under utility blankets. This was curled hair, the good suitcases, in-flight meal. (Just run-of-the-mill, ordinary abandonment, Suri said. Be kind, Pari begged her sister.)

“Maybe we can get a photo of all of us,” Babak suggested. The last time all four had appeared in a photo with Baba Ardeshir had been as young children. In black and white, their parents looked hardly out of their twenties. Every detail was professionally arranged, all six smiling obediently, except one: in the left side of the photo, Goli’s fingers on Suri’s forearm, her fingers closing together in a secret pinch. Over the years, the photo had become Amirzadeh family legend. They had all seen it once or twice, but despite attic searches and calls to Iran, no one could find a copy.

The Revenant by Edwidge Danticat (Granta)

The story is set in strife-torn Haiti, the native country and muse of Edwidge Danticat.

Doctor Berto came with a new stethoscope to check Victoria’s heart. He was shocked to learn that she had died.

After examining Rafael, the surviving twin, he sat with Señor Pico in the parlour, while Señora Valencia took her infant son upstairs with her for a siesta.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Doctor Berto said as I served them each a cup of coffee. ‘She was gaining weight, getting bigger.’

‘What about Rafael? How does he seem now?’ Señor Pico asked about his son. ‘When I look at him, I see a sadness that a child shouldn’t have.’

‘There is nothing physically wrong with him.’

‘I tell you, there is this sadness. I saw it yesterday.’

‘Perhaps he misses his sister. They grew in the womb together.’

‘Will it go away, his sadness?’

Pineapple Crush by Etgar Keret (Electric Lit)

(Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.) Etgar Keret is my favourite contemporary short-story writer. His new collection, Fly Already, is out now.

The first hit is the one that colors your world. Save it for the evening—and any piece of trash flickering across your TV screen will be riveting. Puff it at midday, before you get on your bike, and the world around you will feel like one big adventure. Smoke it as soon as you wake up in the morning, before your coffee, and it’ll give you the energy to crawl out of bed or dive back in for another few hours of sleep.

The first hit of the day is like a childhood friend, a first love, a commercial for life. But it’s different from life itself, which is something that, if I could have, I would have returned to the store ages ago. In the commercial it’s made-to-order, all inclusive, finger-licking, carefree living. After that first one, more hits will come along to help you soften reality and make the day tolerable, but they won’t feel the same.

The Migration of the Stork by Ismail Kadare (Asymptote)

(Translated from Albanian by Ani Kokobobo.) Ismail Kadare was the winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005. I love his novel The Palace of Dreams, but this short story is very different from that.

“Hello, how are you?” he said, shaking my hand.

“Hello, how are you?” I repeated, without bothering to hide my lack of interest.

Bastard! I thought to myself. Why can’t you understand the misery you cause? The most maddening thing about this man was precisely his obliviousness to the vexation he provoked in people, a vexation that many displayed quite openly.

If you yourself know how you are, why bother going out? (And if you don’t know, that is worse yet.)

“So, anything new,” he asked for the third or fourth time in a row, while I kept thinking: How can such a person be alive; how can the ground hold him up?

“Nothing much, anything new with you,” I said.

“Nothing much, just the usual.”

Villain! I wanted to scream. What terrible stroke of fate put you in my path, on a day as hopeless as this, when I so desperately need the antithesis of monotony.

“Well, see you,” I said with the same droning voice, surprised at how the sentiment “I hope never to see you” could be so calmly translated into its opposite.

“See you,” he replied and shook my hand, after which I almost groaned in his face.

I had already advanced several steps when I heard him calling me. I spun around as if someone had shot me in the back. I could not believe my ears—could this evil really be so insistent?

My dismay was so grossly apparent that he couldn’t help but ask, “What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong with you? I almost yelled. But he, cheerful as always, continued:

“I forgot to tell you. Did you hear? Lasgush Poradeci has been having an affair this summer.”

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Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (io9)

If you plan to read one story from this list, then please make sure you read this one. You might need a drink or two after reading it. Had to make do with two shots of coffee.

Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.

One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.

He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of Mom.

I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a calm child.

“That was the last page of the catalog I saw,” he said.

The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned out to be true.

Lois and Varga by Lisa Taddeo (Granta)

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, a journalistic account of the sex lives of three women, made waves in 2019.

It was a regular old bar, except there was a stripper pole in an unremarkable corner of the room. The reason for its existence had a lot to do with how Al lost his wife. The other thirty percent of the reason was that the stripper who lived in the town, Varga, had suggested it to Al. She said it would be good for the economy of the island, that it would be interesting and fun for regulars and, during the high season, it would bring in a load of business. But most of the time, Varga said, it would be super chill. Most of the time nobody would even know it existed. The regulars would drink Pabst and casually glance over from time to time.

This is not, she said, about selling sex. I’m just going to season the room with it.

It was only topless. Varga kept thong panties on. She wore a regular rotation of panties in primary colors with girlish and white eyelet scalloping, which the regulars joked was a good way of knowing what day it was if they hadn’t read the paper that morning. She did about four stripteases a night. Each dance lasted two songs, one of which was almost always a Springsteen.

Tiger Bites by Lucia Berlin (Lithub)

The horrors of a backstreet abortion clinic in Mexico come alive in this moving story.

The train slowed down outside of El Paso. I didn’t wake my baby, Ben, but carried him out to the vestibule so I could look out. And smell it, the desert. Caliche, sage, sulphur from the smelter, wood fires from Mexican shacks by the Rio Grande. The Holy Land. When I first went there, to live with Mamie and Grandpa during the war, that’s when I first heard about Jesus and Mary and the Bible and sin, so Jerusalem got all mixed up with El Paso’s jagged mountains and deserts. Rushes by the river and huge crucifixes everywhere. Figs and pomegranates. Dark-shawled women with infants and poor gaunt men with sufferer’s, savior’s eyes. And the stars at night were big and bright like in the song, so insistently dazzling it made sense that wise men couldn’t help but follow any one of them and find their way.

My uncle Tyler had cooked up a family reunion for Christmas. For one thing he was hoping my folks and I would make up. I dreaded seeing my parents… they were furious because my husband, Joe, had left me. They had almost died when I got married at seventeen, so my divorce was the last straw. But I couldn’t wait to see my cousin Bella Lynn and my uncle John, who was coming from L.A.

Slingshot by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Harper’s)

Souvankham Thammavongsa won the O. Henry Award in 2018 for this short story.

“There’s no such thing as love. It’s a construct,” Richard told me one day when I went over to his apartment. I had gotten a package of his in my mail. “You know anyone who is in love?”

I thought of Rose, who always said she was in love whenever she met a new guy and then would wait by the phone all day, crying. Then I thought of my friends and my own experience. We had all known it, but it was something that happened a long time ago, not something we sat around thinking about. It happened, and when it’s happened, there is no need to think too hard about it.

“Maybe,” I said, “you haven’t had much time to know a range of people.”

He told me he knew a lot of people. Thousands was the number he gave me. I got the feeling that what I wanted to say to him was about the quality of closeness, not what he was talking about. A few minutes passed between us, and he said, “People say that they are in love all the time, but they’re not. I don’t believe them. They think they should say it because it’s what you say. Doesn’t mean they really know what it is.”

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Lulu by Te-Ping Chen (The New Yorker)

Te-Ping Chen’s story charts the destiny of two siblings whose lives follow different paths although they are born just a few minutes from each other. I look forward to her short story collection, Land of Big Numbers.

Dr. Feng had operated on our mother as a favor to our uncle, his old classmate. Otherwise we would have been born in the hospital down the street, where a woman had bled to death after a botched Cesarean the previous year. The family had been in the waiting room for hours, and at last the father-to-be pounded on the doors of the operating room. When no one responded, the family pushed them open to find the lifeless woman on the table, blood pooling on the ground. She was alone: the staff had stripped the medical certificates that bore their names from the wall and fled as soon as the surgery went wrong.

From the start we were lucky, not least because we had each other. As twins we’d been spared the reach of the government’s family-planning policies. For the first few weeks of our life, our skulls had matching indentations from where they’d been pressed against each other in the womb, like two interlocking puzzle pieces. Later in life, when we were apart, I used to touch my hand to the back of my skull when I thought of her, as if seeking a phantom limb.

Shakespeare, New Mexico by Valeria Luiselli (Guernica)

(Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeny.) The Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli’s highly rated Lost Children Archive was on the longlist of the 2019 Booker prize.

At times, as we progressed through this enormous country, their father told them stories—also thinning and wavy, uninspiring. When it was my turn to provide some entertainment, I didn’t tell them any stories because I don’t know how. Instead, I set them riddles I’d learned so many lives ago that I couldn’t even remember the answers:

A cowboy goes into a saloon. He’s soaked through. He asks for a glass of water, and the bartender hands him a pistol. Then, the cowboy says, “Thank you,” and leaves the saloon.

“That’s it?” asked the eldest.

“That’s it,” I confirmed.

“That’s the end of the story?” said the little one.

“Yes, my love, that’s the end of the riddle,” I said.

***

My story picks from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.

Bryan Washington | A short story from the collection Lot | Riverhead Books | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,120 words)

 
1.

It started how you’d think, with this whiteboy throwing up in an alley. I’d pulled a job at a taqueria dumping pig guts out back. The cooks gave me grunt work, the way they do when you’re starting out, like when my father had Javi and me pinching the shells off shrimp back in the restaurant as kids. It didn’t matter that I’d been fixing mole in Ma’s kitchen for years; I was short on money.

My managers looked like gauchos. Porno mustaches, bloated frames. They read my name and they saw my face and they pointed to the dishes. One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español, and I wanted to snatch his ears off but then I’d be out of a check.

So I should’ve left the whiteboy outside alone. I had enough on my plate.

But I stayed. Watched him heave. When he finished I came back with a glass of water.

He took me home. Dude had these little hairs climbing his belly. His eyes got wide at how furry my legs are. When we finished he gulped at the air in the room, he asked for my name as we were sliding down the futon, and when he couldn’t pronounce it the whiteboy gave me a new one.

He lived in a condo on Navigation. Said he stayed there because this was the real Houston. This Houston came with needles in the grass, but he said I was lucky, lucky to have it all in front of me. I told him if somebody gave me an out, they wouldn’t have time to finish their sentence.

His bedroom was nice and the building was nicer. Wood flooring. Green walls. Like the inside of an avocado. I remembered when the lot had been cleared for the building’s construction, when it was just a busted Mattress Center I went to once with Ma, but then the whiteboy started asking me what was wrong, and I said it was nothing, I was gassed, he should be proud of himself.

I grabbed my kicks and left is what should’ve happened next. That was my thing. And I did dip out, eventually.

But the whiteboy told me he had a job; he needed help with his Spanish because he was gunning for some promotion. He temped at some nonprofit over on Pease, a house for battered refugees. One of those places where everyone’s lived through everything. They needed help getting papers, with reaching their people back home, but if he couldn’t understand them then he couldn’t do much about it. What he really wanted was this position upstate, way out in Dallas, but they’d stuck him in the Second Ward.

The whiteboy told me I could expedite the process. Give him some lessons. Help him help the rest of the world.

I gave him this look like maybe I’d just beat his ass instead. Case his place for fun. It would be so easy.

He asked how much I made dumping napkins. He said he could double it. We’d keep it up as long as we had to. I asked why he didn’t just find someone else, someone official, and he said I was already in his bed.

It’s one of those moments where I could’ve done the good thing. Apropos of nothing. Hooked him up, just for the sake of doing it.

I told him for fifty a session I’d think on it.

2.

Meanwhile the taqueria was eating me alive. It was an ultra-retro dive, the kind with barbacoa roasting at dawn. A line of construction types looped the building every morning just to walk like twelve plates home to their kids. We had a guy whose job was sweeping people off of the sidewalk, waving them onto Leeland when the crowd shot through the doors. But somehow the gabachos knew about us too, and by midafternoon we looked a lot less like el D.F. and more like the U.N.

One day nobody was manning the counter, and some blondie yelled to the back for chilaquiles, and when no one else looked up I told the guy we didn’t do that. He was a snake in a suit. Glasses tucked in his pocket and everything. He gave this slow nod, like, Well, okay, we’ll see.

I was sweeping under the fryers when one of the managers asked for a minute. Something’d come up. Could we touch on it outside. I thought that he’d ask me some bunk about my hours, but when we made it to the back he grabbed me by the throat.

Next time a customer asks for something, he said, you find it. Claro?

I felt like a bobblehead.

I needed the money.

I picked up the phone at Ma’s that night, told the whiteboy I was free after ten.

It’s one of those moments where I could’ve done the good thing.

3.

Long story short, this guy was hopeless. Doomed. It took four, five days to stuff the o into his hola.

We started with greetings. He had so many questions. He wanted to know why he couldn’t use usted with everyone. He wanted to know why the x had to be silent. He wanted to know why every morning had to be bueno.

Some days are just bad, he said. Some people live their whole lives and not a single good thing happens to them.

I told him those were just the rules. He should follow them unless he had something new to say.

I thought he’d bow out, because it really wasn’t worth it, but what he did was take notes. He wrote it all down.

Vámonos, I said.

Bamanos, said the whiteboy.

Vámonos. V. Think volcano.

Bamanos.

No. Vulcan. Velociraptor.

Right. Bamanos.

That’s how we did it. Had us a full-stop barrier.

And the people at his shelter—on the trains from Tapachula? San Pedro Sula?

Forget about it. They wouldn’t be talking to him anytime soon.

I told him this. I told him not to get his hopes up. He rubbed my earlobe with his fingers, said that was where I came in.

Hey, I said, don’t get too comfortable.

Cómodo, said the whiteboy. Cómodo?

Correcto.

So we kept it up.

And the whiteboy always paid me afterwards.

And we’d always, always, always, always end up in bed.

Lo siento.

Las siento.

Negative. Lo. Lo.

Las siento.

Weeks passed, then months. We moved from greetings to goodbyes. We brushed by commands. We jumped back to directions. I told him about my father living who the fuck knew where. About my brother in the ground. About Ma and I, stuck in East End, scrambling to keep everything together in a home we no longer owned. The whiteboy told me about his sisters, about his parents in Alamo Heights, and when I asked how many guys he’d been with before me he told me about an ex, some genius over at Rice.

He asked if I was out. I told him I didn’t know what that meant. He asked if I’d thought about abandoning Houston, and I said if I had I’d have done it by now.

I kept my head down at the job. Did what I was asked to do. The kitchen was sloppy, utterly inefficient, but every now and again one of the cooks asked for a hand— with temping the oil, with keeping the cow heads intact, or some other no-brainer thing they should’ve known how to do.

They’d laugh afterwards, pat me with their gloves.

Smear all that grease on the back of my tee.

Mostly I wiped benches. My bosses spat on the tile I mopped, asked how my day was going.

I kept my mouth shut about it, kept my eyes on the ground. Because if someone else put their hands on me, I didn’t know what I’d do.

Creo que sí.

Creole.

Creo, creo.

Creole, creole.

I started spending my nights with the whiteboy. Dropped whatever scraps I stole from the job over at Ma’s. Then took the sidewalk lining Milby on the way to his condo, just before the neighborhood dips into the bayou, and most nights the whiteboy met me at the door; he’d reheat a bowl of whatever he’d ordered for dinner.

We continued our education.

At some point I stopped jumping when he touched me.

At some point the whiteboy started rolling his r’s.

At some point I decided I’d make him fluent, however long that took. We would see that through.

4.

Then one night, after a long day, we were rehashing phrases. Things he’d been hearing on his day-to-day. He’d started having piecemeal conversations at work, putting names and addresses together.

The whiteboy told me about the woman who came to Texas in the trunk of a Chrysler, who worked off her debt by dancing in the Galleria.

He told me about the man who’d sold his oldest daughter to traffickers to get his youngest into Brownsville, and how, months later, he still hadn’t found either of them.

He told me about the little girl who hadn’t said anything, just touched his cheek, rubbing the skin between her fingers, and how after she’d done that he knew no matter how much money he brought in or where he put her family up or how much relief they signed off for, he couldn’t do anything to help her at all.

One night, we had a six-pack between us, and his legs on my stomach, which should’ve been awkward for us. We weren’t even fooling with English by then. I was filling in his blanks.

Te amo, I said.

Te amo.

Nice. Good. Te amo.

Te amo.

Right.

Sí.

I laughed in his face, told him to say it again.

I dumped garbage all day, taught my whiteboy at night.

This is how things happen. Even for us.

He wanted to know why every morning had to be bueno.

5.

A few weeks later, he got the promotion.

His supervisor said it wasn’t like he was a natural. But out of all the whiteboys they had on hand, he was the closest to whatever they needed.

A position had opened up out in Dallas, if he wanted it. He had a few days to decide.

Of course we had to celebrate. We sat at his table, sober for once, and I told him that was great. He’d probably enjoy himself.

He made this face like that was the wrong response.

I knew what he’d ask, and I answered before he said it.

The whiteboy said I knew I could come too, come with him, and I told him I did.

The whiteboy said this was it, what we’d been working toward, and I told him it may have been.

The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name, and I didn’t have the words for that.

I stretched my cheeks as far as they’d go. Put a hand on his thigh.

I grabbed my socks and my cap and my belt and I left and he did not put up a fight.

This is how easy it is to walk out of a life. I’d always wondered, and now I knew.

I didn’t see him before he took off.

Who knows what he’s doing now.

6.

But a week or two later, I was working the night shift, scrubbing blood off the floor, when one of my managers asked for a word.

I’d already decided to put him in the dirt if he touched me. Someone, somewhere in Houston needed a fry cook. I’d twirl signs on the street. Dance on the curb in a phone suit.

He put his hand on my shoulder, and I clinched for the punch.

He told me they’d fired a couple of fatheads for pocketing tips. He called them idiot cabrones, as if he weren’t one himself.

But we need a guy who has experience, he said.

We’d start you slow, he said. Behind the stove. Work you up from the bottom.

You’re asking me to cook for you, I said, and he shrugged, said, If that’s what you want to call it.

I’m asking you to do yourself a solid, he said.

And if this were a different story, a story about something else, a story where we did the things we know we need to do, I’d have smiled real wide, the same as with the whiteboy, and with a little more feeling, or maybe a different one entirely. But I just put my hand on his shoulder, and I squeezed around the edges, and I loudly, gracefully, told him to go fuck his mother.

* * *

Bryan Washington has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.

From LOT by Bryan Washington, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Bryan Washington.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

***

For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter using hashtag #Longreads. It’s a nightly thing: Before sitting down to write (currently working on a spec screenplay — an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma set in suburbs of Mumbai), I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write something or not.

Starting with David Gates’s “Texas” from The New Yorker, to Laura Adamczyk’s “Too Much a Child” from Lit Hub, I posted 288 stories in 2018. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most, in random order:

‘The Office of Missing Persons’ by Akil Kumaraswamy (Lit Hub)

This story is set in strife-torn Sri Lanka about an entomologist whose son has gone missing:

“These young Tamil boys always getting into trouble. They don’t know how to be proper citizens,” the officer said and scratched something on the paper in blue ink. Jeganathan remembered his younger boy, Prem, shaking on the floor as they questioned him, his eyes flushed with tears as he cut through the bond of the womb and revealed the trip Jeevan had planned that night with Amutha to the local Shiva shrine, and before then all their meetings under the neem tree by the abandoned pharmacy, the way his brother unravelled her braid, tied her hair around his hand like a bandage.

The officer asked for a description of the missing boy beyond the photograph. Jeganathan lifted his hands and attempted to re-create Jeevan for the officer, but under the dim fluorescent light, any conjuring was hopeless. In the end, the officer wrote: 17 years old, 181 centimeters, 76 kilograms, birthmark on right arm.

‘The Frog King,’ by Garth Greenwell (The New Yorker)

A vivid story that takes place during the year-end vacation as two lovers take a trip to Bologna.

I was still groggy with sleep when I turned in to the main room, and I stood uncomprehending for a moment before I realized that R. had rearranged things in the night. He had moved the table to the middle of the room, and had placed my winter boots on top of it, beside the little tree we had bought earlier that week. Sticking up from the boots were packages wrapped in newspaper, his Christmas gifts for me; he must have hidden them somewhere after he arrived, he must have got out of bed in the night, careful not to wake me, he must have been quiet as he moved the furniture. I caught my breath at it, I felt a weird pressure and heat climb my throat. I felt like my heart would burst, those were the words for it, the hackneyed phrase, and I was grateful for them, they were a container for what I felt, proof of its commonness. I was grateful for that, too, the commonness of my feeling, I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race.

‘On Destiny,’ by Lee Chang-dong (Asymptote)

I love the cinema of Lee Chang-dong, and in his oeuvre, Poetry is my favourite. The Korean auteur is in the running for 2019 Oscars as his new film Burning (based on Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning”) is shortlisted for best foreign language film. No Korean film has ever been nominated in this category and we fans of Korean cinema are rooting for Lee Chang-dong to make history. (Story translated from Korean by Soyoung Kim.)

The story I want to tell you is about my strange destiny. I understand that you are a novelist, so I assume that you must have heard all kinds of strange stories about all kinds of people. But for all I know, my story is the strangest.

Do you believe in fate or fortune telling? Those who do say that a person’s destiny is predetermined at birth, no, even before birth, as if it were written on a ledger, meaning that no matter the struggle, people are destined to live and die according to their palm lines. Similarly, Christians say that there is nothing in human affairs that does not go according to God’s plans. But what those people say has never made sense to me. I mean, if it is true, how unfair is human destiny?

‘Motherland,’ by Min Jin Lee (The Missouri Review)

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko continues to make waves and I still haven’t bought it. This story is more than a gentle reminder for me to do the needful.

That spring, she began sleeping with an old boyfriend from her freshman year in high school. He’d grown up into a handsome, mar­ried playboy who still had the tendency to talk too much. One afternoon in her tiny Nagano living room, as the playboy was getting dressed to return to his office, he bemoaned the fact that she wouldn’t leave her dull husband, who preferred the company of his work colleagues to hers. He laid his head between her small breasts and said, “But I can leave her. Tell me to do it.” To this, she said nothing. Etsuko had no intention of leaving Nori and the children. Her complaint about her husband was not that he was boring or that he wasn’t Rome enough. Nori was not a bad person. It was just that she didn’t feel like she knew him in any clear sense after ~eteenyears of marriage, and she doubted that she ever would. Her husband didn’t seem to need her except to be a wife in name and a mother to his children. For Nori, this was enough.

‘The Era,’ by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Guernica)

Nana Kwame’s debut collection Friday Black made it onto a lot of year-end lists and this story set in dystopian society took a while to sink in.

Together they’re called the Water Wars because of how the Federation Forces lied to its own people about the how the Amalgamation had poisoned the water reservoirs. The result was catastrophic/horrific. Then, since the people of the old Federation were mad because of their own truth-clouding, they kept on warring for years and years, and the old Federation became the New Federation that stands proudly today. Later on, when the Amalgamation of Allies suspected a key reservoir had been poisoned, they asked the New Federation if they’d done it. In a stunning act of graciousness and honesty, my New Federation ancestors told the truth, said, “Yeah, we did poison that reservoir,” and in doing so, saved many, many lives, which were later more honorably destroyed via nuclear. The wars going on now, Valid Storm Alpha and the True Freedom Campaign, are valid/true wars because we know we aren’t being emotional fighting them.

‘Redeployment,’ Phil Klay (Granta)

A soldier must learn to resume his domestic life after returning from the front lines in Iraq, in this story written by Klay, a US Marine veteran.

We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose and we called it ‘Operation Scooby’. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.

First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, ‘Jesus,’ and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.

At the time you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 metres and you’re killing people at five in a concrete box.

‘When the Tide of Misfortune Hits, Even Jelly Will Break Your Teeth,’ by Porochista Khakpour (Gulf Coast)

Porochista Khakpour is fighting a battle with Lyme disease and we can enlist to assist her in what has been an expensive treatment. Her memoir Sick describes her years of ill health with a mysterious ailment that took a huge emotional and financial toll. Give to her Gofundme page here.

She had no name it seemed but “The Spiritualist” which was a term he had not heard before. There was no photo, just a description of her services and the number to call, along with a simple graphic of a dove flying in a sky littered with flowers.

He called the number and a woman answered.

“May I speak to The Spiritualist?” His voice sounded off to himself, shaking as it was and somehow higher, like a child’s.

The voice that spoke back was deep and rich. Every word was deliberate and firm. “Yes, this is she, The Spiritualist. What might I help you with?”

He paused. He didn’t know what to say. “Well, I could use some help to get back on track. My life, you see. . .” He paused some more. How could he put it? “It’s all been a mess.”

“I understand,” she said.

“You do?” he said, sounding a bit too excited for his own comfort.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “It’s part of my job. People rarely come to me when all is well, after all.”

‘Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,’ by Saul Bellow (Granta)

I love everything Saul Bellow has written.

‘Gott meiner,’ said my father to my mother. ‘Again no money? But I gave you twelve dollars at the beginning of the week. What have you done with it?’

‘I don’t know. It went away.’

‘So quickly . . . by Thursday? Impossible.’

‘It couldn’t be helped. Some of it I used to pay old bills. We’ve owed money to Herskovitz for I don’t know how long.’

‘But did you have to pay him this week?’

‘He’s right in the block. For two months now I’ve been coming home the long way around. I gave him three dollars.’

‘How could you! Haven’t you any sense? And what did you do with the rest? Joshua,’ he said, turning to me furiously. ‘Take a pencil and write these things down. I have to know where it all went. I bought eggs and butter on Tuesday.’

‘Cattle Praise Song’ by Scholastique Mukasonga (The New Yorker)

(Translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner.) Scholastique is a Rwandan author who lives in France and if you are planning to read just one story from this selection then I recommend that you choose this one.

My father didn’t need to count every cow in the large enclosure: he could tell at a glance if they were all there. They lay on the grass bedding that my mother and my sisters had prepared the day before, while the cows were in the pasture. My brothers were busy rousing them. A gentle tap of the stick was enough to prod the leader of the herd, and the rest then followed. My father made sure that, as they jostled, they didn’t stab one another with their horns; he went from one to the next, his staff raised, protecting the gentle cows from those who were known to be skittish or feisty (we had carefully burned the tips of the horns of the most aggressive ones). As the master, he had nothing to fear, even from the most irascible cows. He worried about the cows who seemed to balk at standing up on all four legs. He spent a long time checking them, prodding, touching, and tapping them, inspecting their ears, eyes, and tongues. He examined their dung—its color, size, and consistency; he decided what medications to administer and indicated which cows he deemed too weak to go out and graze: they’d stay in the kraal to be fed hay and fresh-cut grass gathered as the herd returned.

‘Mucci’ by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Bennington Review)

A searing story of a crumbling marriage.

The night before they had been too jetlagged for anything beyond quick showers and sleep, but tonight Marcelo was certain they’d have sex.

Elbowing her way out of the coffeehouse, Tatum greeted Marcelo with a coffee granita. A white dash of whipped cream streaked her left cheek.

“You have no idea what you’re missing,” she said, a brief moan escaping her throat. “This is,” she added, lolling her head around, “to die for. Want a bite?” she offered, pushing the plastic cup toward him.

***

Read Pravesh’s story picks from 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015

Chris Power | A story from the collection Mothers | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | January 2019 | 25 minutes (5,051 words)

Several months ago, while travelling in Sweden, I experienced something I have given up trying to explain. In fact, since it happened I have tried to push it as far from my mind as possible. But yesterday afternoon, searching for an errant set of keys, I found, nestled deep in a coat pocket, an acorn that I plucked from its cap in the forest beneath the fortress of Stenshuvud. Then it was smooth and green, but now it is tawny, and ribbed like a little barrel. You wouldn’t know it was the same acorn I picked on a whim, but holding it I felt again the compulsion that propelled me, at the end of that strange day, into the burial chamber at Haväng.

It was the end of September. I was attending a three-day conference in Lund. It finished early on a Friday afternoon, and with the weekend ahead of me, and nothing to hurry back to London for, I elected to stay. My colleagues recommended some sites – Iron and Stone Age, neither era of particular interest to  me, but I thought why not. The only one I had heard of was Ale’s Stones, Sweden’s Stonehenge, built on a clifftop above the Baltic in the shape of a great ship.

I had presented a paper at the conference, ‘Digging Deeper: On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief.’ It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. It was a blessing when it was all over and I could leave Lund. I needed some time away from people.

Escaping the rush-hour traffic I drove my hire car east on Riksväg 11 to Simrishamn, a small fishing village on the eastern coast of Skåne, Sweden’s southernmost county. I drove between gently sloping hills, past apple orchards, and beside the ruffled green seas of sugar beet fields. The weather swung rapidly, as it had all week, between showers and sun.

Approaching Simrishamn on the coastal road I saw a rainbow springing from the sea. I pulled over and got out of the car to admire it. It arced from the water and disappeared into a low, dark cloud. Its bands had an unusual solidity. The wind gusted, and the grey sea was ridged like a tilled field. I felt a long way from the stuffy rooms and obtuse debates of Lund.

I checked into a small hotel a short walk from the harbor. I thought the holiday season was over, but in fact I only managed to get a room because of a late cancellation: The receptionist told me an apple festival, one of the locality’s most significant annual events, was taking place in the nearby town of Kivik.

Finding a small fridge in my room, I decided to get supplies and make the following day’s lunch. The hotel might have been full, but I didn’t see anyone in its corridors. The town also seemed largely deserted. Everyone was in Kivik, I supposed, worshipping the apple. The wind was blowing less forcefully now, but the sun had also faded. It was wet and warm, and the light had a greenish cast. Near the harbor the buildings were old and low, half-timbered, divided by narrow lanes and small cobbled squares. Further back from the shore the stock ceded to concrete and brick modernity, as typical as it was ugly.

I bought bread, meat, cheese and two blood-red apples. As I was queuing to pay I noticed a commotion by the entrance; a boy, seemingly drunk, was taunting shoppers as they passed. He accosted me, too, as I exited. He didn’t touch me, but stood in my way so that I was forced to stop. We faced each other. He was perhaps eighteen or so, with very short hair, an upturned nose, and blue eyes that, despite his unsteadiness, were extraordinarily clear and penetrating. His face reminded me of someone – I couldn’t place whom, but I had the sense it was someone I hadn’t thought about for a long time. In that moment, as he stared at me, I felt certain he was about to speak my name. What came out of his mouth instead was no less strange: a series of drawn-out screeches, aggressive and birdlike. I tried to move past him but he shifted position to block me, continuing to emit the aggravating noise. His lips were drawn back from his brown teeth; he reeked of alcohol and tobacco. Behind him, on the short flight of steps leading up to the street, a fat, vacant-looking girl sat smoking. Looking at me she spoke rapidly in Swedish, giggling as the shrieks grew even louder. Shoppers were hurrying past, not wanting to get involved. The concrete porch we were standing in felt as though it were shrinking, pushing me, the boy and the girl closer and closer together. Beginning to panic, I forced my way past the boy and hurried away, not stopping until I was back at my hotel. His screeches rang in my ears long after I had left him behind. I made sandwiches and put them in the fridge ready for the next day’s expedition. I had some food left over and considered having it for dinner, but my room felt too confining. I walked through the still-deserted streets in the direction of the harbor.

His face reminded me of someone – I couldn’t place whom, but I had the sense it was someone I hadn’t thought about for a long time.

I hadn’t been walking long before I found a restaurant with a name that called to me: Cimbris. It was familiar, I realized, from the conference. Someone had spoken about the Cimbri, an Iron Age tribe that spread from Jutland. They harassed the Romans, even getting as far as Italy at one point, then disappeared from history the way tribes, even entire civilizations, sometimes do, the archaeological record providing no answer to why they should have dropped off the face of the earth.

The restaurant was busy, and I was stuck in a corner at a small, wobbly table on the threshold of the men’s toilet. I thought about complaining, but my waitress was so thuggish I didn’t want to interact with her any more than I had to. The food was surprisingly good, though: grilled plaice in a butter sauce, and boiled potatoes dressed with dill. For dessert, fried apples with whipped cream: the surplus, I presumed, from the nearby festival.

After dinner I crossed the street to the harbor. Lamps cast pools of yellow light along the jetties. The air was cool, and the water so still that every boat had a perfect double hanging from its hull. As I wandered, enjoying having the harbor entirely to myself, I realized I wasn’t in fact alone: A figure, tall and thin, was standing on the seawall and looking out over the black water. I considered approaching him. There was no one else around, nor any movement in the town at our backs, nor even – or so it seemed for a few moments – any sound from the invisible sea. Where was the screaming boy now? The thought of him prowling the streets unsettled me, and instead of joining the watcher on the seawall I hurried to my hotel, half expecting to hear that uncanny shriek again. In fact I walked back in perfect solitude, but in my room, lying in the dark and beginning to slip into sleep, I unexpectedly heard the excited shouts of children from somewhere in the nearby streets.

I set off early the next morning. The day was bright, the streets still and peaceful. First I would visit the remains of an Iron Age fort on the headland at Stenshuvud, then pass through Kivik on my way up the coast to the Haväng Dolmen.

When I arrived at Stenshuvud the visitor centre was shut up and silent. Through the trees  the white sea dazzled, but despite the sun’s brightness there was no warmth in the air. The walk up to the fort began in a low, uneven pasture where sheep grazed. The churned ground was spongy underfoot, and at its lowest points was more sea than soil. Skirting muddy pools I thought of a lecture I had attended in Lund, more to fill time than anything else, about the Iron Age bodies found in bogs across northern Europe. Tollund Man was found in the Jutland Peninsula, home of the Cimbri, and was so well preserved that police mistook him for the victim in an unsolved murder case. Inside his stomach they found traces of the gruel he had eaten before he died. The lecturer, a Dutchwoman, concentrated mostly on the scientific methods used during the examinations and subsequent re-examinations of these finds, but she wasn’t a gifted speaker, and it was only when she began showing pictures of the remains and describing how these men had died – some of this new to me, some half-remembered from undergraduate studies – that she won my full attention. Tollund Man had been hanged. Grauballe Man, another Jutlander, had his throat slashed. Lindow Man was strangled, received a double fracture of the skull, and had his jugular sliced. Clonycavan Man’s head was split open with a stone axe. Arms and a torso appeared on the screen, purplish-red and wrinkled as a dried chili. This was Old Croghan Man. In her monotone the lecturer recited the details of the overkill this young, unusually tall man had suffered: he was bound with hazel branches threaded through the skin of his upper arms, his nipples were snipped off, he was stabbed in the chest, stabbed in the neck, decapitated, and cut in half. “Somehow,” she said, her voice thickening with rehearsed mirth, “these wounds proved fatal.”

I stepped over a wooden stile and entered the beech forest that climbed towards the fort. The light beneath the trees was tea-colored, the air cool, which I was glad of as the ground began to steepen. Stenshuvud is an outcrop rising a hundred meters above the sea, and my breathing was labored by the time I broke free of the trees and felt the soft earth of the forest floor give way to rock.

The fort’s remains, spread over three small peaks, were scant, but it was easy to see how well chosen it had been as a stronghold. From here you could keep watch over your entire surroundings. The first peak faced south, where heathland studded with junipers stretched to sand flats and, beyond, the sea; the second east, where bluffs dropped sharply to the water; the third looked back to the interior, down a creased and thickly forested valley.

This was the route I chose for my descent. Berry-like clusters of sheep droppings lay in mounds. Heather writhed across the ground. A regal oak stood heavy with plump acorns: green, orange and brown. I slipped one from its cap with a gentle tug. When I was a young child our next-door neighbor, a kind Welshman who whistled constantly through nervous habit, gave me an acorn he had taken from the grounds of Windsor Castle. My mother helped me plant it in the back garden, and from then on that little patch of ground was thought of as belonging to me. Over the years the oak grew to twice my height. When I was older, and I needed to move home for a period of time, I sat beneath it every day, telling it things I wasn’t able to tell other people.

The acorn rested in my hand, smooth and apple-green. I rolled it between my fingers, deeply pleased by its shape and texture. At some point my old tree was stricken by a fungus and chopped down. My mother didn’t tell me until after it was done. Now just a mossy stump is left. The fungus is still alive somewhere down in the roots; my mother tells me she scrapes it off when it pushes through the cracked surface of the wood.

I tucked the acorn away and walked on. My water bottle, half full, gulped in my pocket at every step. I heard chestnuts rattling through branches as they fell to the ground. On this side of the hill, where the beeches weren’t dominant enough to block all the sunlight, the undergrowth was thicker and there were more signs of life. Stepping over a huge slug lying across the path, I heard a thrashing off in the distance. I stopped to listen and the sound ceased, but I had the sense that someone was very close by. I turned, thinking I’d see a fellow walker somewhere behind me. There was no one there. But turning again I did see someone, perhaps thirty feet ahead, part-screened by leaves and branches. They were tall, and seemed to be standing slowly from a kneeling position. “Hey!” I called. There was no reply. I started towards the figure, which was still rising – now it seemed impossibly tall, perhaps twice my height. I had halved the distance between us when I heard something rushing at me from my left.

“Ursäkta!” a man cried as he sprinted past, almost knocking me to the ground.

“Idiot!” I shouted, but the runner had already disappeared among the trees. I turned back, but on the spot where I thought my watcher had stood I found nothing except bushes and a pile of dead branches.

By the time I reached Kivik I was hungry and the roads were crowded. Trapped in a slow-moving line of traffic, I crawled past the Kungagraven. In Lund, having coffee after a morning session, a Bronze Age specialist had stood too close and excitedly briefed me on “the largest circular burial site in Sweden.” He had halitosis, and his enthusiasm for barrows was something I couldn’t share, not when he stood breathing on me, and not as I stared from the car at a large, low mound of grey stones.

I rolled slowly past a group of boys sitting on the fence dividing the road from the field in which the Kungagraven lay. They were passing a bottle back and forth and shouting things at the cars, goading one another to be ever more outrageous. They seemed possessed by a hectic energy, and the violence of their laughter made me uneasy. It was then that I realized who the boy at the supermarket had looked like. Guillaume. I met him in France, on a family holiday when I was a child. He was short and muscular, like an acrobat, and had – just like that strange boy in Simrishamn – the most piercing blue eyes. I hadn’t thought of him for years, but now his face hung before me as I listened to the boys’ malicious laughter. They were like animals.

I had planned to eat my lunch in Kivik, but it looked unbearable. From the main road all the way down to the harbor the streets were thronged with festival-goers drinking cider and carrying sacks of apples. They clogged the pavements and spilled onto the road, braying and grinning like morons. I decided to head straight for Haväng, another ten kilometers up the coast.

I heard a crow’s loud complaint as I got out of the car. The empty car park faced a grassy field inhabited by a few black and chestnut mares. The nearby sea was out of sight and silent. I closed my eyes and absorbed the quietness.

At the edge of the car park stood a cafe, which was closed. Beside it there was a small cement toilet block. Inside the men’s a flickering tube spat yellow light on the damp cement floor and the dirty porcelain of the sink and urinal. A sodden, dissolving mass of toilet paper stood on the ledge of the sink. Barnacles of rust had formed on the taps. There was a single cubicle, which I was surprised to see was occupied. As I urinated I heard someone shifting on the toilet seat. For the second time that day I felt watched. I turned and looked at the small gap between the base of the cubicle and the floor, half expecting to see a face glaring out at me. I had an urge to go down on my knees and peer under, to see at least the shoes of whoever was in there. I went to the sink, but having my back to the cubicle made me almost shake with fear. I yanked open the door and threw myself outside.

For the second time that day I felt watched.

There, my uneasiness instantly became laughable. The sun was shining, and now there was even some heat in the day. Realizing how hungry I was, I decided to walk down to the beach and eat my lunch before visiting the dolmen. I passed through a gate, walked up a short rise and from  its crest saw the sea. A duckboard path sloped down to the beach, cutting across tussocky grass. I saw white, brown and yellow mushrooms bursting from cowpats, clumps of buttercups, and small networks of a blue flower I didn’t recognize. When I was a child and we went on walks, my mother, a woman who never wasted words, would recite the names of the trees and flowers we saw. The way she spoke made them sound like the words to a spell.

At the border between grass and sand stood a large concrete pillbox built into the bank, so I could walk directly onto its roof from the grass. It probably dated from the early years of the Cold War. The thickly littered steps leading down to its interior announced its dereliction. Beer bottles, plastic bags, crisp packets, fragments of wood and metal: the archaeological record in waiting. I sat on the edge of the concrete roof, my legs dangling. Sun and shadow alternated at speed. The ocean was flat and the beach was empty of people. Silver water lapped at the floury white sand. I ate my sandwiches slowly, lulled by the gentle sound of the waves and the drone of insects. The dolmen was somewhere behind me, but I didn’t want to look at it yet. I wanted to save it. To my right, above a small pine wood, a dark, cracked cloud seemed to hold the sun prisoner: Fissures in the cloud glowed with brilliant light.

I ate an apple and watched the currents show as zigzagging lines in the water. Scrolls of cloud receded to the horizon. I thought of the pillbox I was sitting on, and Stenshuvud, and the millennium that separated them: structures erected at the edge of things, repelling invaders. But our defenses are always overrun eventually, by time if by nothing else. I decided I wouldn’t go to the dolmen yet. I would walk along the beach, then climb the low cliffs to the sloping grasslands above. They would carry me back down to the site.

I put the litter from my lunch in my knapsack and descended from the pillbox. Gulls launched themselves from the trees edging the beach and patrolled the sea in shallow parabolas. Sand flies flickered at my feet. Before two black wooden boathouses, their doors and windows sealed, I passed a large patch of burned straw, the remains of a beach fire. A little further on, climbing over some rocks, I slipped and sliced open the side of my hand on a jagged piece of granite. The wound wasn’t so deep, but enough blood continued to well from it that I needed to staunch it: Looking back I saw a line of dark spots running alongside my footsteps.

I sat down amid the exposed roots of a chestnut tree, its split, spiked pods littering the sand around me. I took a lightweight scarf from my knapsack and knotted it as tightly as I could around my hand. As I did so I felt, for the third time that day, that someone was watching me. As I looked around, confirming I was utterly alone, I dug the fingers of my good hand into the powdery sand. Dry and fine on the surface, it was dense and cold beneath.

Just before I left the beach, beside a steep track up the cliff that would allow me to double back towards the dolmen, I was confronted by a strange totem. It was a section of birch trunk embedded in the sand, its white bark mostly stripped away by the salt air. Halfway up the trunk a small branch reached out from it like a withered arm. The remains of an emerald-green net hung from the end of the branch. At the top of the trunk someone had wound a mass of white and yellow rope that had an unpleasant resemblance to human hair. Its frayed ends shifted in the breeze. Beneath the hair a crude face had been cut and scorched into the wood, its round eyes and slot mouth giving it a hateful, imbecilic expression. It stared back down the beach the way I’d come. Maybe this was my mystery watcher, I thought, and felt a fury rise up in me. I took up a length of driftwood and used it as a cudgel, thrashing at the totem until it lay in fragments on the sand.

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Breathing hard, I climbed the path up to the grasslands. In the far distance, to the north, I could just make out a family: a woman, a child and a man. They were walking away from me. There was no one else. My only companions were sheep, grazing at a distance from one another on the ground sloping down to the dolmen.

At the edge of the site stood an information panel, angled like a lectern. The Haväng Dolmen, five thousand years old, was uncovered by storms in 1843. I didn’t read any more; I was impatient to explore the site for myself. I skirted the square of jagged stones that marked the dolmen’s perimeter, the grass around them springy, cropped, and dotted with rabbit droppings. At the centre of the site, an enormous porphyry capstone rested on several smaller stones to form a grave chamber six feet long, four wide and three high. The chamber stood open on the seaward side like a waiting mouth. A large red admiral swirled past. I felt the lightness of being far from home, the pleasure and terror of being free to do as I liked. No one knew that I was here. No one would know if I didn’t return. I felt faint, and put my hand out to balance myself. My cut hand throbbed against the perimeter stone, coated in flaking grey lichen. It was then that the feeling took hold: a keen urge, a need, to lie within the burial chamber. I scrambled towards its mouth, got down and squirmed inside on my belly.

Once I was in as far as I could go, I twisted onto my back. My clothes had ridden up, and the small of my back pressed against the icy sand of the chamber floor. Looking out between my feet, which lay outside the chamber still, I saw a strip of green grass and a grey band of sea. I dropped my head back into the sand. I looked up at the base of the capstone, streaked black and copper red. I reached out my hand and pressed it against the frigid rock, smooth against my palm.

I felt a deep tiredness seep through me. As the walls of stone closed in I shut my eyes. I heard the sea in the distance. I saw a cave mouth, and darkness streaming from it. Guillaume was beside me, I could feel the nearness of his body. I was ten again, on holiday in the south of France. He was a few years older, leader of a gang of local kids. He was fearless. I saw him on the beach, devising games, issuing orders, leaping about in the water. I thought he was magnificent, and as soon as he spoke to me I became his most loyal disciple. I followed him everywhere, to the surprise and relief of my parents: now I wouldn’t be a burden to them.

I scrambled between capstone and sand, digging my heels into the ground to help lever myself out, but I couldn’t move.

On our last day together Guillaume and the others showed me a large cave you could swim into, just around from the little bay that had briefly been our kingdom. The cave’s entrance was a shallow arch. At high tide, Guillaume said, it was all underwater. Inside, in the half- darkness, our cries merged into a ringing echo. The cave’s entrance was a burning eye. Ripples in the water glided in golden ribbons across the stone above our heads.

My friends – I still thought they were my friends – showed me a ledge at the back of the cave where you could sit and hang your legs in the water. Guillaume pulled himself onto it and hauled me up beside him. The others stayed in the water. Guillaume showed me a passageway leading back into the rock. He told me that beyond this passageway lay another cave the others hadn’t seen, one he wanted to share only with me. Gesturing towards the narrow crack in the rock, he said I should go. I eagerly complied, but after just a couple of steps I had to turn my body sideways, and after only a little more progress squeezing myself through the passage I was stuck fast. I couldn’t even turn my head to ask for help, so I shouted back to Guillaume. I heard him laugh at me. There was the splash of a body returning to the water, and someone shouted, “Bye, English!” There was more laughter, then only the sound of water sloshing in the empty cave.

I was helpless. For a long time I did nothing but cry. Eventually, desperate, I began wrenching my body forward and back against the rock. I felt my skin tearing, but still I wasn’t free. I remember feeling each pump of my heart, how it seemed to squeeze against the rock. I believed what Guillaume had said about the cave being underwater at high tide. I was convinced I was going to drown. I could see my corpse stuck there, its hair waving in the water. Lying in the burial chamber, returned to that narrow space between those pinning walls, I felt the certainty of nearing death.

I opened my eyes and saw the capstone above me. I was very cold. I heard the crashing of waves from the beach below. I scrambled between capstone and sand, digging my heels into the ground to help lever myself out, but I couldn’t move. I felt as though the life was being crushed out of me. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, and felt a scatter of rain on my face. I looked down at the entrance to the dolmen and saw a pair of legs – my legs – emerging from it, lying completely still. There was a dark figure, very tall and thin. Its back was towards me, but I was certain it saw me. It looked like a column of rags, its tatters whipped by the wind. The water pounded the shore. The figure turned, but there was no front or back to it – it was blank on all sides. I felt something cold and empty press against me. Guillaume, a boy still, slid from the dolmen’s mouth and leapt into the turf, which parted around him like water. The earth warped and surged: The green land and the grey sea and the silver sky became a ribbon of light whipping around me and I was trapped again, wedged tightly, stripping off my skin as I tore myself free. I found myself beside my car. I had no memory of leaving the dolmen. No idea how much time had passed. The sun was sinking. My head felt like it would split open with the pain. I stood up, stumbled to the undergrowth fringing the car park and vomited. It lasted a long time, until there was nothing left but a thick bile that burned my throat. Shadows were spreading across the car park. In the next field stood a tree black with crows.

I drove through the darkness to Simrishamn, packed my things and checked out. The streets were as silent as they had been since I arrived. I drove straight to Malmö and booked into a hotel in the center of the city. I walked the busiest streets. I ate dinner at the most crowded bar I could find. Only when it closed and I had no other choice did I go back to my hotel. In the shower the water ran grey with sand. I sat on the bed with BBC News blaring from the TV. Even with the lights on, even with the room’s comforting ugly modernity all around me, I struggled to stay calm. I told myself I was exhausted. I had been anxious about presenting my paper, a paper I had worked on for months, and it had been misunderstood. I needed rest. I needed sleep.

I woke feeling wet rock pressed against my face. I heard the moan of the sea on the beach below. It grew louder. I woke again to the chatter of the TV and the room’s burning brightness. I lay in bed rubbing my chest, which ached the way it had ached in France after I finally wrenched myself free. I told my mother I fell while climbing. If she knew I was lying she didn’t care enough to get the truth out of me. I never spoke about it, and eventually I forgot it had ever happened.

Back in London I kept myself busy preparing my lectures, answering emails, paying bills: all tasks that bore me away from that strange episode. But the dolmen was always there, looming like a door I didn’t want to open, and when my fingers found this acorn it was as if they turned the key in the lock. Now when I close my eyes I see the chamber, waiting to be filled. When I fall asleep, I feel the rock encase me. There are moments in life when we grasp what it is to die. If we’re lucky we forget them, but my luck has run out.

***

Excerpted from Mothers: Stories by Chris Power. Published by  Farrar, Straus and Giroux January 15th 2019.  Copyright © 2018 by Chris Power. All rights reserved.

Chris Power’s column, A Brief Survey of the Short Story, has appeared in The Guardian since 2007. He has written for the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Statesman. His fiction has been published in Granta, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and The Dublin Review, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Should art — and more specifically, literature — be instructive? Adding her perspective to the never-ending debate, Roxane Gay has an essay at Lithub in which she reveals how she chose the short stories for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2018: with an eye toward writing that engaged with the political in thoughtful, engaging, diverse and inclusive ways.

Writers are divided on whether or not it is their responsibility to address the contretemps in their work. Some writers stubbornly cling to the idea that writing should not be sullied by politics. They labor under the impression that they can write fiction that isn’t political, or influenced in some way by politics, which is, whether they realize it or not, a political stance in and of itself. Other writers believe it is an inherent part of their craft to engage with the political. And then there are those writers, such as myself, who believe that the very act of writing from their subject position is political, regardless of what they write. I know, as a black, queer woman, that to write is a deeply political act, whether I am writing about the glory of the movie Magic Mike XXL, or a novel about a kidnapping in Haiti, or a short story about a woman eating expired yogurt while her husband suggests opening their marriage.

When I am reading fiction, I am not always looking for the political. First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don’t know and need to know about the lives of others.

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