The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 23

"Crossing" emerged, after a fifteen-year dormancy period, from an act of near-biblical stupidity on my part: in 1994, while crossing a river in the Pacific Northwest with my five-year-old son on my back, I found myself, very quickly, in serious trouble. It didn't matter that I'd forded the same river many times before without incident; this time, for whatever reason, was different. Even now I don't like to think about it. There are few things more excruciating than realizing you've put your child's life in danger.

Over the years that followed, I thought about the incident more than once; I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn't find the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note-often dissonant, almost always unexpected-that brings a story to life. Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert. So I let it be.

It wasn't until I came across the anecdote about the medieval priest that flashes through the father's mind on the story's last page that I felt the tumblers fall. Of course! I had to leave him midstream, tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.

On some level, it feels almost ungrateful; I made it out, after all, and today my son could carry me across that river a good deal more easily than I could him. But fiction, I remind myself, is an act of trespa.s.s on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn't play.

Both are equally true: We made it. And we're still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.

Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. He is the author of a collection of stories, Lost Lake; two novels, G.o.d's Fool and The Visible World, which have been translated into sixteen languages; and Essays from the Nick of Time. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellows.h.i.+ps and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. His short fiction has appeared there as well as in The Paris Review and Granta, among other publications, and his essays and stories have been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories. He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, and lives outside New York City.

Elizabeth Tallent, "Never Come Back"

The deep background of this story-which may not make itself felt very much in this final draft-are the changes confronting my hometown on the Mendocino coast: old ways of making a living have vanished, and with them the certainties they fostered, so there's a sense in which people are free to start from scratch but also bewildered by the prevailing scriptlessness. In "Never Come Back" I wanted to write about a young mother who leaves her child and how the grandparents left to care for the child handle an absence they can't understand but which they inevitably judge. My secret ambition in this story was to kindle empathy for characters whose actions are, on the face of it, indefensible, but which make the deepest kind of sense to them.

Elizabeth Tallent was born in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., in 1954. Her work includes the story collections Honey and Time with Children and the novel Museum Pieces. She teaches in Stanford's Creative Writing Program and lives in California.

Lily Tuck, "Ice"

My husband and I did take a cruise to Antarctica, and since I am both a pessimist and a contrarian, I imagined the worst: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, my husband falling overboard, drowning. As it turned out we had a very happy time and, except for the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that was neatly stacked on our nightstand falling pell-mell to the cabin floor and the obnoxious fellow pa.s.senger whose goal it was to drive a golf ball in every country of the world, nothing bad happened. Antarctica is stark and desolate, and despite the presence of birds, penguins, and seals as well as the unexpected beautiful blues of the icebergs, one cannot help but be struck by how insignificant and intrusive the appearance of human beings is in that predominantly white landscape, and I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.

Lily Tuck was born in France in 1939 and lived in South America as a child. She is the author of four novels-Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), and The News from Paraguay (winner of the 2004 National Book Award)-a collection of stories, Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived, and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Her essay "Group Grief" was included in The Best American Essays 2006. Her novel Probability or I Married You for Happiness will be published in fall 2011. She lives in New York City.

Brad Watson, "Alamo Plaza"

During my family's leanest years, when I was growing up, we spent our summer vacations (if we got one; sometimes we didn't, and sometimes they were as brief as three days) on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was always a boy's disappointment, compared to the Alabama and north Florida coasts, with their natural white sand beaches and comparatively huge waves rolling in. And their much clearer water, very clear and green in north Florida. The real beaches in Mississippi are offsh.o.r.e, on the barrier islands, accessible by private boat or ferry, but we never went out there. We got the Mississippi Sound, which in those days was polluted by bad stuff from plants upriver, by waste from the fis.h.i.+ng industry, and I don't know what-all else. But it did have a charm about it. The whole place seemed calmer, more still, less corrupted by the glitzier and cheaper elements of upscale tourism. The smell-at first alarming and repulsive, then kind of wonderfully rich, a smell you realized was the rank richness of marine life and death-was one I experienced nowhere else, on no other coast, and not in New Orleans or any other coastal city. Except for a grand old hotel or two, most of the lodging was either run-down or modest. And the clientele was pretty much entirely local, Mississippi, with some Louisiana tourists mixed in. So I have fond memories of the place, even though I despised it at the time. These memories, mixed with memories of an imaginatively reclusive childhood, of often feeling like the odd boy out in my own family, were things I tried for a long time to combine in this story. It went into and back out of the desk drawer for many years, as I'd write a draft and fail, put it away, write it again a year or a few later, until it finally felt right. It feels highly personal, anyway, a story that comes from pretty deep inside. Putting it together, finally, felt like a great and pleasant relief. There was a kind of joyous sadness about it, which I guess is what I often experience when I recall that childhood, that family, mostly gone now.

Brad Watson was born in 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. His stories have been published in Ecotone, The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, The Greensboro Review, and The Yalobusha Review, as well as anthologies including The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Story and Its Writer. His story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury, received the Southern Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (shared with Lee Smith), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent collection is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

Recommended Story 2011.

The task of picking the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories each year is at its most difficult at the end, when there are more than twenty admirable and interesting stories. Once the final choice is made, those remaining are our Recommended Stories, listed, along with the place of publication, in the hope that our readers will seek them out and enjoy them. Please go to our website, www.penohenryprizestories.com, for excerpts from each year's recommended stories and information about the writers.

Adam Atlas, "New Year's Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims' Hospital, Naples, Italy," Narrative Magazine.

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