The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Contributors’ Notes

Robert Hinderliter’s short stories have appeared in Columbia Journal, Sycamore Review, New Ohio Review, Fugue, and other places. He grew up in Haviland, Kansas (population 600), and now lives in Gwangju, South Korea, where he teaches English literature at Chosun University.

• “Coach O” is one of many stories I’ve written set in Haskerville, Kansas, a fictionalized version of my hometown, Haviland. Haskerville is like Haviland in many respects, although home to slightly more weirdos, degenerates, and unfathomable mysteries.

The idea for “Coach O” came when my wife and I were having drinks and brainstorming story ideas. I wanted to write about a football coach in the biggest game of his life, but my wife suggested a more unique angle: a sports story in which no actual sporting occurs. So the setting switched from the game to the pep rally, and I started to think of all the ways Coach Oberman’s life could be unraveling, and how it might all come to a head. One aspect of small-town life that interests me is the impossibility of keeping secrets. The answer to the question “Who knows what?” is usually: “Everyone, everything.” In a half-square-mile town with six hundred people, there’s nowhere to hide. So I wanted Oberman to feel that all his secrets and failures would soon be on public display. He’s surrounded, boxed in, and therefore increasingly desperate.

Sharon Hunt’s first published mystery story was in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “The Water Was Rising” was nominated for the Arthur Ellis and International Thriller Writers’ awards. Additionally, her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, on the mystery site Over My Dead Body, and are forthcoming in other publications. She has also written a lot about food and the memories it evokes. A novel she is reworking was nominated for a Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger Award. “The Keepers of All Sins” is her first story selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. She lives and writes in Ontario, Canada.

• An image usually prods me into writing a story and it was no different with “The Keepers of All Sins.” For that story, the image was of a young woman on a ferry, growing more and more dehydrated. In reality, that young woman was two, my sister and me. Touring Europe, we had an afternoon to kill in Geneva and decided to take a boat tour. Somehow we ended up on a ferry instead and for seven hours were stuck on deck with little shelter from the sun and no water, because we assumed there would be a canteen onboard. I had experienced severe dehydration before and knew the signs — “feeling dried out like a prune” as my Newfoundland grandmother would say, the fuzziness that blankets your brain and how your limbs eventually take forever to do the most basic things. People boarded and debarked, but no one noticed our growing distress. When finally we stumbled back onto land and into our train, we were distraught, not about taking the wrong boat but because we were so ill prepared. For the rest of the trip, I was obsessed with water, which became central to this story.

Also central is the man from Hamburg whom the young couple meets. He was fashioned after a man from that same city we met on a train on that European trip. Our man, nameless but not forgotten, was aggressive and slimy although no doubt thought himself charming and we two naïve enough to fall for his lines. I could hear my grandmother’s warning: “Stay away from men who watch you too closely.”

This man did. He was a photographer, he said, and invited us to stay at his place in the red-light district for as long as we wanted. He was at our command. Other girls “not as lovely as you” who stayed with him had an unforgettable experience and we would too.

The train was full and we couldn’t change seats so did our best to ignore him.

Realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere with us, he grew sullen and before disappearing into the night, bent close to me. “This city can be dangerous for stupid girls.”

“Then it’s good we’re not stupid,” I remember saying, but not being stupid doesn’t always save you from harm, as my main character sadly discovered.

Reed Johnson is a fiction writer, translator, and scholar who holds an MA/PhD in Slavic languages and literatures along with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, and currently works as a preceptor in the Harvard writing program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals like New England Review and online at The New Yorker, and he is writing a mystery novel set in Russia, where he spent nearly a decade of his life.

• When I was growing up, our family didn’t have much money, and we were often on the lookout for things to do that didn’t cost anything. One such free weekend activity was the open house. No doubt many of us have been to an open house with no intention of buying, and so we understand that there might be nothing real about this sort of real estate: the open house is a space for the imagination to roam, a place to picture alternate selves and alternate lives spent living there. At the same time, it’s rare that these houses turn out to be completely blank rooms on which we can project these imagined selves. The open house almost always contains the remainders and reminders of another set of lives — the lives, that is, of the current inhabitants. And in turn, these traces suggest other sets of dreams (or, as is sometimes the case with families moving out, failed dreams) that might collide with one’s own, creating interesting echoes and patterns of interference. In this sense, the open house is a lot like the story: a structured space that both constrains and spurs the imagination, an armature that gives shape to thoughts about how our lives might otherwise unfold.

Arthur Klepchukov found words between Black Seas, Virginian beaches, and San Franciscan waves. He adores trains, swing sets, and music that tears him outta time. Art contributes to Writer Unboxed and has hosted Shut Up & Write(!) meetups since 2013. His literary fiction appears in journals like The Common, Necessary Fiction, and KYSO Flash. His crime fiction debuted in Down & Out.

• A few years ago, I reached out to my oldest friend, Kyle Stout, about catching up in San Francisco. He didn’t want to come to the city when it was about to rain. But it’s a damn fine town in the rain. I jotted down what could be a phrase or a title. After Kyle and I made a short film in an Oakland coffee shop, we were inspired to find other limited settings for our stories. BART, the Bay Area’s subway system, somehow felt appropriately grungy and fitting. With a setting in mind, “A Damn Fine Town” took shape at The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany. The irony of writing abroad about traveling without traveling seeped into my character’s attitudes. I’d still love to make a short film version. So on your next train to the airport, keep an eye out for Mr. Suitcase or Kid Cape. And keep an eye on your luggage.

Harley Jane Kozak was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Nebraska, completed NYU School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, and migrated to Los Angeles. She starred in a few dozen films (Parenthood, Arachnophobia, The Favor, etc.), three soaps (Texas, Guiding Light, Santa Barbara), countless plays, and a lotta TV before taking a fifteen-year maternity leave and turning to crime fiction. Her first (of five) novels, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her short prose has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Sun, Santa Monica Review, and eight anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2019.

• When Les Klinger and Laurie R. King invited me to contribute a story to their Sherlockian anthology series, I jumped at the chance, although not without trepidation. Fans of Watson and Holmes are a rabid bunch, rivaling those of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Shakespeare, and a writer ventures into those territories at her own risk. Probably that’s why I had a hard time coming up with a premise, plot, character — any doorway into a story. One night, a voice woke me from a dead sleep with the words “This is the first line of your Sherlockian short story.” I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what the dream voice dictated. The next morning, I stared blankly at the scrawled words. It’s not every day you walk into your apartment to find your cat has turned into a dog. My big nocturnal “aha!” by daylight had all the literary weight of a grocery list. However, it’s not like I had any competing ideas, and also, I don’t like to argue with the voices in my head, so I started typing. The result was “The Walk-In.”

Preston Lang is a native New Yorker and a product of its public schools. He’s published four crime novels so far.

• This story was written specifically for an anthology to honor the terrific journalist and crime writer William E. Wallace, so it seemed appropriate to focus on a struggling reporter getting into trouble. I realize now that in the first sentence, I boldly called out the hitman subgenre as unrealistic but then went on to write something much less believable than the average assassin story. It was fun to write.

Jared Lipof’s short fiction appears in The Los Angeles Review, The Emerson Review, and Salamander. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he’s at work on a novel.

• Rendering an actual human being in fictional form can be tricky. Even more so when it’s family. Relatives will read your work and say the events in the fiction did not occur exactly as described. They’ll remind you how it really went down, as if that was even the point. But when you use your recently deceased father as a template for a character, whatever pressure is relieved by his inability to give you notes is offset by the fact that you really wish he could read it. At which point you realize you were just trying to perform a magic trick. “He’s not dead if he’s in the story,” you tell yourself. And even though you’re wrong, it was worth a try. Special thanks to Jennifer Barber at Salamander, whose editorial instincts brought out the best possible version of this story.

Anne Therese Macdonald is the author of the novel A Short Time in Luxembourg. Her short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Blue Earth Review, Belletriste, Dublin Quarterly, Matter: A Journal of Art and Literature, Words on the Waves, and most recently the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ anthology False Faces: Twenty-Six Stories About the Masks We Wear.

• “That Donnelly Crowd” evolved from a culmination of several events in my life, especially the years I hitchhiked through Ireland during the Troubles and my return during the Celtic Tiger. In the story, a young American woman is attracted to Joe Donnelly, a man caught between these two eras. He is from a family of terrorists but claims that he’s in Ireland to build a modern factory. Against this, I explore the tendency of Americans to cling to the fantasy of an ancestral Ireland over the reality of today’s modern country. Colleen, the American woman, is a troubled soul. Like so many of us, she succumbs to her own fantasy. She sees in Joe Donnelly what she wants to see, unencumbered by the reality before her, ignoring the little signs that tell her to run the other way.

Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 2012 to 2014 he lived at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer. His first book, Aerialists, won the Michener-Copernicus Prize. He lives in Paris with his wife and two rabbits.

• I wrote “The Clown” immediately after Trump was elected president. Many new stories justifying the Trump voter were suddenly in circulation, and I was feeling fretful about how fiction writers are told to create empathy for ill-doing characters by presenting their inner lives and stories — by making the evils they commit products of situation and circumstance. I was asking myself whether literary fiction always absolves its criminals and whether there was a limiting case. The story is part of my collection Aerialists (2019), in which every story reimagines and reinvents one of the acts or characters of the circus.

Rebecca McKanna is the recipient of Third Coast’s 2018 Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, and other journals and was published as one of Narrative’s Stories of the Week. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Indiana, where she is finishing her debut novel about a young woman uncovering the dark truth about her mother’s childhood. Visit her at rebeccamckanna.com.

• When I grew up in Iowa, Grant Wood’s American Gothic was everywhere. Despite or maybe because of its ubiquity, it wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I started thinking about what the painting said about midwestern life. Around this time, I was writing a series of stories about different women who had been impacted by the same serial killer. When I was back in Iowa visiting my parents for Christmas that year, my mother and I drove to Eldon to see the American Gothic House and Center. I was startled by how small the iconic house seemed in person. As we walked through the museum, I imagined an employee receiving a letter from the serial killer, and the story took shape from there.

I’m indebted to the editors at Colorado Review for originally publishing this story, especially Stephanie G’Schwind and Steven Schwartz. Thank you to Otto Penzler and Jonathan Lethem for giving it a home here.

Jennifer McMahon is the New York Times best-selling author of nine suspense novels, including Promise Not to Tell, The Winter People, and The Invited. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.

• I was on vacation with my family a couple of years ago, doing lovely touristy things during the day. But one night I had a terrible, vivid dream.

I dreamt that I was a twelve-year-old girl, an outsider, the one others teased, and they were playing a wicked sort of trick on me. A whole series of tricks that ended in fire and death. I was wearing an absurd costume they’d dressed me in. I was Hannah-beast.

But then, the dream shifted — I wasn’t the victim, I was one of the girls playing the trick, laughing at poor, stupid Hannah, thrilling at how clever my friends and I were. Knowing it was wrong, but going along for the ride anyway, telling myself it was just a joke.

The dream stuck with me throughout our pleasant family vacation, and it was obvious why — in real life, hadn’t I been both girls at one time or another?

I’m a big believer in ghosts but sometimes what I find most frightening are the ghosts of my own past. The things that haunt me most are the choices I’ve made. Like Amanda, they’re the things that have me looking over my shoulder, jumping at shadows, sure I hear some long-ago voice taunting, teasing:

Say boo.

Joyce Carol Oates has long been fascinated by the phenomenon of “mystery” — in art, as in life. She is the author of a number of works of psychological suspense fiction including the novels Beasts, A Fair Maiden, Jack of Spades, and Rape: A Love Story (recently adapted for the screen as Vengeance: A Love Story, starring Nicolas Cage, arguably the worst film adaptation ever made in the history of American cinema, though film aficionados might wish to quarrel with this), and the story collections The Female of the Species, The Doll Master, Dis Mem Ber, and Night-Gaunts. In 2018 she was awarded the LA Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for her novel A Book of American Martyrs and in 2019 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for her lifetime achievement in literature. She has been a member, since 1978, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2018 was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.

• “The Archivist” is an adaptation of a section of my novel My Life as a Rat, which had its genesis in a short story titled “Curly Red,” originally published in Harper’s, in a very different form. In the short story, I was exploring the commingled guilt and hurt of a young woman who had been exiled from her family, for having (reluctantly) informed upon her older brothers, who’d participated in a hate crime; in the novel, I am exploring the psychology of exile, the assimilation of guilt by the victim who, if she is victimized again, as in the story “The Archivist,” will not defend herself but accept further punishment as deserved, and will not inform upon her abuser. It is often wondered why victims of sexual abuse don’t report their abusers, and in “The Archivist” it is clear to us that the teenage girl-victim identifies more definitively with her abuser than with those adults who might wish to help her — because she considers herself guilty, deserving of punishment. But “The Archivist” is also an exploration of the culture that averts its eyes from abuse, in this case shielding a flagrant bully/abuser who happens to be a high school math teacher of quasi-popular status.

Brian Panowich feels a bit strange writing about himself in the third person but he will do his best. Brian started out as a firefighter who wrote stories and morphed into a writer who fights fire. He has written three novels, a boatload of short stories, and maintains a monthly column called “Scattered & Covered” for Augusta Magazine. He lives in East Georgia with four children who are more beautiful and more talented than anyone else’s. He also might be biased. Brian’s first novel, Bull Mountain, topped the 2015 best thriller list on Apple iBooks, placed in the top twenty best books on Amazon, and went on to win the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel, as well as the Southern Book Prize for Best Mystery. The book was also nominated for the Barry Award, the Anthony Award, Georgia’s Townsend Prize, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Bull Mountain was also selected for the coveted “Books All Georgians Should Read” list by the Georgia Center of the Book, and has been the recipient of several foreign press awards. Daniel Woodrell and C. J. Box really like his latest novel, Like Lions, so Brian is pretty happy.

• I remember when my wife and I bought our first home. It was a three-bedroom townhouse that was immediately too small the month after we bought it because she got pregnant with our son, Wyatt — the youngest of our four kids. I was a full-time firefighter at the time and I only worked ten twenty-four-hour shifts a month. I enjoyed my time off. Our first summer in the townhouse I bought a big yellow inflatable pool for the backyard and read a lot of books in a lawn chair while the kids got bigger and bigger right before my eyes. One of those books was a collection of stories by various masters called Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. I don’t have a clue where I got it from, but it was an old faithful read, and I discovered a lot of authors I’d come to idolize. Tom Franklin’s “Poachers” was in that book and it quite literally changed my life — but that’s a different matter altogether. The point is, I remember as if it were minutes ago, thinking to myself how amazing it must feel to be included among the writers in that book. I also thought about how far out of reach and impossible it would be for a forty-year-old Elmore Leonard — loving fireman to ever see his name tagged on that wall.

Hey, y’all. Not impossible.

Because here I am, holding the can of spray paint.

Huge bearhug to Patrick Ryan, my editor on “A Box of Hope.”

The story was written for my father. I cry every time I read it. I hope he’s pleased.

Waiter, more wine, please.

Tonya D. Price publishes both fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Pocket Book and Fiction River anthologies. She draws on her MBA, high-tech business career, and time overseas at the World Health Organization to write international thrillers. She designed her nonfiction series, Business Books for Writers, to help authors who are not business-savvy navigate the serious business of writing. She is currently working on the fourth book in the series. In her most recent novel, a World War II young-adult historical, an American teenager struggles to retain his birthright identity while held as an enemy alien behind the barbed wire of the Crystal City Family Internment Camp. You can find Tonya online at www.tonyadprice.com or on Twitter @BusBooks4Writer.

• When I needed to write a fast-paced story for an anthology submission, I remembered a spring day as I walked to my mailbox at the end of our long driveway. I spotted a large dog running toward me down the middle of our country street. I worried he might get hit, as the street is on a hill with a large blind curve. A blue sportscar raced past me, windows down. Two teenage boys screamed what my grandma would call “bad words” at the dog. I tried to distract them by picking up a softball-size rock from my stone wall. I tossed the stone at them while yelling “Slow down!” The rock landed harmlessly behind the car as it rounded the curve, brakes screeching. My first thought was that the car had hit the dog. A few minutes later I was relieved to see the dog unharmed and hiding in the pines beside our house. When I sat down to write the story, I asked myself, “What would have happened if the rock had hit that car?” I had great fun answering that question, but I have never looked at my house in quite the same way.

Suzanne Proulx is one of countless authors to have published a book entitled Bad Blood. In her case that book was the first of a series featuring hospital risk manager Vicky Lucci, which has been translated into several languages. She is a longtime member of Mystery Writers of America, has been a reader for MWA’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and is the editor of Deadlines, the newsletter of the Rocky Mountain MWA chapter.

• I envisioned “If You Say So” as a Valentine’s Day story, but kind of a grim one. He has his scenario — who he thinks he is, how he thinks other people perceive him, how he wants her to see him — and of course she has her scenario, and nobody is quite who the other thinks they are. Not at the beginning, and in this case, definitely not at the end.

I had written the first draft when I saw the call for entries from Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers for the False Faces anthology. I thought “If You Say So” would be a good fit, and was really excited when Angie Hodapp and Warren Hammond, the editors, agreed.

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena, in addition to six other novels; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

• During the Civil War, Madison County, North Carolina, like most parts of southern Appalachia, had strong Unionist sympathies. When Secession was proposed in 1861, the county voted solidly against it. Once the war began, the county became known as Bloody Madison. In the most notorious incident, Confederate troops massacred thirteen men and boys in the Unionist stronghold of Shelton Laurel, the place where the story is set. But the impetus for “Neighbors” was contemporary events, and those who are caught between allegiance and denial of community.

Amanda Rea lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Peden Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, One Story, American Short Fiction, Freeman’s, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

• When my brother and I were children we were told a story about a distant relative who tried to hang us. According to family lore, the young man led us away from our backyard and into the forest, where he was later caught trying to hoist us into a handmade noose. Neither of us were hurt or remember the incident; it remains, for me, just outside the realm of believable. But I have always been intrigued by what the hangman’s mother reportedly said when she learned two small children were alone with her son: We’d better find them quick. When I started writing “Faint of Heart” there was something about this line, the mystery of it, that felt like an entryway. Still, the story took an appalling number of drafts (and, incidentally, years) to finish, and I’m grateful to Patrick Ryan of One Story for giving it a chance, and to Otto Penzler and Jonathan Lethem for showcasing it here.

Duane Swierczynski is the two-time Edgar-nominated author of ten novels including Revolver, Canary, and the Shamus Award — winning Charlie Hardie series, many of which are in development for film/TV. Duane has also written over 250 comic books featuring The Punisher, Deadpool, Judge Dredd, and Godzilla (among other notable literary figures). His original graphic novel, Breakneck, with artwork by Simone Guglielmini and Raffaele Semeraro, was published in 2019. A native Philadelphian, he now lives in Los Angeles with his family.

• “Lush” was partly inspired by an article I read years ago where a liver specialist tried to estimate exactly how much James Bond drank and came up with something like forty-five drinks per week. (The results were published in the British Medical Journal.) It was kind of a miracle that Mr. Bond could tie his shoes, let alone engage in fistfights, daring escapes, and endless sexual dalliances. So I got to thinking: what if a spy had to drink? I wrote the story, but couldn’t think of anyone who would want it.

Enter Rick Ollerman, who years later asked if I might contribute to his anthology honoring beloved bookseller Gary Schulze, who died from leukemia in April 2016. The only rules: the story had to mention a book, bookstore, or tuba. Of course I said yes (I’m never one to shrink from a challenge, especially when it involves a large brass instrument), and I thought about “Lush.”

Blood Work appeared in August 2018, right when my fifteen-year-old daughter Evie was enduring a second round of chemo in her own battle against leukemia. (She would lose that battle on October 30.) I think Evie would have enjoyed this loving Bond parody — we watched quite a few of the Daniel Craig movies together, even though she probably wasn’t old enough. Every December my wife and I host a book drive in Evie’s honor, something Gary Schulze no doubt would have appreciated. I just haven’t found a way to work in a tuba. Yet.

Robb T. White was born, raised, and still lives in Northeast Ohio. He made it to China once but has been content to remain in his backyard with garden and hammock. He has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels and three collections of short stories. He’s been nominated for a Derringer, and many of his stories have appeared in crime zines or magazines including Yellow Mama, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Switchblade, and Down & Out. His new hardboiled series features private eye Raimo Jarvi (Northtown Eclipse, 2018). Murder, Mayhem and More cited When You Run with Wolves as a finalist for the Top Ten International Crime Books of 2018.

• “Inside Man” was a different writing experience for two reasons: first, Down & Out editor Rick Ollerman, who accepted the story “conditionally,” worked me over in the details, grammar, and word choice until he was satisfied, and we’re talking weeks, not days. I don’t think the Dead Sea Scrolls received as much critical attention, and for his keen eye, and that story’s place in this prestigious anthology, I’m very grateful.

The other reason is that my narrator fits a niche I’ve tried before to squeeze my other narrating criminals into — and not always successfully. Cold-bloodedness doesn’t always work well with the jocular. If it does work here (I defer to the reader), then my ex-con’s heist borders on a kind of hopeless, disciplined lunacy that will affect the reader as I intended. Mindful of those readers who like to peruse a writer’s notes before taking up the story, I’ll say no more about it here.

I suppose, as a crime-fiction writer who turned late in life to writing fiction, I was never tempted by elaborate plots or clever characters. The thrill has always been in a character’s self-revelation through a brutally honest introspection in that neutral zone between writer and reader. This also speaks to my natural antipathy to avoid anything remotely “cozy” in my fiction. I made it to page 25 of my one and only Agatha Christie novel (title forgotten over the decades since) before that paperback went flying into the garden, where it did more good as compost than if I’d forced myself to finish it — not finishing a book begun being a lifetime taboo, not easily violated then or now. I think it was Browning who was chided by his wife in a letter for his lack of spirituality, or something similar, and he responded with a line I’ve regrettably forgotten and won’t try to paraphrase. The gist was that we all need an “appreciation” for evil. For that, an unblinking gaze is required. Stories serve as a prism for that. Hard to do in any era but in our time where everything is psychoanalyzed and nuanced, dissected and filtered through a collective and increasingly more delicate sensibility, it’s almost impossible to do. Let the shrinks and behaviorists scoff. I deplore academe’s desire to eradicate the word evil from our consciousness.

Genre fiction also gives us something besides entertainment and is worth the effort Rick Ollerman and every good editor or publisher demands. Besides, unless I’m wrong about anthropology’s origins, the more violent chimpanzees came out of the trees first, not the gentler bonobos, those sexualized apes from the simian tree. I place my hope in the future of humankind there — in the heavens, the Milky Way, to be precise. If there really are a hundred billion stars swirling about the black hole in the center, then about half should be surrounded by planets, as the astronomers tell us. That increases the odds mightily that there might really be intelligent, civilized life in the universe. It’s just not down here very often.

Ted White began his writing career as a jazz critic, writing for Metronome magazine in 1960. Since then he has been a science fiction writer (more than a dozen novels, many short stories) an editor (assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for five years; editor of Amazing Science Fiction and Fantastic Stories for ten years; editor of Heavy Metal for one year; editorial director of Stardate for one year), an agent (at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, then solo), an FM radio deejay, and a musician (winds and keys) still currently in a band, Conduit. He has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution. He is currently the copy editor of the Falls Church News-Press, a local weekly.

• This is one of my favorites among the stories I’ve written recently. I was most active as a writer in the 1960s and 1970s, but returned to short stories in 2013, essentially in retirement from the mundane jobs I’d held for the previous two decades. Nikola is a character with whom I fell in love when I wrote this story. I admire her literacy and her guts. She lives alone in a grim world, but she’s a survivor.