This is the published version: Takolander, Maria 2015, Transition, in A kind of compass: stories on distance, Tramp Press, Dublin, Ireland, pp.231‐240. Available from Deakin Research Online: http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30078936 Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright owner. Copyright : 2015, Tramp Press edited by Belin da McKeon First published 2015 by Tramp Press Dublin www.tramppress.com A Kind of Compass: St or ies on D ist ance C op yrigh t © Belin d a M cKeon 20 15 ‘Terraforming’ by Elske Rahill Copyright © Elske Rahill 2015 ‘The Naturals’ by Sam Lipsyte Copyright © Sam Lipsyte 2015. First published in The New Yorker, 2014 ‘Six Days in Glorious Vienna’ by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder Copyright © Yoko Ogawa 2015 is a translation of [風薫るウィ ーンの旅六日間] in『海』 Tokyo: Shinchosha 2006 ‘Extremadura/Until Night Falls’ by Kevin Barry Copyright © Kevin Barry 2015 ‘Big Island, Small Island’ by Francesca Marciano Copyright © Francesca Marciano 2015. First published in the author’s collection The Other Language, Pantheon, 2014 ‘Animal Heart’ by Niven Govinden Copyright © Niven Govinden 2015 ‘New Zealand Flax’ by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Copyright © Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 2015 ‘The Rape Essay (or Mutilated Pages)’ by Suzanne Scanlon Copyright © Suzanne Scanlon 2015 ‘Finishing Lines’ by Sara Baume Copyright © Sara Baume 2015 ‘The Place for Me’ by E.C. Osondu Copyright © E.C. Osondu 2015 ‘Palomino’ by Mark Doten Copyright © Mark Doten 2015 ‘City Inside’ by Porochista Khakpour Copyright © Porochista Khakpour 2015 ‘Made’ by D avid H ayden Copyright © D avid H ayden 20 15 ‘The Unintended’ by Gina Apostol Copyright © Gina Apostol 2015 ‘Holy Island’ by Ross Raisin Copyright © Ross Raisin 2015. An original commission by Hexham Book Festival. ‘Distant Song’ by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, translated by Lytton Smith Copyright © Kristín Ómarsdóttir 2015 ‘Transition’ by Maria Takolander Copyright © Maria Takolander 2015 All characters in this publication are ¿ ctitious, and any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-9928170-5-3 Tramp Press gratefully acknowledges the ¿ nancial assistance of the Arts Council. Set in 11pt on 15pt HoeÀer by Marsha Swan Printed by Clondalkin Print in Dublin Cont ent s INTRODUCTI ON Belinda McKeon |vi i | TERRAFORMI NG Elske Rahill |3| THENATURALS Sam Lipsyte |21| SI XDAYSINGLORI OUSVI ENNA Yoko Ogawa |1| THEUNI NTENDED Gina Apostol |3| EXTREMADURAUNTI LNI GHTFALLS Kevin Barry |3| HOLYISLAND Ross Raisin |1| THELACEFORME E.C. Osondu || THERAEESSAYORMUTI LATEDAGES Suzanne Scanlon |1| FI NI SHI NGLI NES Sara Baume |12| CONTENTS ANI MALHEART Niven Govinden |13| DI STANTSONG Kristín Ómarsdóttir |11| IGISLANDSMALLISLAND Francesca Marciano |13| MADE David Hayden |11| ALOMI NO Mark Doten |11| CITYINSIDE Porochista Khakpour |1| NEEALANDFLAX Éilís Ní Dhuibhne |21| TRANSI TI ON Maria Takolander |22| About the Authors |21| Belinda McKeon istance is inherent to the short story. Or, the short story is made out of distance, out of the problem Dof it. A story must be ‘the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem,’ Amy Bloom writes, and it must be these things within the space allowed by a clutch of pages, or maybe even a single page; space which eats itself up greedily, like a life. And yet the short story is a form which contains within itself acres, ‘a faraway deep inside,’ to borrow a second phrase from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the book from which this anthology takes its title. The distance from here to there is never what it seems. The diɱerence between those two places – those two illusions? – is always more than a country mile. I asked these seventeen writers to think about distance because I am obsessed with it, and because I wanted to outsource that obsession for a while, or maybe to exorcise it. This did not work. I read the stories as they arrived from down the road and across the oceans, from Ireland and England and Italy and France and Iceland and Australia and Japan, and from America, where I live now, and from writers who live now in America but were born in Nigeria and the Philippines and Iran; I read these stories as they showed up in my inbox, and I became even more obsessed. With the faraway deep inside; with the faraway glancing oɱ every surface. With the spaces – the acres – between people, between places, between the parts and versions of the self. With the stuɱ of feeling at home, and how that never produces interesting ¿ction, and with the stuɱ of feeling at sea, and how that so often produces ¿ction that will not leave you alone. INTRODUCTI ON Short stories, Richard Ford writes, are ‘daring little instruments’. I always read ‘daring’, there, as ‘darling’ at ¿ rst – and if that’s not an attempt to take the pinch of fear, of anxiety, of seasickness or jetlag or compass-needle-spinning out of the business of writing a story, I don’t know what is. Because they’re not darling, short stories – or at least, they should not be; they’re daring. They go places. They leave for places, and their creators had damn well better go along. And those places, if a story is doing what it needs to do, are hardly ever comfortable – for the writer or the reader. T his idea of a story allowing its readers to go to places they’d otherwise never have had the chance to experience; this idea gets trun- dled out a lot, on the jacket copy of books for instance, and actually, didn’t I trundle that idea out myself, writing the jacket copy for this book? Yes, I did. Because it is such a jacket copy way of t alking about what stories do; it is the kind of description you pull, unthinkingly, out of your jacket pocket. Well, forget I said that, will you please? Or consider me a liar, a lazy jacket-copy-writer, whatever works for you, because I don’t really believe in that idea. It casts the story in too much of a do-gooder, humanitarian sort of role; a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation for readers. But readers looking for good stories don’t want to make a wish. Readers like this want to take a plunge, make a wrong turn, ¿nd themselves lost and feel their hearts thumping as they scrabble around for a ¿eld guide. As they look at the cracked glass of an unlikely compass. ‘Art,’ Deborah Eisenberg has said, ‘is destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and re¿ nes what you can experience.’ A good story takes its readers to places to which they didn’t particularly want to go. It takes its readers to those places and it says, look; see. I’ve never particularly wanted to go into space, for instance; given that it is usually quite an undertaking for me to get out of the house and go to yoga, Mars or even (I may be googling the phrase ‘map of outer space’ right now, by the way) the earth’s outer atmosphere are a bit of a stretch for me. But I went there; I was taken to those places, or to the possibility of those places by two stories in this anthology – two stories the shared resonances of which struck me at ¿ rst as uncanny and then as quite devastating. Elske Rahill and Maria Takolander both thought about distance and came up with women INTRODUCTI ON drawn to the idea of splitting oɱ from everything, to the opportunity to leave everything behind, everything known, everything thought worthy of treasuring or losing; there is something, I think, so very telling in that. And there is maybe, too, something very telling in the fact that I think of space as a place to which a person might go, the way they might go to a country or a continent; the way Sara Baume’s troubled protagonist, for instance, might Ày to London to do a favour for a relative, or the way that the eager tourist in Yoko Ogawa’s story might treat herself to a holiday in Vienna. That’s the thing about distance, or rather about the way we conceive of it; we always place ourselves at the origin-point of the far- away-ness, think of ourselves as the ‘here’ to the ‘there’. But we are both at once, really, and more than both; we are not looking at space, from our solid rock, but caught in it, part of it, changing it. “Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and the feelings of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places,” says the self-vanished man of Kevin Barry’s story. It works both ways. People travel in some of these stories, but they are in exile in all of them. Any story that digs into the human is a story about exile, in a sense; we are all at a remove from one another, sometimes trying to reach one another, sometimes trying to do the opposite. Porochista Khakpour’s Henry comes to a ‘famous city’ with the apparent intent of avoiding other people, but the glass that keeps us separate is a mirror as much as is a window; Francesca Marciano’s Stella Àies to a small island in the Indian Ocean, half-hoping to step onto the sands of something she lost long ago, but the roads are made of packed dirt and a harsh tower looms over everything.