The Best American Short Stories 2015 Read Online Free Page A

odd as any of Flannery O’Connor’s.
    There’s a whole multiplicity of effects on display here, which is as it should be, each of the best stories being best in its own way. Shobha Rao’s “Kavitha and Mustafa” is a riveting, pulse-pounding narrative that allies two strangers, an unhappily married young woman and a resourceful boy, during a brutal train robbery in Pakistan, while Aria Beth Sloss’s “North” unfolds as a lyrical meditation on a life in nature and what it means to explore the known and unknown both. In “About My Aunt,” Joan Silber contrasts two women of different generations who insist on living their own lives in their own unconventional ways and yet, for all their kinship, both temperamental and familial, cannot finally approve of each other. Ben Fowlkes’s “You’ll Apologize If You Have To” was one of my immediate first-round choices, an utterly convincing tough-guy story that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hemingway’s canon and ends not in violence but in a moment of grace. So too was Jess Walter’s “Mr. Voice,” a story about what it means to be family, with one extraordinary character at the center of it and a last line that punched me right in the place where my emotions go to hide. Which brings me to the most moving story here, Maile Meloy’s “Madame Lazarus.” I read this one outdoors, with a view at my command, but the view vanished so entirely I might as well have been enclosed in a box, and when it came back, I found myself in the mortifying position of sitting there exposed and sobbing in public. An old man, the death of a dog, Paris. What Meloy has accomplished here is no easy thing, evoking true emotion,
tristesse
, soul-break, over the ties that bind us to the things of this world and the way they’re ineluctably broken, cruelly and forever, and no going back.
    We’ve come a long way from the forced effects of Benjamin Rosenblatt’s “Zelig” and Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s hammer and anvil pounding out the lesson of “In Berlin.” I can only imagine that this series’ founding editor, Edward J. O’Brien, would be both amazed and deeply gratified.
    Â 
    T. C. B OYLE

MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
The Siege at Whale Cay
    FROM
The Kenyon Review
    Â 
    G EORGIE WOKE up in bed alone. She slipped into a swimsuit and wandered out to a soft stretch of white sand Joe called Femme Beach. The Caribbean sky was cloudless, the air already hot. Georgie waded into the ocean, and as soon as the clear water reached her knees she dove into a small wave, with expert form.
    She scanned the balcony of the pink stucco mansion for the familiar silhouette, the muscular woman in a monogrammed polo shirt, chewing a cigar. Joe liked to drink her morning coffee and watch Georgie swim.
    But not today.
    Curious, Georgie toweled off, tossed a sundress over her suit, and walked the dirt path toward the general store, sand coating her ankles, shells crackling underneath her bare feet. The path was covered in lush, leafy overhang and stopped in front of a cinder-block building with a thatched roof.
    Georgie looked at the sun overhead. She lost track of time on the island. Time didn’t matter on Whale Cay. You did what Joe wanted to do, when Joe wanted to do it. That was all.
    She heard laughter and found the villagers preparing a conch stew. They were dancing, drinking dark rum and home-brewed beer from chipped porcelain jugs and tin cans. Some turned to nod at her, stepping over skinny chickens and children to refill their cans. The women threw chopped onions, potatoes, and hunks of raw fish into steaming cauldrons, the insides of which were yellowed with spices. Joe’s lead servant, Hannah, was frying johnnycakes on a pan over a fire, popping pigeon peas into her mouth. Everything smelled of fried fish, blistered peppers, and garlic.
    â€œYou’re making a big show,”