Life wish, death wish, red fish, blue fish: "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess (BASS 2025)

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author. They maintained this practice this year, in spite of the change of editor. So when two stories have similar themes or subject matter, it's a coincidence. 

Sometimes, it's one hell of a coincidence, though, enough to make me wonder if the guest editor selecting the winning stories is actually such a genius that, as they read through, they were able to consider how the stories would play out through juxtaposition by considering author surnames. "Let's see, yes, Wilson's story is about as good as Baker's, but if I choose Wilson, it'll go right after Weber, and both are about a family mourning the loss of a dog..." I can't believe any editor chooses stories like that, but in all the years I've been doing this, "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess, coupled with "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein, the story just before "Unfathomably" in the 2025 BASS, have got to the take award for "two stories most difficult to believe just happened to end up next to one another." This is because of the way both stories squeeze all the meaning they can out of the uncanniness of the female body. 

Freud just won't go away

I always wondered, from the first moment I realized there was such a thing as literary theory, why Freud was such a big part of it. In any anthology of or introduction to literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism will probably occupy a large chapter somewhere near the front (because it was, chronologically, one of the earliest influential theories in modernity). A good chunk of that chapter on psychoanalytic criticism will belong to the work of Sigmund Freud. 

When I first found myself spending a chunk of a semester learning to apply Freud to a literary text, I was surprised. Freud isn't very influential in the actual practice of psychology or psychiatry anymore. The science of the brain has advanced far enough that we can pretty easily dispense with a lot of his key concepts. For example, we don't really think that dreams are the unconscious trying to tell us something, even while repressing that message. I don't think anyone believes that women go around their whole lives wishing they had penises. Even if we aren't professionals in mental health or cognitive science, we can read his work and see a good deal more cultural assumption than rigorous science in it.

And yet...

Some of the major concepts in it have appeal, not as science, but as a way of explaining art and why certain motifs continually show up in literary works. Freud isn't relevant much anymore if you're going to a mental health professional to try and quit smoking or to deal with your anxiety, but it's hard to read some stories and not think of his categories. So as unlikely as it seems, Freud is still worth considering, not as a psychologist, but as a cultural thinker who brings psychology into the discussion of art. He's more Joseph Campbell than Michael Gazzaniga. 

I wonder whether doctors who did bloodletting or doctors who tried to fix patients based on the images from their dreams have done more harm in the world. 

Life and Death

Two concepts in Freud are the "life wish," which he called eros, because one way this wish manifests itself is in the decision to have children through sex, and the "death drive," which he called thanatos. Thanatos manifests itself in all of humanity's violent and risky behaviors. Since sex can be one of those risky things, it's pretty clear that the life wish and the death drive are kind of mixed up in one another. For a male to do his part in traditional procreation, he has to have an orgasm, which has been compared to death in many cultures and languages. 

In "Unfathomably Deep," the two drives are completely mixed up for Izzie, the first-person narrator. They're so mixed up, they almost have the same name. One is Danielle, her dead sister, and the other is Daniel, the doctor-in-training who's doing his OBGYN rotation at the place where Izzie is a hired actress playing a patient. 

But which is death and which is life? It'd be easy to say that Danielle, as the dead one, is the death drive, while Daniel, playing a doctor helping Izzie to achieve her make-believe pregnancy, is life. But when Danielle died, she was herself pregnant. And the frequent references to Medea, who killed her own children, mean that even Doctor Daniel's role in bringing forth children could be tied to death. 

When the story opens, we immediately get a very funny play on the meaning of the words of the title. Immediately below the title of the story and the epigraph from Medea, we get the opening line: "Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out." Izzie, as a fake gynecological patient, is getting an exam of her "unfathomable depths." In Freud, the unconscious mind, deep waters, and the vagina all occupy similar psychological territory. There are a number of reasons why. The ocean is deep, the unconscious mind is deep. The womb is watery. The vagina is a depth to plumb. All are something primordial from which our existence stems. 

Izzie's psychotic break into her own unconscious comes on the bank of the river, and it is described in terms of falling into a depth: "Then, as you all know, I fell in. Not down into the water, but backward, into the steep ravine that's cracked up my brain." This psychotic break is then followed by Izzie plunging both herself and Daniel into the water, where she kills him with love.

In addition to being life, Daniel is also sort of an Adam-like person to Izzie. She is first attracted to him because he doesn't do the interview right. He reassures her when he is supposed to be clinical and unemotional. She sees him as Edenically innocent: "My god, it's gotta be so beautiful to be dumb. To be born with such a stagnant little forever face. To be born so entitled to a certain eternity. It's gotta be like nothing just to live and live and live and live!" 

Contrasted to Daniel's innocent stupidity is Rebecca...ahem...Apple, the genius. That is, the fruit of knowledge, contrasted to Daniel's Edenic and stupid innocence. What attracts Izzie, though, is the thought that she might find depth in Daniel. Or, failing to find it, to create it herself. 

Daniel is innocent and child-like and is training to help people have innocent babies, but Izzie baptizes him, against his will, into the depths of the unconscious, the "unfathomable depths" of the womb from which we come and which ultimately leads us to death. 

Look! It's all here in one painting! Life! Death! Water! Unconscious!

On the one hand, one could look at this story as just a rendering of the break of a mind traumatized by the death of a beloved sister. But it's more than that, because it takes the local trauma and mythologizes it to universal levels. "They say I'm made of myth," Izzie speaks to her listeners. At the beginning of the story, her listeners seem to be friends listening to her meet-cute about Daniel, but by the end, they seem to be more the psychiatrists treating her in a mental institution after she kills Daniel. Or has a mental episode in which she thinks she kills Daniel. Izzie means "myth" here as a lie; she's saying her listeners are skeptical. But also, she has become a myth. She's become Medea. 

A lot of people tend to wonder, when reading a Freudian explication of a story like this, whether the author intended it. I think it's quite possible, given how well-known Freud's basic ideas are, and the extent to which the story plays with them, that there was at least some conscious desire to make use of Freudian images. But also, it doesn't matter. It's an example of why Freud is still relevant: because his ideas, while not great for treating mental illness, can sometimes do a great job of giving us a language to discuss ubiquitous images and motifs that crop up in human thinking. Medea is a mother. Mothers are the source of life. Medea murders her children. Life and death are bound up together. The gift of life is always an eventual gift of death. When we overcome our death drive long enough to "dive into" the female depth and create life, we are also creating eventual death for someone else. This life may start out innocent, but eventually, it will get sucked into the business of life, which means it's on its way out of Eden before it even gets started. 

Anything can go wrong, but it doesn't: "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein (Best American Short Stories 2025)

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the title, I had to do some post-facto thinking to re-insert the story's title into my overall understanding of it. Like many stories nowadays, it didn't even have the words of the title appear in the narrative itself.

None of that is true of "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein. Rather than being a quick onramp into the story, something I read and then immediately sprang past into the narrative, the title made me stop and consider it before I moved on. In everyday meaning--at least among the kinds of people likely to use "abject" in a sentence--the word means something like "extreme, but only for bad things." In my mind, the word most likely to follow "abject" in a spoken sentence is "poverty," and the words most likely to precede it are something like "He/she/they lived in..." 

So maybe it's just talking about "really bad examples of naturalism," or "naturalism taken to extremes that are bad." If that's the meaning, it sounds like something an erudite critic would say about a painting. What would this meaning of "abject naturalism" in the sense of "naturalism run amok" be? Well, that makes us consider what naturalism is. The line between naturalism and realism can be hard to draw, but one boundary we might use are these words from Encyclopedia Britanica: "Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities." 

This emphasis on the "physiological" nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity's grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It's borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term "the abject" from theorist Julia Kristeva. I've delved more deeply into the meaning of "the abject" in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I'll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our "naturalism." If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like "Abject Abject." A double dose of abjection. 

And that's what we get

From the first lines of the story, it's this kind of naturalism, the gross and abject kind, that we get: "The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil." In its reminder that female bodies produce other bodies, that those bodies get scarred in the process, it's introducing us to the uncomfortable facts of the female body, the ones that horror movies play with.

In fact, there are a lot of hints at horror in "Abject Naturalism." The narrator, Toni, is a former creative writing student who's given up, but when she did write, she wanted to write scary stories, scarier than Stephen King. (And what, in society, it more "abject," in the sense of being "thrown out," than one of the many former students of a writing program who have now given up, "all early sense of specialness evaporated"?) At many points, we get hints that a horror story is about to break out. Toni lets her daughter Amelie go jogging, and we, along with Toni, worry she won't make it back. There is a neighborhood man, Marco, who gives Amelie a telescope. He seems harmless, but we worry that Toni's decision to put off Googling him might be a mistake. When Amelie, commenting on deformed animals at Chernobyl, remarks that "anything can go wrong," we might be tempted to see it as foreshadowing. 

Nothing ever does take that turn for the worse and terrifying, though. Toni certainly faces disappointment. Her writing never takes off, but the jerk who got her pregnant, a romantic-adjacent foil to her naturalist nature, not only abandons mother and daughter for "texts," but then he goes and has a successful writing career right where Toni can see it. So Toni's dreams don't come true, but it's not all bad. Having decided to keep the baby when she gets pregnant and then committing to motherhood, right away "something lucky happened" to Toni when she finds a cool apartment in a hip part of the city for a good price.

The "abject" never goes away. Rather, it's there on every page. From Toni becoming a phlebotomist who draws blood, to her friends obsessing about their children's periods, to the body odor of the homeless in the library where Toni reads the father's successful novels, there is plenty of the gross and everyday about the story, what my mother used to call "bathroom talk" when my siblings and I were kids. However, when Toni is touring her lucky apartment, she notices that although her Cesarean scar is smarting, it's now so subtle "she could almost forget about it." The abject is always there, but it's not so "abject," in the sense of it not being as acute. 

Graduation from "abject" naturalism to "mere" naturalism?

The title of the story comes from a criticism that Toni's writing instructor made of her work, calling a story in which a couple fights about a skunk they need to get rid of "abject naturalism." This instructor went on to say the story's weakness was that "the plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order." This is probably similar to the criticism many have made about contemporary fiction in the realist vein. Anis Shivani has called it "plastic realism," and many other critics have bemoaned our era's overreliance on verisimilitude. 

Personally, I've been more annoyed by "plastic magical realism" in contemporary fiction than realism, as I feel like the fantastic is more likely to feel forced and fake, but in any event, you can be too much of anything. There can be "abject" anything. 

Naturalism was a strange name for a trend in art that wasn't really about seeing nature for what it was. Instead, naturalism tended to see nature only in its "red in tooth and claw" version, never the symbiotic one, and it saw humanity's fate within nature as basically doomed. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is one of the examples of literary naturalism most often assigned in schools, and if you've read it, that's the kind of "nature" that naturalism saw, a nature that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst (and more likely) out to get us. 

Toni's journey is the move from "abject" naturalism, one that fetishizes the gross and offputting and horrifying, to "mere" naturalism, one that can also see some good in the world because it actually considers the world on its own terms. She graduates from drawing blood to filing papers for the hospital, because paperwork makes more money. And naturalism, in the sense of letting nature speak for itself, is perfected in Toni's daughter, who uses the telescope to see the stars.

The strange climax

Toni and her daughter sharing a night looking at the stars through the now-fixed telescope is the denouement, but the climax is just before it, when Toni and Marco use the telescope to spy on the neighbors in their home. If ever there was a moment when the plot was going to take a turn toward horror, this was it. Suddenly realizing Marco used the telescope to look at people feels very Hitchcockian. But it turns out to be very tame. They see one person asleep and the other reading, occasionally scratching his balls. Toni finds "The dullness of the scene, the abject naturalism, aroused her." 

So is Toni's arousal her slipping back into fetishizing the abject? I don't think so. Instead, she's realized that the big, frightening thing, which is humans qua human animals, isn't really that frightening. It's more like what she'd always wanted to write, something much more terrifying than King, but also funny. The abject isn't terrifying. It's just a thing. That's naturalism that actually takes nature seriously. 

The story ends with as much abject grossness as it began with--Amelie throwing up in the coat room of her school after ODing on donuts and coffee too early in the morning. But Toni has come to terms with the abject now. She's gone beyond seeing nature as an impersonal force out to get us nearly to the other extreme: She reads the fact that "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song about a murder, ends just as she is dropping Amelie off for school in nearly providential terms: "When she starts the car, the radio is playing the right song, Freddy Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself has set the needle down."

The world is a tough place. The story alludes to some of this toughness when Toni briefly thinks about the immigrant families in her neighborhood. I could probably just as well do an "against the grain" reading of this story that comes up with a reading totally at odds with the apparent catharsis of the narrator, one that argues that Toni only is able to become reconciled to abject nature and to develop a belief in at least some goodness in the world because of her privilege. But I leave that reading to others and stop here with the "with the grain" reading. 

The trans climax that never comes: "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" by Emma Binder (BASS 2025)

While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I could listen to philosophy podcasts while I work and then be free at home to read more, but I  ultimately landed on considering the people in my family and trying to find something that will provide for them a little better. So I guess I really am starting law school this week and putting the study of the thing I most want to do on hold for a while longer.

In any event, one of the side issues in the philosophy of religion is that of substance dualism. Are the body and the mind two things, and is the mind really the soul? Is who we really are somehow separate from the physical trappings we come in, even though we can't point to this other, more essential thing? Traditional philosophers are mostly the only ones who cling to dualism nowadays. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe that all we are is our bodies, that our brains are part of our bodies, and that our experience of a separate self apart from our bodies is somewhere between a useful fiction and an illusion created by old Western philosophy and theology. I would guess most everyday people have kind of muddled beliefs, and that if you were to ask them, you might get answers suggesting dualism, and you might get answers a materialist would make, depending on how you framed the question. 

It's kind of ironic that advocates for trans people end up promoting a kind of dualism. In a popular form of explaining their issues, they tend to talk as though they have a mind trapped in the wrong body. It's how Jazz Jennings explained things almost twenty years ago on 20/20, and it's been a pretty consistent trope of trans advocacy as long as I've been aware of it. The irony here is that trans advocates, who are about as far from traditional theology as you can get, are using a lot of similar language to that of traditional theologians, who are about the last people on the planet still talking about dualism and also some of the most hostile to trans platforms.  

Of course, people a lot smarter than me realized this long ago, and intellectuals associated with trans rights have already produced work that attempts to deal with this seeming inconsistency. One response is something like, "Well, we have to explain this to cisgender people so they'll understand, and because of the lingering influence of dualism in Western thinking, this provides an avenue that is politically expedient, if not strictly philosophically correct." Taking a different approach, Gayle Salamon has explained, using phenomenology (here, we can say phenomenology mostly means the study of subjective experience), that even though we don't have a separate soul, our psychological experience makes it feel like there is a disconnect between body and mind. It might be a disconnect between two physical systems, but it feels like a war between two separate things. 

I'm sure that dualists would seize on this "apparent but not real" contradiction and use it as evidence that the split is real, but I'm not mostly concerned with who is right in the dualism/materialism debate here. I'm just pointing out that trans narratives do tend to lead to a dualist, brain-vs.-body metaphysics.

And now we finally get to the story

"What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?," the third story in this year's Best American Short Stories collection, does some interesting things with the dualism (real or implied) of many trans narratives. Early in the story, Cody, the trans man protagonist, thinks back on past visits to Pearl Lake in rural Wisconsin where he grew up. During the time of the flashback, he would have been living as a young woman who felt out of synch with his body. At the lake with his sister Molly, though, he felt comfortable: "Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood."

In this flashback, Cody is having one of his few moments of feeling whole. How did he accomplish that wholeness? Not by uniting mind to body, but by obliterating mind. In many forms of traditional dualism, it's having a mind/soul that sets humans apart from animals. But Cody is here "an animal among animals." That is to say, his mind isn't out of synch with his body, because it isn't there. That's why he "had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose." 

Cody's fleeting moments of happiness as a teen weren't a result of the union of an estranged body and mind, uniting, after much work in therapy and much medical intervention through testosterone and other treatments. His happiness isn't an improved dualism; it's an enthusiastic embrace of materialism. There is no conflict between mind and body because mind doesn't exist. As part of this instinctive, animalistic happiness, Cody felt "the clock of light" in his blood. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, clocks have served as cruel masters of humanity. We have to get up when they tell us to, go to bed when they tell us to, and plan to arrive everywhere when they tell us to. But animal, materialist Cody lived by the circadian clock of light that he felt inside of him. There was no society telling him how to be based on what it saw; he was free from a society handing him his identity. 

This looks a lot safer than what the guys in the story were doing.

The climax that comes and the climax that doesn't

There are two climaxes teased in "What Would I," one that happens and one that doesn't. The first one takes place all within the first five pages. Cody sees a bunch of guys ice fishing on ice they probably shouldn't be on, because the weather has been warming. But they're guys, who always think they know best and always underestimate the danger they're facing, so one of them ends up in the drink. Cody hesitates to go out to help him, and then, "without another thought"--his materialist, animalistic self reasserting itself--goes out to help him. 

This first climax ends with a setup to the second one, the one that never happens. Cody, having saved Greg, the man who fell in the ice, wraps him up with his jacket, and then he forgets to get his jacket back before Greg drives off, taking his cell phone and wallet with him. This leads to Greg tracking down Cody and inviting him out to drinks.

Cody reluctantly agrees to go to the local watering hole, the kind of place where tough and burly local men hang out. The whole time Cody is there, he's worried about them "clocking" him, a twist on the internal "clock of light" Cody felt before. Cody grew up around people like this before taking off to a friendly queer community in rural Massachusetts, and he's aware that if they do clock him as trans, it might be dangerous for him. So we, the readers, are waiting for one of two climaxes. Either Cody will be clocked and have to run for his life, or he will be clocked, and we will find out that hey, surprise, the guys are cool and let Cody know he's safe with them. 

Neither of these endings happen, though. Instead, Cody gets progressively more and more frightened that they will clock him, and he bolts as soon as he thinks he can do so with dignity. One of the three men at the bar follows him into the parking lot, but not to beat Cody up. Just to say thanks for saving Greg and to give Cody a hug. It's acceptance, but not the big Acceptance of what we might call an "ally" in the parlance of our times. 

While fretting his way through the night at the bar, Cody tried to use his father's clothing as armor, literally. He hoped the clothes would "shield" him and allow him to be one of those people who "moved through the world unquestioned." Based on Kevin's growing inquisitiveness, the shield might have only been partly effective. Cody kept hoping in the bar for a song to come on that would "anchor him in his body," meaning return him to his unitary, animal state, but it doesn't come, and he's left with the weak devises of subterfuge to hide his split selves from others. Cody barely manages to escape with his dignity. As he leaves the bar, he feels that he has been released "from a frozen world into fresh air and life." He couldn't find his unitary and animal self in the bar, trying to blend in as a man among other men. He isn't "anchored" again until he's far from the bar.

Cody's story as a small-town, rural queer kid who grew up troubled and misunderstood, then found acceptance, identity and happiness when he left, is a pretty standard story, told in almost every queer community in America. Cody muses on how he is a different person depending on his environment. When he feels safe, he's "easy, warm, funny, and shameless." Cody wishes he could be this person in Iron River where he grew up. He senses that he needs to come to grips somehow with Iron River, even if he never goes back once his dad either dies or recovers. Maybe he will never feel like his complete and comfortable self there, but he knows he has to learn to at least be okay with having come from there. 

At the end of the story, Cody has not managed to find a way to live permanently in the materialistic, animal self that brought him the only happiness he ever knew while growing up in Iron River. He is out walking on the ice. Earlier, he thought of how the ice was all connected, but here, he is thinking of the fractures in the ice, and he wishes he could be "brazen and unafraid, like any other man." At the end, not only has Cody has gone back to a kind of fractured dualism, but instead of the triumphant uniting of the soul and body that sometimes comes with the dualist view, the two seem as far apart as ever. We are denied a third climax, the psychological climax of Cody either absorbing his discordant soul into his materialist body or uniting soul and body into a unified whole.

The part where everyone hates me

I've admitted before to being a bad liberal when it comes to trans issues. Although I fully believe in supporting anyone in a quest to find fulfillment, and completely reject traditional notions of sex and gender that would critique trans goals either on religious or natural law grounds, I still don't think everything I'm being told by advocates for trans rights makes sense to me. To greatly simplify, my doubts come down to two things. First is the seeming muddling of sex and gender terminology that some advocates use, then applying that conflation to policy goals. The second is a more practical one: I don't think the care now available is advanced enough that it accomplishes its goals. If you could take a pill and magically change your male body that's out of synch with your female brain into a female body that went along perfectly with how you see yourself, great, do it. But what we have is painful, long, comes with risks, and still leaves many people worrying the whole time that they'll be "clocked." My hesitation to accept sex reassignment surgery isn't a moral objection; it's an entirely pragmatic, and it's kind of like me thinking that getting a hip replacement right when the procedure was first invented wasn't necessarily a good idea. 

"What Would I" offers both the materialist and the harmonized-dualist solution to fractured trans identity, but neither is a complete solution. The animalistic, materialistic solution is only achievable in the right environment. Unsafe environments make the corporal grounding needed impossible. So it is a partial solution, but not a complete one. The harmonized dualism possibility is limited by the state of medical technology. "T" can help, but it's not going to fully prevent raised eyebrows, even from people who mean you no harm, because they are going to sense that something is different. 

None of this is a reason to abandon trans political goals. But it is a reason to separate the language of advocacy from the language of real, lived experience. To advocate is to lie. You might wonder, if I feel this way, why I'm about to go to law school, when a lawyer's chief job is to advocate. It's a good question, and an even better one when I consider who much the law school's advocacy for the law as a profession annoys me. They can't stop talking about how hard law study is and how different legal work is from everything else. This isn't truth talking; it's the desire to make law sound important. It's exaggeration meant to improve the standing of the profession. I hear similar things from every profession when they try to make what they do sound more difficult than people think it is, just like advocates for political groups always try to make their plight sound as dire as possible. 

I am skeptical of the truth of propositions from advocates, but I can accept a kind of social dualism, one in which we allow advocates to do their thing but where we also reserve space for ourselves to be honest about what lived experience is like. Trans advocates can say, "Here's a problem, and here's a solution that would help if we could do it." If the lived experience of trans people demonstrates sometimes that this solution isn't always as great as advocates make it sound, that's actually okay. Advocates do their thing, sometimes, to give us space to try solutions that are less than ideal. 

When I read trans stories, I am trying to understand how the trans person views the problem, what solutions they look to for their problem, what they hope those solutions will do, and then whether those solutions actually do the hoped-for thing. What I like about a story like this one is its break from advocate-like narratives. You might do everything to try to find happiness as a trans person, and it still might not work. Or it might work, but only in the right environment. That actually helps me feel more connected to the needs and wants of trans people rather than less, but it means they're just like everybody else, groping in the dark for what they hope will make them happy, maybe succeeding a little bit here and there, but also meeting with failure as much as anything. Far from making me think that everything the advocate pushes is bunk, it makes me think that this is a group I can find common ground with and maybe even understand, because we are both equally lost and looking, perhaps quixotically, for light at the end. 

Andrea Long-Chu wrote an op-ed years ago explaining that her upcoming sex transition surgery might not make her happier, but that it shouldn't have to in order for her to be allowed to get it. The idea behind trans rights isn't that everything they try will work. It's a big problem, one that is probably beyond our current medical capacity to fix so that everyone will feel "in their body" in every environment. But the point is to give people the freedom to try solutions and the support to maximize success and mitigate failure. This story is a useful, honest, and human portrayal of someone stumbling through as he tries to navigate a problem with the solutions available. 

For Karen Carlson's take on the story, which includes an analysis of the title which I neglected to do, see here. 

The limits of narrative control: "Kirkland" by Sarah Anderson (Best American Short Stories 2025)

If you've ever dabbled in cognitive therapy, you've probably encountered this adage from Epictetus that is thousands of years old: "Men are disturbed not by things, but the views which they take of them." There's a lot of truth in it, and the idea, as well as cognitive therapy in general, are fairly empowering. It's a philosophy that gives a lot of agency to its adherents. I might not be able to control what happens, but I can control how I react to it. Many people probably live happy lives thinking this way.

The problem is that sometimes, events happen that are so powerfully damaging, they stretch the ability to control them through our thoughts to and past the breaking point. For example, if a fascist leader sends you to a concentration camp, there's not much agency you can obtain by trying to re-cast your detainment into your own narrative. That's why the movie La Vita e Bella, as much as it was loved, is probably the stupidest movie I've ever seen. It is a maximally "the story you tell yourself controls your destiny" type of movie. When the main character and his son are sent to a concentration camp, the main character manages to save his son by convincing him it's all a survival game. If this were actually the world we lived in, then life really would be beautiful, as the title of the movie suggests.

A would-be Roberto Benigni tells herself stories

The unnamed narrator of "Kirkland" (N from here on) seems to be a devotee of Epictetus, whether she's aware of it or not. Or maybe she's influenced by the school of La Vita e Bella and thinks that life can be whatever we imagine it to be. She's not too fussy about separating fact from fiction. If a story makes her happy, she runs with it. The most obvious example is Kirkland, the name of all Costco-brand products. N thinks it's a real place, and she imagines it as an isthmus full of abundance. (Fun fact: N is right that Kirkland is a real place. It's a city in Washington, the former headquarters of Costco, and it very nearly, but not quite, qualifies as an isthmus, as it's along the shores of Lake Washington and does bump into the lake ever so slightly. So N is almost right, even if it's for the wrong reasons.)

Whenever I think of anything Kirkland-related, I now think of Bojack Horseman saying this. Does Kirkland have a reputation for being cheap, or is that just Bojack being Bojack? Maybe it's just his fastidiousness, since he was also tough on certain fruits.

 

Other mistaken beliefs that N holds include thinking Jon Bon Jovi's full name is Bon Jovi. (I think a lot of 80s kids had that mistaken belief.) She mispronounces words like "soldering." Her parents do not bother to disabuse her of her fantasies. Maybe they think that if these things make her happy, there's no need to let inconvenient facts ruin her enjoyable world. 

One person happy to tell her she's wrong is her boyfriend Damian, her possibly-statutory-rapist-depending-on-the-laws-of-the-state, four-years-older-than-the-seventeen-year-old narrator, boyfriend. The story opens with him telling N that she doesn't know how the real world works. He's a total knob, but he's probably not completely mistaken about that assessment. 

N actually brags to herself about her ability to control how she feels based on what she tells herself. At one point, she claims that, “You can make yourself fall in and out of love with people pretty easily, I’ve found, if you have a strong sense of narrative arc and choose the right moments.” She does this with Damian. When she needs to love him less, she thinks of his many bad qualities. When she needs to love him more, she focuses on his few good ones. 

Later on, she makes a similar, though broader claim: 

“One good thing about me is that I’m extremely adaptable. I can adjust to new circumstances before they even happen. When I start to sense a person pulling away from me, I immediately imagine my life without them. The hobbies and TV shows I could use to fill the time left by their absence. I could take up fencing and win a scholarship to a fancy college, my breasts smushed into hard white pancakes. I could commit to watching every episode of The Sopranos so people could finally stop telling me, “You should really watch The Sopranos.” I could become a dowser, follow my quivering rod for miles and miles until it led me to an oasis in the middle of the desert that only I knew about. I would bend down, cup my hands, and drink.”

She thinks, in other words, that if her life starts to go one way or the other, she can adapt to it by convincing herself that she's fine with whatever way it goes.  

The limits of N's control

So N thinks she's in control of her own mind by virtue of the stories she tells herself. But a trauma is about to strike that will test the limits of what she can control through her inner life. 

In fact, there are chinks in her narrative armor long before Chloe goes missing. She recalls a teacher she had in second grade, Ms. Klein, who was fired for conducing an experiment that taught the kids too tough of a life lesson. For N, this year in second grade was about her best introduction to "the real world." The class carried out a year long economic experiment resembling uncontrolled capitalism, one that ended up creating a lower class of "homeless" students who lost their desks and had to work on the floor. N's father doesn't object to the experiment, thinking of it as the "school of hard knocks." N struggles, but eventually comes out on top of the experiment, while Chloe simply refuses to compete, happily living out her life on the floor. 

Ms. Klein also helps N learn the value of "facts," the real-world antithesis of the fantasies that N creates inside her head in order to exact control over the world. Ms. Klein has lied to all of the children, saying that if they all have her over to their house for dinner, she will bring them to see her ostrich farm. N spends the year learning facts about ostriches. Among those facts are that the common myth about ostriches--that they bury their heads in the sand in order to avoid having to see things they don't want to see--isn't true. Even ostriches don't just see what they want to see. 

N finds, during the stressful meal when Ms. Klein comes to dinner, that reciting the facts actually helps to keep her calm. So she tells herself fantasies to achieve mental control over the real world, but also, simply acknowledging real things has a similar effect. So what superiority does her fantasy world have?

N's attempts to use mind over matter fail her, in fact, when Chloe goes missing. She tries to think of the things about Chloe she didn't like, so her disappearance won't affect her so much, but N finds she can only think of the good things, including some of the quasi-erotic thoughts she's had about Chloe. 

The union of fact and fantasy as a possible system of control

Dad has an interesting theory about human nature that he shares when Ms. Klein is over for dinner. He thinks all people can be plotted on a grid consisting of four elements. First, they are all either hard or soft. Second, they are all either "lizard" or "mouse." We don't get an explanation of these categories, but we can maybe guess their rough meanings. This charting of human nature seems to be how Dad exerts his control over the world, by creating a theory and applying it. It's a facts-based approach, but one that involves a creative analysis of the facts to put them into a pattern. Maybe his theory actually provides us, the readers, with a key to resolving the tension between fact-first and fantasy-first mentalities as the best way to deal with highly destabilizing events. 

Whatever these things mean, it's probably something like this: A lizard is a hunter, while a mouse is a hider/avoider. A hard lizard is a strong type-A personality, while a soft lizard might occasionally relent from trying to take the world by the throat. A soft mouse (Chloe?) might live eternally in fantasy land, while a hard mouse might lean toward fantasy but be able to accept cold, hard facts when necessary. When it comes to the choice between applying "real world" logic or "fantasy Kirkland" logic, maybe the strongest people will be those who combine contrasting categories. A soft lizard or a hard mouse, let's say. 

That is to say, it's best to find some union between fantasy and fact. Both can offer comfort. Both can help us to find some level of control over an uncontrollable world. Facts give us science, with its ability to control the natural world and bring about better outcomes. Fiction gives us the ability to at least try to cope with the disasters that we cannot avoid through our use of facts. If you're naturally a mouse (given to fantasy, let's say, like N), it's good to mix in a little fact, to be a hard mouse. If you're a natural lizard, like Damian with his command of the number of grams of protein in a Costco hot dog, maybe you could use a little softening. Dad might be a good mix, since he both uses his rational mind and isn't opposed to the "school of hard knocks," but he also sees no reason to correct his daughter's fantasies. 

There are two examples of N seeking this union between fact and fiction. One is her predilection for magazines like Cosmo, which are a blend of factoids and the fantasies of glamor and beauty they sell. The other is in her brother Raymond. When N finds that her ability to control her thoughts through self-will fails her, she looks to Raymond. Raymond has been working on and off for years on a documentary about an alien abduction that happened to kids in Zimbabwe. Many of those kids, unable to deal with the trauma of what took place, have taken to drugs and gone crazy. Raymond isn't sure he believes them, but he's sure that "something happened." Raymond, by making a documentary (non-fiction) about a strange and probably fictional event, is trying to make fact and fantasy go together.  

The same is true of Chloe's mysterious disappearance. Something, of course, happened. But what? The children in Raymond's documentary don't have facts, and the (likely) fiction they've created of an alien abduction isn't comforting. There was very likely some traumatic event, but they aren't able to come to grips with it, either with facts or with a story. 

That's exactly where N is with Chloe. She and Chloe had been drifting apart late in high school, but N was the last person Chloe reached out to before she went missing. N, miffed at Chloe for getting a tattoo without her, didn't answer, so now she has to live the rest of her life wondering if she would have known what happened to Chloe if she had just answered the phone. She doesn't even get the closure of a tragic event, like Chloe dying in a car accident. She gets complete open-endedness. 

 That tattoo was of a ghost. N had been wanting to get her first tattoo with Chloe. N's dream tattoo was of a stylish ghost, not a Halloween spooky ghost, along with the words "give up the ghost." She likes that phrase because it's a strange way to say "die," because it has a long history going back to the King James Bible, and because it can also refer to machines. It is, in other words, a good blend of fact and fiction, of the real world and fantasy. As a tattoo at age eighteen, it would have represented a permanent mark of the philosophy N had brought with her out of childhood, her merger of the two worlds she had struggled to bring together. But Chloe wasn't there to share it with her. 

N finds herself casting about looking for a story to make sense of Chloe's disappearance. She has no facts, so she can only resort to fiction. It's just like when the beloved class pet duck Coco died. She just wanted answers about why, but none were available. As a child, N pretended that Coco had gone to Kirkland, which in that version was kind of like Heaven. She toys with that possibility with Chloe, but ultimately doesn't stick with it. She imagines Chloe being trafficked for sex, or that she is waitressing at a steakhouse by the beach. 

The final fantasy N applies to Chloe is that she never really left, and that she is living at her teacher's made-up ostrich farm. The ostriches were N's introduction to the power of fact, even though the farm itself was a fantasy. One of the things N learned about ostriches was that they were not powerless. They could kill you with a single kick. Ostriches that didn't exist taught N something about our unexpected power and agency. 

She imagines Chloe trying to find a way to "grow teeth," that is, to obtain the ability to defend herself. It's a wish for the powers of fantasy and fact to combine, for Chloe to become a hard mouse, for Chloe's story not to end with her as a victim, but finding a way to fight back. Absent any knowledge of what happened, it's the only power N can imagine. 

Other analysis: Karen Carlson's take on this story is available here. 

A zoo disaster story somehow even duller than Jurassic Park: "Dominion" by Lauren Acampora (BASS 2025)

True to my word, I'm at least going to try to blog through Best American Short Stories again this year, even though I'm scheduled to begin law school in little over two weeks. Maybe it'll take me a full ten months--until BASS comes out next year--to finish. Maybe I won't make it through at all. Maybe I'll drop out of law school in two weeks like I did twenty-five years ago. Who knows? 

I've been reading old editions of law books to get ready for school. When I can't possibly read any longer, and don't have it in me to do anything else productive either, I figure I might as well read a BASS story. I decided to do that two weeks ago, but the first story was such a chore to read, I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

In concept, it's a bog-standard lit fic story. It's fine. Take a former CEO of an oil company who is self-delusional enough to think that his retirement project of a zoo proves that he was always pro-environment, even though he oversaw an oil spill that destroyed a wide patch of ocean. Situate his delusion within the old Judeo-Christian belief that humanity was assigned by God to rule over the natural world, to "have dominion" over it, in the words of the Book of Genesis. Then show how his belief in dominion is frustrated, both by a natural world that resists dominion by insisting on being wild, and also by showing how wobbly his dominion or rule of the human world is.  

One main purpose of this blog is to provide explanations of literary short stories to people who might not be literature majors, who might read the stories and think, "What was the point of that?" The paragraph above is a pretty succinct explanation of the point of this story. It seems like an idea that's worth working through, but in practice, the story was so grating, I found myself reaching for the soothing comfort of property law. 

Contempt

Easily the greatest weakness in the story, the thing that undid any intellectual or emotional impact it might have made, was the attitude of contempt "Dominion" had for its own main character, Roy. ("Roy" means "king!" Kings have dominion! Did you get that? Since the story thought its readers were too stupid to get the "dominion" reference without shoehorning the exact Bible passage into the narrative, I am surprised it didn't also give us an etymology of Roy's name.)  

The narrative is told in third-person limited. That means that all of the opinions expressed in the narrative are Roy's, and Roy just can't help himself from noticing all of the shortcomings in others. Right off the bat, when he is looking at the drawings the students in his granddaughter's kindergarten did of his tiger, Molly, after Roy brought the tiger to their school, he sees them as "inept." There is hardly a page where Roy isn't judging someone. If he isn't judging, he's explaining away his own behavior. 

Roy assumes that he was meant to be part of the ruling class that his favorite part of Genesis establishes. He sees himself as qualitatively superior to the people he hires to run his backyard zoo. "Satisfied by the simple things the natural world provided, they were unaware of or indifferent to the higher calibers of human pleasures." He has a sort of Rousseau-like belief in their simple goodness and, along with it, in the simple goodness of nature. Because he believes that "nature," both in animal and lesser-human forms, is there for him to rule, he overlooks the ways in which it escapes his grasp.

There are examples of Roy self-justifying or looking down on others on nearly every page, but maybe the hospital, when he goes to see the girl who was attacked by one of the servals in his zoo, provides the clearest example. When Roy walks in to meet the girl's family, he sees "the bald father with his derelict patch of hair beneath his lip, the peroxide-blond mother, the greasy brother." Then, as if we didn't already understand that Roy thinks he's above these people, just a little below that, Roy "saw the dark roots at her scalp, noticed the cheap quality of her blouse, a mass-produced sort of tie-dye print."

Doctrine and reality

The story is supposed to give us irony, where Roy thinks he's in charge but finds he isn't at all. Not only do his animals insist on being wild, so does the older brother of the girl who was attacked. The boy asserts his dominance over Roy in the hospital room, gorilla-like. I suppose this is supposed to be a millenarian view of the future, in which the working classes rise up to reassert their mastery over the self-appointed rulers. 

There are two reasons this story doesn't work, and in fact was so boring it took a week to read. Neither has anything to do with the fact that I knew on page one that there would be an animal attack, and that as soon as Roy suggested the kids come to his zoo, that one of them would be the victim. 

The first is that the story just can't survive all that contempt for its own main character. One reason so few horror stories work for me is that I just don't care about the characters enough to be interested in whether they live or get cut up by the villain. It's true of this disaster story, too. Roy is there so the story has a symbol of corporate greed and destruction of the environment to whip. There isn't even an attempt to make him anything other than odious. 

The second reason is hinted at in the story, but not followed through with. Roy used to be frustrated with his daughter for being mad at him for his job as CEO of an oil company because it ruined the environment, but then hypocritically accepting the benefits of being the daughter of a rich man. This could be a very strong balance to the way the story is punching at Roy the whole time: It could be offering the view of reality offsetting the idealistic shade it is throwing at Roy. But the story fails to accept its own invitation.  

At one point, Roy is eating a steak sandwich while meditating on the wonders of animals, an obvious example of his hypocrisy, as he both professes to love animals but also is fine eating them. It reminded me of something I saw a few weeks ago. After Mamdani won the election for mayor in New York (or maybe it was right before the election, I don't remember), I saw a story where a reporter asked him for his favorite places to eat in New York. Mamdani mentioned a beef dish at one place and a lamb dish at another. The comments seemed to all accept these answers as appropriately hip and worthy of the symbol of a new left hope. I was just wondering why an audience of presumably pro-environment commenters didn't take him to task for eating the two animals that, by far, cause the most greenhouse gas emissions per ounce of any kind of meat one can eat. 

The fact is that idealists often betray their own beliefs when they are paired with something else they believe in or want. Roy is driving at the end of the story, and he thinks to himself how much he hates traffic. It's supposed to be ironic, as Roy, the former head of an oil company, is now hoisted on his own petard, forced to live in the mess he's made. But it takes two sides to made a traffic jam or to ruin the environment through oil: both the supply and the demand. Roy was only responsible for the supply. We all provide the demand. You want to wring your hands about the wee baby seals when there's an oil spill? Cool. You going to stop driving your car as a result? No? Then don't write stories about how CEOs of oil companies are the problem. 

This is the real reason this story was such a dreary bore to read. It's an attempt to whip Roy and and people like him, but it doesn't deal with the reality it would take to rip power away from them. It would take all of us giving something up, changing how we live. I know one reason I've never been much good at living like that is because whenever I start to try, I realize nobody else is doing it, so there's no point. Also, it's really, really hard. I have probably "given up" meat two hundred times in my life. Then I realize I hate food for a while until I give up. 

A story doesn't always have to provide an answer. It can, instead, merely shine a light on what the problem is. But "Dominion" doesn't face up to the problem. Instead, it gives us a false answer, which is that Roy is the problem, and if we just stand up to the Roys of the world and put them in their place, their false dominion will end. It won't. 

As a final aside, I will say that because I read this story in the middle of much reading of law books, I thought of a much better title than "Dominion." It should have been called "Strict Liability." Only don't explain the title to everyone like this story did. 

A merciful compare and contrast post so I can slack off: "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories, is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying, but really the analysis kind of writes itself.

What am I comparing "The Three Niles" to?

I'll be comparing and contrasting it with "The Suitcase" by Meron Hadero, which was in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, the year before I started blogging all the way through it. Meron's story came to mind while reading "The Three Niles" because both were about children of immigrants to the U.S. from the Horn of Africa, and both involved trips made by those children back to the homeland of their parents. 

What's similar about them?

Both stories have children who go to the countries their parents came from, Sudan for "The Three Niles" and Ethiopia for "The Suitcase." Although I hate it when people treat all things African like they're the same and like Africa is one big country with a shared culture and heritage, in the case of Sudan and Ethiopia, there really is a lot that's shared between the two. They're both part of the Horn of Africa, which tends to have a lot of commonalities between countries. They even have their own regional quasi-UN, called IGAD. (Don't quibble about that characterization. It's close enough.) Both Ethiopia and Sudan are immensely proud of the Nile River and their country's share in the history of that cradle of civilization. This pride in the river isn't in "The Suitcase" the way it shows up in "The Three Niles," but it is a commonality between the two countries. Right now, Ethiopia is involved in Sudan's civil war, and Sudan is involved in Ethiopia's. The countries share a porous border.

Both "the boy" in "The Three Niles" and Saba, the protagonist of "The Suitcase," struggle with language. Saba isn't great at Amharic, the language of her relatives, and "the boy" is pretty bad at Sudanese Arabic. In both stories, the returnees from America are feasted and celebrated by relatives while in the homeland, but neither knows how to repay their hospitality or even to carry on much of a conversation with them. 

Both stories contain their primary image or symbol in the title.

Both protagonists feel, in different ways, that they "don't belong here." Saba thinks this explicitly, while it is simply implicit in the boy's every thought, word, and attitude. But here's about where the similarities end.

Obvious differences

Saba is twenty; the boy is thirteen. Saba wants to fit in and become more Ethiopian during her month trip to Addis Ababa; the boy just wants his three-day stint in Sudan, on the outskirts of Khartoum, to end as soon as possible. Saba, who actually did live in Ethiopia when she was very young, wants to connect with Ethiopia to be more fully herself; the boy, who has never been to Sudan before, wants to deny his Sudanese heritage, because he feels that it has nothing to do with his true self. He doesn't even want to be called by his name in Sudanese Arabic. In short, Saba is there of her own accord and wants to be there, while the boy is going purely out of what flagging sense of loyalty he has to his father. 

Less obvious differences

While it's very easy to see not just the outward differences in age and sex between the boy and Saba but also the huge gap in dispositions toward their ancestral home, it might be harder to see the difference in how the major symbols in both stories are working. In "The Suitcase," the major symbol, according to my highly advanced ability in literary analysis, is the suitcase. Saba has brought it with her and now needs to pack to go back home to America. She has actually brought two suitcases with her, one with her clothes and the other with gifts from her family in America to all of her family in Ethiopia. Now that she is headed back, the family in Ethiopia wants to fill that second suitcase with gifts of their own for Saba to take back. They have too many gifts, though, and they are arguing about what to take out. The choice is given to Saba, who, pressed for time to make it to her return flight, decides to dump out her other suitcase, the one with all her clothes, in order to make room for all of the gifts. 

It's such a neat and apt symbol, one that serves as a metaphor for Saba's own process of identity shaping. In order to let in what Ethiopia has to give her, she literally has to empty out her own identity, in the form of the clothes she loves so much. She has brought something to them, and she leaves it there with her family. When she goes back again, it will still be there. None of her identity is lost, but it is reapportioned. The family shares not only gifts, but their core selves with one another, and so bits of who everyone is are shared across continents. I am often mystified when people talk about being moved by literary fiction stories, but this story did move me. It's about as happy a story as one of these anthologies will ever give you.

With "The Three Niles," I have to admit that the symbolism tricked me. The boy resists everything he sees while in Sudan with his father, from the Arabic language to prayers to lamb meat to even remembering who the relatives introduced to him are. At one point, the boy "hated every single person in that courtyard for what they made him do, what they reminded him of." What they remind him of is his cultural inheritance, the one the boy thinks belongs to his father but not to him. That's why when the boy once heard someone in America call his father the N word over the boy's head, he convinced "himself that word, that agony, was his father's lot and not his." This was true because of "how unlike his father he was." 

But I thought, near the end of the story, that Sudan was going to sneak into the boy in spite of himself. The boy has noted how "effortless" the "transition" from talking to killing the lamb to talking again happened, and for a moment, I thought that a similar effortless transition was going to happen to the boy, one where at least something of Sudan would get into him unawares. That moment comes on the last day in Sudan, when the Sudan-based family is taking the father and son out for a river cruise. The father is pointing out the sights of Khartoum, and he indicates to the boy the point where the White Nile and Blue Nile come together to form one river:

The boy looked to a spot where he saw, or thought he saw, a shifting band in the river where the two currents, one murky, one milky, met and intertwined. But there was no crash, no violence. No spectacle to suggest different currents fighting for dominance. The river ahead was complacent, the merging silent and unremarkable. Easy to overlook, were it not for his father’s finger showing the way.

"Aha! This is it," I thought. The boy's American self and his Sudanese self are coming together, and will form one whole, and it will happen so effortlessly, he won't even notice! But just as earlier, when the boy seemed to be sharing a moment of mutual understanding with his father, but it was interrupted, so this unnoticed mingling of two worlds is also interrupted. The family on the boat begins to sing a song in praise of wearing traditional clothing instead of Western clothing. The boy wants to "step into the center of all that dancing and singing, to silence it." He and his father almost share another moment of mutual understanding when neither can eat the sandwiches the family offers them, but then a storm comes up, the boat tosses, and the grandfather is pitched off into the river. 

When it becomes apparent that the grandfather had drowned in the Nile, the boy's main concern is for how long it will take to find him, because he still wants to get on his flight to go home. (God, I love this ending.) He is literally standing between his father and the rest of the family at the end. There is no fusion of identities, only a steadfast refusal to allow himself to be transported back into his other life, the one that might have happened if his father hadn't immigrated. 

Should we blame the boy?

For much of the story, I'd guess most readers would be fairly sympathetic to the boy. He's apparently gay and vegetarian, doesn't speak Arabic, and doesn't believe in Islam. He was so happy when his father couldn't afford to keep sending him to a private, Muslim school in America, he felt liberated, and now here he is in the heart of all that he got away from. Although we might feel the boy is wrong to deny all of his heritage, we can certainly understand it. It's not an unusual attitude for a child of immigrants raised in the U.S. to want to live like the people he knows live. 

Still, the myopia of the boy at the end is pretty startling. He's has a few moments while in Sudan of almost kind of connecting with his father. Shouldn't that have made him able to understand, even a little, how his father must feel losing his own? 

Maybe it can't be helped. Maybe for the boy to be himself, to avoid the death that comes from giving up one's own identity, he has to keep his Sudan self at a distance. He can't allow himself to become blended from two distinct flows into one, because "His" Nile--the "White" Nile, tied to his white existence through his mother--can't join the other. 

Two different experiences of geographic origins as sources of identity

In "The Suitcase," Saba is presented with a seemingly impossible choice. During her entire trip to Ethiopia, her family has gone out their way to try to make her feel welcome and loved, but she feels she hasn't measured up. Now, she is being asked to choose which tokens of their love should make it back to America. It's a real Kobiyashi Maru scenario. But much like Captain Kirk, Saba doesn't believe in a no-win situation, and she comes up with a solution where identity doesn't involve hard choices. 

The same elements are there for the taking in "The Three Niles." We have three generations of men brought together at the convergence of the three rivers. The story could have allowed for an "effortless" blending of generations and rivers and identities. It would have been as satisfying as "The Suitcase." But for the boy, there is no way to cheat the Kobiyashi Maru of identity. For the boy, his identity is so completely at odds with the boy he would have been in a life where he grew up in Sudan, that the attempt to bring together the old with the new can only result in the stormy death of the old. 

Releasing versus freeing: "Rosaura at Dawn" by Daniel Saldaña París (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts themselves, and maybe these will be useful to readers as they seek their own ideas for making sense of the whole.

Two physical landscape and one personal, bodily landscape

A lot of what's going on during the few pages of "Rosaura at Dawn" involves comparisons and contrasts. One very clear set of comparison/contrast going on is between the physical border between Tijuana, Mexico, and the United States on the one hand and the body of the unnamed female narrator on the other. The opening lines describe the border: "The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards." There are two subsequent invitations to compare the narrator's body to this landscape, one explicit and one implicit. The first is when the narrator describes the scar on her leg from an undisclosed accident as resembling the frontier line, seen from above. (The "bird's eye" that the translator uses is a clever wink to the frequent appearance of birds in the story.) The second is when she refers to the scar on her leg, now fading, as "zigzagging," the same word she used to describe the border fence. 

This juxtaposition of the landscape of the border with the bodily landscape of the narrator likely means that the same feeling the border gives her, one of unfulfilled dreams, is how she feels in her own skin after her undisclosed accident in which her mother died. A body can be a prison, and our scars can serve to remind us of all that's gone wrong.

But then there is another comparison, one between the border and the aviary that Severiano has created for the exotic birds and reptiles the police bring to him after busting illegal exotic animal dealers. In some ways, the aviary performs the same function as the border fence: it keeps some things in and some things out. But instead of being "tall and threatening...the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad," it is, in the narrator's one-word assessment, "awesome." It is constructed "from metal tubes, like the ones used in market stands, and completely covered in chicken wire." Unlike the border, which was built by companies for profit using standard construction materials, this was built by salvaged parts out of love. Chicken wire is much less threatening than barbed wire. The aviary, like the border, is there to restrict entrances and exits, but it shows there can be more reasons for building something like this than fear or (as Severiano's brief time in "the can" reminds us) punishment. Walls and fences can also be a means of providing sanctuary.

There are prisons and border fences, but also bird sanctuaries. Which kind of building will the narrator's body, with its zigzagging scar, end up being? That is the question of the narrative. (Okay, that's sort of a GUT for the story, isn't it?)

This is a photo one will often see making the rounds on social media. I'm not sure what point it's making, but I know it's making one.

The two openings

When I went back to re-read the story, I tried to find the original Spanish version. I succeeded, but only partly. I did find the original online, but only the first few paragraphs. That leaves me to rely on the translation for most of the story. In the little that is available for free online, I did realize that there is a version with a different opening paragraph. The translated version in the O.Henry Anthology goes: 

The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards. It stands tall and threatening, rusting in the sunlight, the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad. People peer through it, projecting hopes and a new version of themselves beyond the ICE patrols. There is no escape from this place.

The other version, with my own translation below, goes:

The enormous fence, crowned with barbed wire, winds among the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, cuts a capricious zigzag and, out beyond where it can be seen, ends several meters into the ocean. But the waves that break upon one side are the same that break upon the other, and the clouds cross the line routinely, in both directions, without passports or visas. 

I'm not saying the translator made the first version up. I'm sure there's a different Spanish version out there somewhere. Authors change their vision all the time, including after something has been published, so I guess that between the version online and the publication in O.Henry, the author changed his mind.

The version one goes with has an effect on how one views the resolution for the narrator. Are the barriers of her body a sanctuary or a prison? If we read version one, perhaps the narrator views her scars and her body as a confinement to escape from, but her dreams of escape have been disappointed. Her journey is in learning not to escape, but to find a better kind of confinement, one that provides protection rather than restriction. But if one takes reading number two, then there almost never was a confinement. In nature, nothing respects borders. The narrator needs to learn from nature not, as in the first reading, how to find the right kind of enclosure, but how to ignore enclosures altogether. Version one emphasizes the eventual returning of Rosaura, while version two emphasizes the freedom of her flight.

Chickens

I count four references to chickens in the story. The first is when the narrator sees Severiano in Tijuana. She assumes he is waiting for a pollero, a colloquial Spanish term for a guide to take him across the border into the United States. (Coyote is an older term for the same thing.) A pollero is literally a farmer or poultry owner who takes care of chickens. In this figure of speech, all the people the guide takes over the border are chickens that he is herding. The narrator assumes Severiano is a chicken looking to escape from his cage. She is wrong, of course, just as she is mistaken a moment later when she sees Severiano take the cockatoo Rosaura out of a bag to release her. She thinks at first that it is a chicken he has released. But it isn't a chicken, and as he will point out, he hasn't really released her. The bird is going to fly back to the aviary.

The third mention is the chicken wire that protects the aviary, which is a much less threatening and muscular type of barrier than the barbed wire that protects the border. The final mention is the raw chicken that the narrator feeds the hawk in the aviary. If the people moving around the border are chickens, then the narrator is reminded that sometimes they will end up getting caught and killed as prey for the stronger birds. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this chicken imagery. Obviously, birds are ubiquitous quasi-characters in the story, and chickens, which can kind of fly but not very well, are a good symbol of humanity, which shares some of the natural and animalistic traits of birds but not all of them. Birds might be able to fly over borders easily enough, but not chickens. So humans will have to modify their notions of freedom.

The comparison between chickens and humans is apt.

Releasing vs freedom

The narrator mistakes Severiano's letting the bird go for freeing it, when it fact, Severiano is merely letting it roam for a while before it comes back. There is a secret ritual he performs in order to get her to come back, one he teaches to the narrator, but it involves an incantation she will not even share with the reader. 

When Severiano is gone to take care of old business, the narrator releases Rosaura, the cockatoo. She does it in one of the seediest parts of the city and awaits Rosaura's return back at the farm where the aviary is. When the narrator sees Rosaura returning at dawn (roll credits!), she is deeply moved by it. She'd seen this return before, but "it had never felt so personal, as though the birds were celebrating me too, rejoicing that something inside me had also returned." 

As if this was the last thing Severiano needed to teach her, we find out immediately after this that he has left the farm to her. 

Freedom means the ability to roam wherever and not come back. Releasing means being free for a time an then to return. Whichever opening one uses, what the narrator learns is that there is a relationship between true security and true freedom. Without true security--which for the narrator, means a space so safe not even Jesus or Buddha can come into it--one cannot be well enough to venture out. Without returning to that place, our journeys will eventually wear us down. 

I think the theme of "Rosaura at Dawn" is similar to that of Robert Frost's Poem "Birches." While the transcendence of soaring into heaven is dramatic and liberating, it's the homecoming after the transcendence that is the point of the whole thing:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.