The Masters Review ten stories The Masters Review The Masters Review, Volume V Stories Selected by Amy Hempel Edited by Kim Winternheimer and Sadye Teiser Front cover: Adobe Stock 68131620 Design by Kim Winternheimer Interior design by Kim Winternheimer First printing. ISBN: 978-0-9853407-4-2 © 2016 The Masters Review. Published annually by The Masters Review. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or reprinted without prior written permission of The Masters Review. To contact an author regarding rights and reprint permissions please contact The Masters Review. www.mastersreview.com Printed in the USA The Masters Review ten stories Volume V Josie Sigler · Eliza Robertson · A. E. Kulze Katie Young Foster · Jonathan Durbin Jonathan Nehls · Andrés Carlstein · Laurie Baker Shubha Venugopal · Kari Shemwell Stories Selected by Amy Hempel Edited by Kim Winternheimer and Sadye Teiser Editor’s Note Five years is a milestone. Since its inception, The Masters Review has published stories by emerging writers, seeking out today’s best new voices and offering a quality platform for their work. What started as a home for writers in graduate- level creative writing programs has turned into a publication that champions all emerging writers, offering their stories and essays to a growing readership. With each issue we see more submissions than the year before, a wider range of voices, and the opportunity to introduce ten new writers to our literary community. Amy Hempel has established herself as an expert on short fiction. Her accomplishments range from a Guggenheim Fellowship to PEN/Malamud and Rea Awards for short sto- ries. Her work has appeared in numerous collections and anthologies, The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize among them. She is the winner of the Ambassador Book Award and her work has been named a New York Times Best Book of The Year. The list goes on. What you’ll discover in the long catalog of her biography is a career dedicated exclusively to short forms. We never expected to be so lucky as to have Amy Hempel oversee this anthology, and it feels incredibly special to mark this issue with a judge incomparable in her knowledge of short fiction. The library of Masters Review authors continues to impress, and this year I’m proud to present ten writers of extraordinary talent. Their stories tackle war, immigration, environmental- ism, race, and the endless frontier of conflict that makes up our interior lives. In Amy Hempel’s introduction she writes: “I wanted narratives that overturned expectations, that gave me a much-needed respite from real life . ” Fiction is a vessel for truth, allowing readers access to territory that the real world harnesses with limitation. It’s incredible to me that visiting the world through a fictitious lens helps shape our understanding of reality. It speaks to the power and significance of stories. I am so pleased to offer ten narratives that explore and challenge expectation. They take us to war-torn Iraq, to South Africa in the 90s, to a city in Poland on Christmas Eve. These stories also take us past the point of what we normally con- sider about the nature of our own jealousy, the fragility of our bodies, and the complications of parenthood. In the end, I hope you’ll feel as our judge did when she read them: “rewarded.” Thank you to everyone who submitted to this anthology and to the readers and writers who helped it come into being. We are extremely grateful. I hope you enjoy our fifth volume. Kim Winternheimer Founding Editor Contents INTRODUCTION We Were The Drowners • 1 The Pirates of Penance • 21 Detail • 37 Alkali Lake • 57 Cough • 71 Communion • 83 The Lindbergh Baby • 101 Hippos • 113 Climb On • 127 This Road May Flood • 143 Introduction The sentence is a writer’s basic unit of construction. It is my way into a story, whether I am writing one or reading one. Here are some of the arresting sentences that locked down my attention in the ten stories that make up this anthology: • They Speedo-wedgied, head-locked, and skull-knuckled each other until Jim marched out of his office wearing Hawaiians and sport sandals over bright white tube socks. • Nor did I miss their equine, translucent daughters who asked questions such as, ‘Daddy, does ‘Lego’ have a silent ‘t’ like ‘merlot’? • He wanted Jack to get to know his target. • It was too dark to see which granddaughter had come back for her, too hard to see if the other was waiting in the skirts of the trees, or had fled. • To get past the barricade on my street I had to show my August bill to a soldier, a blond kid who looked seventeen and told me he couldn’t believe how much I was paying Verizon. • Everyone knew how they got there—Mexicans in a meat- packing town—whether they said it or not, and their knowing was a threat. • They were trying to protect him from what he’d done. • I was unhappy to think I could be frightened by such a man, but unhappier still, to think that his attention was something I was slow to reject. • It felt strange listening to her advice; he’d grown accus- tomed to being her teacher, even after they became lovers. • When he has walked so far that his chin skirts the surface, he says, “There are cities under here, believe it,” then disap- pears beneath the waves. These are stories in which normal moments are tinged with malice, characters are hiding or chasing—sometimes both, characters are looking for what might, in a stretch, be called love. Some of these stories are wild rides, and up to the chal- lenge—as the writer Lee Clay Johnson puts it, they “don’t use front-wheel drive when what is needed for this rough terrain is a 4 x 4.” Others spotlight the difficulty and beauty of a number of kinds of recovery. We see the limits of wit, and why “clever” is never enough. Back in the 1960s, Philip Roth remarked on the difficulty of competing, in fiction, with what was going on in the real world. It is no easier today—I write this after watching hours of CNN coverage of the shooting of police officers by a sniper in Dallas, after the police shootings of still more African- American men, after the Orlando massacre, and Brexit, and the ongoing presidential campaigns (I could not decide on an adequate adjective for this last). Collected here are ten stories that rewarded my switching from current events to a stranger’s imagination. I wanted someone else’s thoughts in my head, but not just anyone’s nar- rative. I wanted narratives that overturned expectations, that gave me a much-needed respite from real life with sentences I would quote to friends, and—in the best cases—stories that gave me ideas for better addressing the facts of real life that are not letting up any time soon. —Amy Hempel The Masters Review ten stories We Were The Drowners Josie Sigler t was every Dolphin’s loftiest goal: to be chosen by Jim Yablonski, director of the Downriver Municipal Outdoor IPool, as one of his Drowners. From June to August, Monday through Saturday, we, the ten swimmingest members of the girls’ recreational team, climbed onto our banana-seated bicycles in the first morning heat. We pedaled, streamers flowing, toward the pool at the edge of our neighborhood. We entered the beige brick building that smelled of chlorine and mildew. Tucked behind our locker doors, we undressed. In the showers, we shouted the best songs on the radio, our voices echoing, our suits sucking quick and wet against our new bodies, the dents and swells we hadn’t shown to anyone yet. We reported for duty poolside at seven. There, waiting for us in the bright Michigan sun, stood the lithest of the Shark boys, ages fifteen to seventeen, who longed to be lifeguards. They Speedo-wedgied, head-locked, and skull-knuckled each other until Jim marched out of his office wearing Hawaiians and sport sandals over bright white tube socks. A staccato screech emanated from the whistle clamped between his teeth. The boys snapped to attention, thrusting out their chests, sinewing their stomachs. Jim examined his beloved clipboard. That morning, Rory Brunhaefer and Casey Wheldon were chosen to go first. They pulled their whistles over their heads 2 Josie Sigler and rock-paper-scissored for who got to sit in the lifeguard chair and who would walk the periphery. Casey’s paper beat Rory’s rock—the only way Casey would ever beat Rory as far as nine of ten Dolphins were concerned. Casey, smirking, climbed his throne. Jim blew an earsplitting blast. And the drowning began. I was a Drowner all three of my Dolphin summers. By the time I was almost fourteen, I understood the nuances of the job. There was an art to playing dead, performing the perfect accident. You had to make up a story about not only how but why you would drown and believe it in your guts before you went anywhere near the water. Each boy got just ten minutes to prove his mettle. Thus timing was of the essence if you wanted a particular boy to notice you. But so was subtlety—if you wanted him to like what he noticed. Thus we veterans strolled around on deck, chatting and tossing a beach ball as real bathers might. Lucy Pfeiffer, however, a newbie if ever there was one, threw her scrawny body in the water and began gulping and thrashing.