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“Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess

by James Wallace Harris, 8/12/26

“Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess is available to read online. Or buy a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2025.

One of the essential challenges of being a professional writer is developing ideas. Ideas come to a writer all day long. I get two or three every time I take a shower, and a few more when I read the morning news. You have to pick one and work at it like painting in oil or sculpting in marble. Developing an idea means making hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. That kind of art takes days, weeks, months, even years.

During my time taking fiction writing courses towards an MFA, I wrote over thirty stories. They encouraged us to write new ones every week. And that is a certain kind of learning experience. However, I thought my program should require workshops in which you rewrote a story every week for a semester. Because that’s how good stories evolve.

Back in the pulp magazine era, professional writers often prided themselves on being able to churn out a first draft that an editor would buy. To make a living, you had to regularly sell stories. If you read these stories today, they aren’t very good. Often I think that if they had only rewritten this story two or three times, it could have been a classic.

“Unfathomably Deep” feels like it has been rewritten many times, lacquered with many layers of varnish.

Going through the contributors section of The Best American Short Stories, you often see comments about how long the writer worked on a story, sometimes even putting it away for a time to rework it later. That’s because literary stories have so many layers.

Because these discussions of stories are not reviews, I’m going to reveal things that many readers will consider spoilers. Read the story. The link is above.

At the simplest level, “Unfathomably Deep” is about a young delusional woman named Izzie who falls in love with a handsome doctor, feels spurned, and kills him. The backstory reveals the death of her sister Danielle. To confuse matters, the doctor’s name is Daniel. And it’s not until you are into the story that you realize that Izzie isn’t talking to the reader.

The idea for “Unfathomable Deep” was just a passing bit of info. Sophie Madeline Dess said this in her contributor note:

A friend of mine is getting his MD, and from him I learned of the existence of the Gynecological Teaching Assistant—a person trained to use her own body as a teaching tool to instruct medical students on administering breast and pelvic exams. I was immediately obsessed by the thought of this job. To bring “performance” into the exam room; to be probed and prodded, to pretend. The job struck me as perfect for a voice that had been floating around in my head, the voice of Izzie in “Unfathomably Deep.” Izzie’s passion, grief, and spunk all took shape as I imagined her as a GTA, lying on an exam table, surrounded by handsome, untalented medical students. Eventually that career choice became secondary to the main thrust of the story, which is to do with allegiance, violence, and fate. It is a story born of the question: What forces and passions possess us in the wake of grief?

Dess was given an idea accidentally. A million writers would have written a million different stories with that idea. Ideas count for nothing. Dess had a character she had been developing in her mind. Character is the foundation of literary fiction, not the idea or plot. How many data points would you need to define your own character? Writers have to think up those details for the characters they create.

Yet, a good idea and character aren’t enough. You need a conflict. Readers keep reading to see how a character solves a problem. And you need to start everything with a hook. The first sentence of “Unfathomably Deep” is:

“Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out.”

That’s a shocker. I imagined open-heart surgery because I’ve seen so many medical shows where the doctors use a rib spreader. But Dess quickly diverted me away from that image. “As the men locked me in my stirrups, they told me their names, which now I’ve forgotten, but I do remember that one was blond, the other blonder.” Okay, she’s in for a pelvic exam. That’s a different image of spreading altogether.

See how Dess’s imagination is controlling what we imagine? Movies are a series of photographs. At 24 frames per second, we see an illusion of reality. Writers have to create the illusion of reality with words. The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words doesn’t apply to fiction. It doesn’t take 24,000 words a second. Fiction is an accumulation of significant details. Each sentence should add details to the story. (Read “About 5,750 Words” by Samuel R. Delany.)

This paragraph should clarify the setting and situation in the reader’s mind:

It was my job to intervene. Formally speaking, I was a GTA: a Gynecological Teaching Assistant. Really just a body lender for medical students. Their one task was to perform a partial gynecological exam on a pretend patient — me — who had pretend gynecological problems, which were the result of a pretend sex life, which was the result of a pretend desirability. I had a script and everything.

Personally, I would have begun the story with that paragraph. I think it’s a much better hook. However, some literary writers like to play around with the reader’s head.

Sophie Madeline Dess is attempting far more than I imagined on the initial reading. Like reality, fiction can connect to many realms, or levels. At first, “Unfathomably Deep” feels like a simple comedy about a woman paid to be a gynecological patient falling in love with the student doctor.

But I didn’t tell you about the epitaph at the beginning of the story:

I know indeed what evil I intend to do,
But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
— Euripides’s Medea, 431 B.C.E.

Now I need to use a reference from a movie that many people consider offensive. It’s when Robert Downey Jr.’s character tells Ben Stiller’s character in Tropic Thunder to not go full retard. He explains that you can create award-winning roles about cognitively damaged people if you don’t play them as too damaged. That’s an apt analogy for going too literary. James Joyce was fine with many readers with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but lost a lot of them with Ulysses. But he lost most of his readers with Finnegans Wake by going full Joycean. There are only so many layers of allusion that some readers can handle.

My friend Linda said she didn’t like “Unfathomably Deep” because it was too strange. I wondered if Dess had gone full-Joycean for her. I still enjoyed the story, but I’m not sure how many times I’m willing to reread it to get all the allusions and foreshadowing.

Karen Carlson said at A Just Recompense, “I had to read the story several times to feel like I knew what was happening in various places, and I think I’ll be milking subtext and metaphor for the next thirty reads at least.” And at Jake Weber’s Workshop Heretic, she said in the comments that this was her favorite story in the anthology. Karen’s post went down the Medea rabbit hole. I recommend you read it.

I ignored the Medea angle while reading the story. That means I missed a lot of what Dess intended. I loved Joyce’s Portrait, but never could finish Ulysses after several tries. Dess is somewhere between the two with literary allusions. Karen said she’s currently obsessed with Greek literature.

Jake went down the Freudian rabbit hole. And I recommend you read his piece too. I wondered about Freud while reading the story and considered researching that angle. Weber is careful to point out that Freud is considered useless for modern psychoanalysis, but is still popular for literary analysis.

“Unfathomably Deep” is a smorgasbord of stories. I latched onto Izzie falling in love at first sight. Yesterday, by coincidence, my friend Anne texted me about how gorgeous her doctor was. She was quite taken. And I’ve remembered other times when women friends told me they were knocked out by male beauty. For men, beautiful women are everywhere. It comes in all varieties. But with women, Mr. Beautiful is as rare as black swans. I was hoping the story would explore the differences between women and men and their view of beauty, but it doesn’t.

Izzie stalks Daniel. The second time Izzie gets to work with Daniel, he completely lets her down. Then she stalks his neighborhood. But why. Well, she kills him. This falls in with the Medea thread. Izzie wraps her legs around Daniel’s head while holding him underwater, fondling his face and hair. Some readers discuss this story’s humor. And I could picture this story made into a movie, and even imagine the scene of Izzie drowning Daniel being funny.

But when you reread the story, with all the Medea and Freudian layers, you realize Izzie is quite cognitively damaged. You have to ask what Robert Downey Jr. asked so crudely. Does Dess go too far with Izzie? That’s hard to answer.

I suppose there’s an audience for humor about insanity, like some readers who seek out stories of body horror. Dess’ humor isn’t like Heller’s in Catch-22. It’s somewhat like J. D. Salinger’s if you ignore all the Medea stuff. And I’m leaving out whole gobs of the story, especially the weird humor about Danielle.

There’s a subplot that satirizes concepts regarding female bodies. I believe hordes of readers could read “Unfathomably Deep” without ever connecting with what Karen, Jake, and I saw in the story.

JWH

“Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein

by James Wallace Harris, 8/11/26

We humans have several cognitive tools for understanding reality. The early ones were myth, folklore, and religion. The only ones that can consistently describe reality are math and science. But a popular one today is fiction. I don’t just mean short stories and novels. But also television shows, movies, comics, video games, manga, poetry, lyrics, etc. I think reading and analyzing literary stories are a unique kind of microscope for studying reality.

The thing about fiction is everyone interprets it differently. I like that. It helps to consume other interpretations. Luckily, I have Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense and Jake Weber at Workshop Heretic to follow behind in reading The Best American Short Stories volumes.

For most of my life, I’ve read science fiction. I review it on Classics of Science Fiction. Science fiction is mostly genre fiction. Genre fiction is like modern art; it doesn’t try to portray reality, but create an artificial reality. Genre fiction is admired for creating something beautiful that doesn’t exist in reality. Literary fiction is beautiful for describing reality.

When I was growing up, science fiction fans would call literary fiction mundane fiction. “Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein describes a very mundane situation. Now that I’m older, stories about interstellar travel bore me, and I’m more fascinated by the mundane.

You can read or listen to “Abject Naturalism” at The New Yorker if you have a subscription. If you have a Spotify account, you can listen to the story read by the author. And, of course, you can read it in The Best American Short Stories 2025.

Toni is the mother of 10-year-0ld Amalie. My guess is Toni is around 44 because she gives two backstories ten years apart. The first jump is twenty years earlier, when Toni first met Amalie’s father in graduate school. The second jump is ten years back, when she briefly reunited with Amalie’s father and got pregnant with Amalie.

Jake Weber at Workshop Heretic did an extensive analysis of the title: “Abject Naturalism.” I recommend reading it because I don’t want to repeat his work. Weber says:

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. Weber gives plenty of evidence to support this with quotes from the story.

Weber cites plenty of points in the story to support this view. Especially connecting it with Toni’s desire to write literary horror stories when she was in writing school. By the end of “Abject Naturalism,” Toni feels positive about writing again, and we have to wonder if “Abject Naturalism” is something she would have written?

But that is not how I focused on “Abject Naturalism.” For me, it was about two things: freedom from fear and writing. Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense was closer to my view when reviewing “Abject Naturalism.” I completely agree with this.

I once took a class with a professor who insisted that every poem Robert Frost wrote, no matter what it was about, was really about writing poetry. Two roads in the wood? Poetry. Woods on a snowy evening? Poetry. Walls, birches, death, gold, choosing a star? All about writing poems. I got the sense, after I’d read this story a couple of times and looked up the title, that this story is all about writing a story.

I believe all literary fiction is about writing, but it seems more obvious when the protagonist is a writer, or in Toni’s case, a failed writer. It’s even more revealing when we get a title like “Abject Naturalism.” To me, literary fiction is always a kind of metafiction. While consuming a literary story, I always ask myself, “Why did the writer write this story, how did they write it, is any of it autobiographical, and what is the writer really telling us?”

I couldn’t find much about Sarah Braunstein, but this paragraph from her contributor’s page is very revealing.

Some years ago, my elementary-aged child went for a jog in the neighborhood, promising to stay alert and to avoid strangers. He returned with a telescope a stranger had been throwing away. The man, he said, had told him he could buy a new part for it on the web. My son and I ordered some plastic mirror thing for $3 on eBay, but we could never get it to fit, and the telescope now sits in the basement wrapped in cobwebs. From the day he came home with it, the telescope radiated with meaning. It felt like the set-up of a short story on my front stoop, the kid and the object. The telescope lets the child see the cosmos, a world beyond the household, beyond what the mother knows. I imagined a mother who would feel threatened by this, who would wonder about the man . . . who might even go to his door to complain. She would be lonely, half-aware of her motivations. When she knocked on his door and I saw the entryway to Marco’s living room, his reading glasses, I realized this might be a story about real estate, or friendship, or love . . . the narrative opened up to me, a Venn diagram of these elements. I began to imagine a daughter who is prickly and tart, always one step ahead of her mother. She has a band on her wrist that counts steps, another device Toni did not give her, and downloads apps without permission on Toni’s phone. Poor Toni! It began to make me laugh, the Sisyphean task of controlling a young adolescent with a burning mind. Well, what about her own burning mind? Toni as a former creative person came into focus then. I wanted to write about so many things, to say something about grief, creativity, doubt, fear . . . finding my way to the end of this story was a challenge. At one point Toni says she stopped writing because she never could figure out how to end things. “Abject Naturalism” sat in a file for a long time until I could understand what its ending needed to do.

So she had a kid about Amalie’s age, but how old is she? In 2010, the National Book Foundation recognized her as “5 Under 35.” I guessed that Toni was around 44, so Braunstein could be of a similar age. From what little I did find about her, I could imagine Braunstein following Toni’s path, as well as the path Toni didn’t take, the one Amalie’s father took. Braunstein attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Mecca for MFA students. And “Abject Naturalism” was published in both The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2025. Braunstein has two novels and a collection available at Amazon, and she teaches creative writing at Colby College in Maine. Doesn’t that sound like Amalie’s father?

Literary fiction gives writers a chance to work things out. I’m currently rereading J. D. Salinger, and I consider his stories metaphorical roman à clef. I want to believe literary writers are telling us something about their lives, even when the plot and characters don’t match their own.

“Abject Naturalism” really begins when Amalie, at ten, claims she’s old enough to go jogging by herself. This terrifies Toni. Amalie wants her freedom. Toni realizes she must give her freedom, but knows that she, herself, is not free. Toni resents that Amalie’s father chose to become a successful writer rather than being a parent, but was that freedom?

Now, I identify with Toni in two ways. First, I’m also an MFA dropout who eventually gave up the dream of becoming a writer. Even though we never had children, the thought of letting a kid go out of the house on their own terrifies me.

Which is odd, because in 1957, when I was just 5, I walked to my first day of 1st grade by myself. My parents asked me if I knew where the school was. I said yes, but I didn’t really. I just went outside and followed all the other kids in the neighborhood, heading somewhere. By the time I was 6 and 7, I was roaming the neighborhood for blocks. When we moved to New Jersey in 1959, and I was 8, I roamed across farms and woods. One day, I led my 6-year-old sister into the woods to see how far we could go and ended up in town. By chance, my father was driving home from work and saw us.

My father was surprised to see us. He asked us how we got into town. But when we explained, he didn’t yell at us. He just drove us home. I’ve always wondered what I would have done if he hadn’t spotted us. Probably returned the same way we came. I was good at not getting lost.

The first half of “Abject Naturalism” dramatises Toni’s fears of letting Amalie roam free. If I had had kids, I don’t know if I could let them out of my sight. In today’s New York Times, I read “Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?” By today’s standards, my parents would have seen jail time.

To make matters worse, Amalie comes back from her jog lugging a broken telescope. She tells Toni a man gave it to her. Toni freaks out at the thought of Amalie talking to strangers.

The next day, when Amalie is in school, Toni goes down the street and confronts the man, Marcos. He’s described as an old guy in his mid-to-late sixties. Toni calmly tells him that he shouldn’t talk to children because it conditions them to feel safe talking to strangers. Marcos explains he hadn’t really struck up a conversation. He said Amalie was looking at the telescope he put out on the street in the trash. He merely told Amalie she could have it, and that it was missing a part that could be bought cheaply on eBay.

This calms Toni some, but she still worries.

Then the story takes a different turn. Toni keeps returning to visit Marcos. In a way, she slowly gives herself freedom too. The hard part of the story for me was believing a woman in her forties would be romantically attracted to a guy in his sixties. Toni does worry about losing her low-rent apartment in a gentrified neighborhood. Does she want Marcos for his house? She imagines her and Amalie moving into it. But she also believes Marcos loves her, but she’s too embarrassed to say that to her friends.

Toni is constantly running a script in her head about her fears. When Amalie demands some very limited freedom, Toni starts allowing herself a small bit of freedom.

The ending of the story is happy, and even kind of sappy. Toni even fantasizes about writing again. She pictures herself setting up a writing location in Marcos’ house.

There is actually too much to analyze in “Abject Naturalism.” In the beginning of the story, we’re given Toni’s backstory with Amalie’s father. This is one kind of love story. But we see another kind of love story at the end, with Marcos. Unfortunately, we are only told what Amalie’s father and Marcos might be thinking.

It would have been a whole other level of naturalism/realism if we had their points of view. Some writers do attempt such multiplex perspectives.

There was something else I wanted to analyze. Like many MFA-type literary stories, there are lots of flashbacks. This means we’re often told information rather than experiencing it dramatically.

I just reread “A Perfect Day for Banafish” by J. D. Salinger. It was an exquisite example of showing rather than telling. It was so concise. So immediate. Reality glittered. I’m sad that we don’t see this style of writing much anymore. Most of my bookworm friends that I try to get to read The Best American Short Stories tell me they don’t like that kind of writing. I will admit that “Abject Naturalism” conforms to a modern MFA-style of writing that feels like a genre of its own.

Like I said, everyone reads a short story differently; just read the comments here. Some of them said they normally get tired of this kind of story, but this one is a good one of that type.

If you read this story, let me know what you thought about it.

JWH

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder

by James Wallace Harris, 8/9/26

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder returns to the assertion that reading makes us more empathetic. The 2020s are difficult times for trans people, especially for those who live in the heartland. Emma Binder tells us about Cody Hartbrook, a trans man, whose father kicked him out of their Wisconsin home when he graduated high school. Cody found love, acceptance, purpose, even happiness in Massachusetts. Then his father got cancer, and Cody returned to Wisconsin to help his mother.

Unfortunately, you can’t read this story online. You’ll have to buy a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2025. I understand publishers need to make money, but I wish literary magazines would publish their stories online. Few people read little magazines, and not that many people even buy the annual Best American Short Stories.

Writing short stories is how new writers break in. They need the exposure. According to the Colburn Classroom, the Michigan Quarterly Review had a print run of 1,000 copies in 2020. I doubt most little magazines are for-profit concerns. Leaving their content offline is only hiding their light under a bushel. The world is giving up on reading short stories, and paywalls are only accelerating that decline.

But you should buy The Best American Short Stories every year. It makes you a patron of the arts by supporting budding writers. Most of the contributors will have names you don’t know. A few of them will publish a bestseller in years to come. Who knows, you might even buy their first novel when it comes out because you loved reading their short story.

Emma Binder said this in their contributor notes:

One of my obsessions, both artistically and in life, are the stories of queer and trans people who come from rural places and small towns, who may be omitted from the acknowledged social fabric of these communities but still shape them and are shaped by them. Queer and trans people are everywhere, so if their existence is not visible in a certain place, that erasure has been somehow designed. I also wanted to write a story about the feeling of freedom, and how some environments allow us to feel free while others are designed to constrain us—perhaps we experience that constraint through fear, shame, self-hatred, or an ambient hunch that we need to hush some vital part of ourselves in order to make our lives simpler. And maybe we love and miss those places regardless. So the emotional and thematic context was very clear to me, but the actual events of the story—Cody seeing a man falling through the ice, saving him, meeting him and his friends at the bar—took shape slowly and organically, during a warm winter when I was taking a lot of walks past ice fishermen.

I started this story in 2022, amid what I already thought was a harsh political climate for queer and trans people in the United States. Looking back on this story in the even darker and more oppressive landscape of 2025, I feel compelled to say that the ability to live in environments where we feel free, and where we can experience self-determination and authenticity, is literally lifesaving; it allows us to move past raw survival and access deeper, human, complex modes of living. It allows us, as Cody says in the story, to experience such essential things as “love, family, peace.” That is true for trans people and for every person on this Earth.

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” really is a test for that common assertion that reading makes people more empathetic. I can’t believe anyone can read this story and not feel for Cody.

Like I’ve said before, literary stories are often like experiencing telepathy. Cody saves an ice fisherman, Greg Parham, when the ice breaks. Greg invites Cody out for a beer to say thanks. Cody doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid the locals will discover he’s trans and beat him up.

Cody does go to the bar, but is unnerved when Greg shows up with Kevin and Nick. Cody drinks and shoots pool with the guys while they ply him with friendly questions.

From that, we experience the anxiety Cody lives with. It becomes even more complicated when the guys discover Cody went to high school with them. The guys are baffled that they can’t place Cody. It makes them pry even more. Cody doesn’t lie, but he doesn’t tell them he was much different back then. He just says he was a loner.

Evidently, Cody wants to be one of the guys, but knows, or fears, being beaten up. I’m not sure I like Emma Binder’s ending. It works realistically, but not dramatically. She shows a gun in the first act, but it’s never used. What if Greg, Kevin, and Nick did learn that Cody was trans? How would Greg, a big, burly, bearded guy, feel about having his life saved by a trans guy?

Greg, Kevin, and Nick are ordinary guys, but they’ve probably never met a trans person. As readers, we feel tension from their masculinity. But aren’t we prejudging them too? Would they beat up Cody?

Other Takes

JWH

“Take Me to Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson

by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/26

At 74, my youngest friend is 60. It’s been years since I’ve socialized with a young person. And when I think of young people, I recall the fellow baby boomers when they were young, or maybe Gen Xers I watched growing up. I’m totally out of touch with recent generations. So when I read a short story like “Take Me to Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson and view modern youth from inside their head, it’s kind of a shock.

Anderson is a young woman from Gainesville, Florida, who is at the beginning of her writing career. Her first novel, Fallow, will be out in September.

Literary fiction is often a touch autobiographical, but you can never be sure. Is the unnamed narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” made up, or does Anderson use herself or people she knows to paint her tale? Since I’ve sat through dozens of writing critiques in writing classes, I know some writers make things up, and some writers describe things they know. Generally, writers of genre fiction make things up, and literary writers use details from real life.

That’s why I like reading The Best American Short Story series. Reading each volume’s twenty stories feels like eavesdropping into people’s lives. And generally, they are unlike anyone I’ve known.

Luckily, the anthology includes notes from the contributors, so we get some clues about Anderson.

“Take Me to Kirkland” initially grew out of two main fragments.

The first piece to arrive was the scene of the narrator meeting Chloe and the intensity between them. My own breasts came in late, and one of my clearest memories from teenhood is the obsessive, desperate way I looked at other women’s bodies, like at any moment someone might jump from the bushes and announce a winner. That moment of sizing up by the mailbox was my way into the scene, and then the friendship came in a series of images: the cutting of the lemon, girl underwater, the trampoline.

The second piece was the section about childhood misunderstandings. I was a deeply anxious child, and that anxiety was made so much worse by all the things I didn’t understand about the world. I just had this vague sense of how much I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Perhaps because of this, and having made it to the other side, I take a particular joy in collecting other people’s stories of the misunderstandings they had well into adulthood. Like the narrator, I truly believed for a long, long time that Al Gore was only his last name.

It eventually became clear to me that the two fragments were connected, and I spent another year figuring out how to stitch together a narrative around them. Once it started to take shape, the story became a vehicle for a collection of other strangenesses, things that used to or still unsettle me in ways I struggle to articulate, all the ways the world never does actually make sense even after you grow up, and all the stories we tell each other and ourselves to try to understand it.

In other words, the story fictionalizes Anderson’s own anxieties. This is often true with literary short stories. It’s what I like. Unfortunately, I have a terrible time convincing my bookworm friends to read the annual Best American Short Stories. Most bookworms don’t like slice-of-life stories.

Partly, their dislike is with short stories in general. Most bookworms love novels. Writers like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout write slice-of-life stories, but they are longer, and they have a plot. Genre short stories and 19th-century short stories have plots, but contemporary literary fiction short stories seldom do. Unless you’re a connoisseur of literary short stories, enjoying them is difficult.

The real pleasure of reading these kinds of stories is admiring a kind of pseudo-telepathy. In “Take Me to Kirkland,” readers will assume the unnamed narrator is either Anderson or a simulacrum of someone like her. We’re invited into her head. The best literary fiction is when writers reveal their innermost thoughts. Fans of this type of fiction particularly love when writers reveal things so private that we cringe at their honesty.

By the way, this same appeal is why memoirs are bestsellers.

There is a challenge to writing literary fiction. Book, TV, movie, and social media addicts now encounter the inner lives of thousands of people. It’s very difficult to make your thoughts naked in today’s world without appearing mundane. There’s a similarity between literary writers and OnlyFans hosts: you have to be willing to take it all off and show everything.

The narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” is somewhat over 18, but spends most of the story remembering her friend Chloe from when they were children. At the beginning of the story, they were reunited after being out of touch.

I was surprised that Chloe was calling. We hadn’t spoken in almost two months, for a few reasons. The first was that she had new friends now, the girls she waitressed with three nights a week at the Longhorn Steakhouse. The one Chloe liked the most, Kayla, had a pierced nipple. Chloe showed me a picture after the first time they hung out. I didn’t know that an areola could be that big. I checked Chloe’s face out of the corner of my eye and could tell I was supposed to not make a big deal about it. “Nice,” I said. “Isn’t it so pretty?” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “I like that it’s silver.”

The second reason was that I had been spending more time with Damian, who Chloe said had too much body hair and a weird sense of humor. When I was honest with myself I kind of understood where she was coming from. Damian could be a real piece of shit sometimes and he was four years older than us which, at our current ages, many people found distasteful.

I’m sure this is all mundane to young people today, but for an old baby boomer, this is not how real people or characters talked fifty years ago.

The next part connects the reader to the story’s title. The narrator explains how, as a little kid, she thought Costco’s Kirkland was a magical place. This is a common MFA writing trick. Unfortunately, such childhood fantasies come off as cute rather than psychologically revealing. In fact, some of Anderson’s childhood stories are on the cute side. Especially the one about baby ducks. Such memoryscapes come off as writerly affectations.

Good writing is the accumulation of details. Great writing is the accumulation of significant details. I don’t think these early childhood details were significant. But then we jump forward in time.

Chloe and I met again when we were eleven, in July, when her family moved into the split-level one street over from mine. We had been in different classes every year since second grade and I hadn’t really thought about her. But that summer there she was, sitting on the curb across from our mailbox when I went outside to check if my mom’s Cosmopolitan magazine had been delivered so that I could read it first and then put it back in with the next day’s mail. “No mail on Sundays,” she said from behind me. I had forgotten what day it was.

I couldn’t decide if the girl in front of me, this new Chloe, was hotter than me or not. Her legs were shorter but her tits were bigger, and I had a bad feeling that her face was better than mine. I wanted her to whisper something in my ear. I wanted to cut her hair off. I wanted to watch her suck a slice of lemon and spit the little seeds into my hand one by one.

Chloe considered me too, pausing on my legs. “I live over there now,” she said finally, pointing. “Do you like trampolines?”

“Cool,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Come with me,” she said. Her ass cheeks peeked out from her jean shorts, two pimply little half moons. She took me to the pharmacy down the street to shoplift laxatives, and cough syrup as an afterthought. We passed the bottle back and forth the whole way home and then lay down on the trampoline in her backyard. The trampoline was covered in gravel and twigs and dead leaf fragments, so once we were high we took turns pulling out the pieces that were tangled up in each other’s hair. The syrup left gritty little particles of something on our tongues and made our breath thick and sweet, our thoughts scattering like fistfuls of pennies in a fountain.

These details seem more real and significant. But are they real? This is unknown territory to an old man like me, but is it mundane to someone Anderson’s age? Mundane isn’t always boring. Sometimes, it’s how people connect.

For the next several pages, the story takes a surreal detour for someone like me, but I worry: is this the average world of being a young woman today?

Then we reach the true shocking point of the story, when Chloe disappears. Was she killed or kidnapped? Did she run away? The narrator thinks she sees Chloe in a porn video, one about rough sex and teens. The narrator reveals she watches porn to combat insomnia. This is the narrator getting naked. Are there other things she can tell about herself that are even more disturbing?

To an old person, this is too private. One reason we old folks retreat from the world is that it gets too weird for us. Reading “Take Me to Kirkland” tells me how much the world has changed.

The narrator of this story tells us how she copes.

To try to make myself stop loving Chloe, I sifted through our moments, looking for a handful of them that could bend our narrative arc, or at least end it. The only thing I could come up with was the sight of that ugly black outline on her skin, glistening under the Saran Wrap, and the way she looked when I passed her silently in the hallway at school that last week, bony and distant. But other moments kept creeping in instead, things that made me love her more. Grape breath and her fingers working through my hair, the v of her legs and the o of her mouth when she jumped too high on the trampoline and scared herself, then did it again. The gasp when her hurricane body knocked me flat onto the nylon. “Sorry,” she said, when I pointed at the slick red rug burn on my elbow, and then she licked it.

For the first two weeks after we realized she was gone, people kept asking me if I was ok, and I didn’t really know but I thought I was, except that I was having a very hard time falling asleep. By the end of that first month, more and more I found myself on PornHub, which Damian introduced me to. I would start out watching really basic stuff but as the night wore on, things would escalate and eventually I would find myself watching a gangbang.

Our narrator has finally reached a state of Holden Caulfield-like mental illness. Does she recognize that? Is the world of 2026 that different from 1951 for young people? Or what about Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar in 1963?

In my nonfiction book club group, we recently asked if fiction or nonfiction was the best way to convey what a moment in time and place is like.

If readers in the 2120s read “Take Me to Kirkland,” will they assume it’s how life was generally like in America in the 2020s? This story resonates with the nonfiction book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein that I read about a decade ago.

The problem with short stories is they are too short. Readers don’t spend the time to think about what they imply. Short stories are going the way of poetry. And if current pundits are correct, the novel will soon follow.

For many readers, reading an anthology like this one is like being pistol-whipped by reality.

JWH

“Dominion” by Lauren Acampora

by James Wallace Harris, 8/5/26

There has been much discussion lately about how people are no longer reading for pleasure. Advocates for reading often claim that reading is important because it promotes empathy. Is that really true? I’ve decided to test that.

I read the short story “Dominion” by Lauren Acampora in The Best American Short Stories 2025, but it was originally published in New England Review. “Dominion” is reprinted in Acampora’s new collection The Animal Room. You can read more about Lauren Acampora here.

Roy Fox is a retired CEO of an oil company. “Dominion” is his story, and we follow Roy’s thoughts. Roy spends his retirement collecting exotic animals. He claims he runs a rescue preserve, but in reality, he owns a large private zoo and employs many people as caretakers.

The plot pivots on a girl who is clawed by a serval when Roy invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class for a field trip.

Now I can’t say that Lauren Acampora’s goal in writing “Dominion” was to have readers empathize with Roy Fox, but if the virtue of reading is to understand people who are unlike us, then Roy is our subject. We live in politically polarized times where politics and wealth make us vilify our opposites.

Acampora doesn’t side with Roy. I believe she works hard to paint Roy Fox realistically and without judgment. However, many readers will see Fox as a narcissistic rich man who constantly rationalizes his wants while sneering down on the poor. But Acampora’s presentation is more nuanced than that.

The story begins when Roy reads through a couple dozen letters that mostly thank him for bringing Molly, the tiger, to Piper’s school. Piper is Roy’s granddaughter. However, one letter, written by a parent, riles Roy:

While we appreciate your good intention in visiting our child’s school with an animal ambassador as impressive as Molly, we’re concerned by the practice of keeping wild creatures captive—

Roy immediately wanted to defend himself by contacting the parent and telling them that Molly was rescued from a circus cage in Peru and now had three acres to herself. Then Roy thinks about how Shannon, his daughter, insisted on sending Piper to a public school when there was a “… panoply of private and Christian academies at her disposal.” He then thinks, “It was doubtful that his granddaughter would gain any special benefit from ‘diversity’ in this rawest sense of the word, this bestiary of scrappily dressed, minimally groomed children.”

Now, is Acampora using these details to criticize Roy? Or faithfully paint her character? Are liberal readers supposed to empathize with Roy? He is spending a great deal of money to “save” animals?

Roy’s favorite lines from The Book of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” He had it engraved on a stone plaque and put it on the gate to his property.

Roy also recalls a time when his company spilled 10 million gallons of oil into the sea. He rationalized that it wasn’t the largest of spills. And that TV images of oil-covered birds were a PR nightmare for his company. Roy worked to minimize his company’s exposure to the affair, but that led to a fiasco. Marilyn, his wife, had tried to get him to immediately take responsibility because that would be the right thing to do. He refused, but in his mind he admitted she was right.

Are readers to assume that Roy is now spending a fortune on a personal zoo as atonement for the oil spill? Do we forgive him? Are we supposed to forgive him? Or is Acampora only asking us to walk a mile in Roy’s shoes?

The readers are next shown Roy’s love of his animals. Is it genuine love, or do caring for the animals only support Roy’s narcissism? Isn’t he getting off on playing God to them? That Bible quote is a clue. This long paragraph is quite telling.

Roy found himself laughing, too. The truth was that he enjoyed his property staff more than his peers in black tie. The people he hired to maintain the property and care for the animals were fine people, steered by other desires. The concept of ambition—of success for success’s sake—was foreign to them. Satisfied by the simple things the natural world provided, they were unaware of or indifferent to the higher calibers of human pleasures. Roy might have envied this plain contentment, but he understood he was designed differently. His enjoyment of these animals, this life, was necessarily contingent on all that had come before, the challenges he’d met with his own brain power. He enjoyed the animals because he’d worked to obtain them. But unequal as they were, he and his staff were happy together in this Eden. Roy was pleased to share the humor of watching a capybara waddle into the lagoon. Marilyn took delight in the animals, too—especially the camels, whose faces she loved, full of comedy and tragedy. She divined profound feeling in their soft, long-lashed eyes. She was, ironically, the keeper of the household ledger. In a funny swap, she was the manager now, and Roy the irresponsible one in need of reining in. When he’d wanted to build a dolphinarium, Marilyn had unequivocally told him no.

Roy wants to control his image. He decides to invite Piper’s class to the estate as a field trip. He’s sure they will see his side of things. Marilyn agrees with Roy and thinks it’s a good gesture. And the school agrees to come, but under conditions that irk Roy and spoil some of his plans.

Unfortunately, the field trip turns into another oil spill for Roy when a serval leaps at the fence, sending one of its very long legs through the links, clawing Layla, a young girl, on her chest.

After the ambulance and school bus leave, Roy goes inside and lies down. When Marilyn comes home, he tells her what happened; she’s horrified he didn’t follow the ambulance to the hospital and meet the parents.

Marilyn rushes them to the hospital. Marilyn goes right in and physically comforts the parents, while Roy holds back. Readers don’t know if Marilyn is a naturally good person or just good at appearing to do the right thing.

Roy is confronted by Layla’s teenage brother, Jordan. Jordan’s righteousness reminds Roy of his daughter, Shannon, when she was young. Roy feels Jordan spits on him, but the others don’t see it. Roy leaves the hospital room quickly to hide in the bathroom, where he starts getting hives that he scratches until they bleed.

As he and Marilyn near home, Roy calms down. He says he forgives Jordan because he is young. Marilyn informs him the parents aren’t going to sue. Roy tells her they should open up their zoo to the public so they can learn about animals.

The last paragraph is quite revealing.

At last, they pulled up to their gate, and Roy pressed the button that instructed the iron doors to swing inward. The row of elephant heads receded in orderly welcome. The car drove through, its tires purring over gravel, down the row of tamarind trees. The gnarled branches laced overhead, wrinkled pods dangling—and like that they left behind the barbaric world with all its howling demands. This was home, a sanctuary in the truest sense of the word. Roy’s heart eased back to a steady rhythm. All around them, miraculous creations. The flamingos in the distance like so many fresh brushstrokes. The camels, his grave dignitaries. The monkeys chirping merrily, scrambling through the branches, swinging down in bright numbers to greet him.

Has God returned to Eden after visiting Adam and Eve on the outside?

Like all stories, we could interpret this one in a zillion ways. But I wonder if Acampora is asking us to empathize with Roy Fox? If the value of reading fiction is to help us see inside other people, what should we do with this insight?

I believe one reason why Trump won the 2016 election is that conservative folks were tired of being bullied by liberals. For decades, comedians, late-night hosts, comedy news shows, and sarcastic intellectuals felt it was ethical to belittle the right. It’s rather ironic that we liberals have always defended the downtrodden and demanded that political correctness protect the weak from verbal persecution. Yet, the rich and strong were fair game to any kind of bullying. If kindness means protecting the mentally ill from verbal abuse, why don’t we extend such empathy to narcissists? It’s just another condition in the DSM.

I just wonder if Acampora was trying to make us feel bad for Roy. She paints him with all his sins, yet doesn’t her story ask us to forgive him? Am I taking my bleeding-heart liberalism too far? Am I expecting the woke to wake up even more?

Acampora also portrays Roy Fox in her novel The Hundred Waters. A blurb at Amazon quotes the Boston Globe calling Acampora “a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs.” I’m tempted to read it.

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense has a much different take than mine. But that’s to be expected. Everyone reads a story in their own unique way. Peter Kirwan at Come to the Pedlar is somewhat like Carlson in analyzing Roy. I agree with them that Roy is a goldmine for psychoanalyzing. I’m more curious what Acampora was aiming at in her storytelling.

The writer at Workshop Heretic feels Acampora is contemptuous of Roy. They certainly provide plenty of evidence to make their case. They also found the story dull. I didn’t at all. They called it a “bog-standard lit fic story.”

Since I have many hours of MFA writing courses (but without the degree), I know what they mean. Modern writers are so well trained in MFA programs that their work has a sameness to it. However, I consider that sameness to be high-quality writing.

And I’ll admit that reading The Best American Short Stories won’t appeal to many readers. But is that because its stories feel intellectual, often by elite writers from the literary establishment?

I have a different take. I refer to it as my “message in a bottle” theory of writing. We all live alone inside our heads, isolated from each other, like living on a deserted island. The best literary stories are distilled insights placed in a bottle and thrown into the ocean. The writers hope that bottle might be found and someone else might see what they see.

If you read this story, let me know what you think. I’ve told a good portion of the plot, but that leaves out the heart of the story. It’s a shame that it’s not online to read for free.

I highly recommend The Best American Short Stories series.

JWH