“Ulf, the museum director, whose hand she’d shaken on the way in, who had offered her a sympathetic and conspiratorial nod, announced loudly from the information desk in Danish, then English, that the museum would close in ten minutes. A few people began to leave—the boys with the sneakers followed their parents toward the exit—but there were still twenty people now, maybe thirty, clustering together near the windows, feigning interest in the wall plaques and photos of carnivorous plants.”
Anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2009 and elsewhere.
“With his left hand, he adjusted the loop of steel that cuffed his right hand to the line of doomed men. His hand was starved, his wrist was thin, his body was cold: the cuff slipped off. In one beat of the heart he looked back to the man behind him and forward to the man limping ahead, and knew that neither saw his naked, red wrist; each saw only his own mother weeping in a kitchen, his own love lying on a bed in white sheets and sunlight.
Listen to Isaiah Sheffer’s interview with Rebecca about The Briefcase
“I’m seventeen years old, sitting with Randy Osterman on his picnic bench. He’s got his dad’s binoculars trained on the bride, but I’m watching the couple in the gazebo stare out across the lake and garden. You can tell they’re talking about the wedding, how expensive and lovely and delicious, what an unusual location. She hands him her champagne glass so she can reach her hand under the hem of her bright pink dress and fix her slip.
“ Personally, I’d come to the think of Miranda Željko as the model of local success. Someone who lost it all, who lived in the same drafty apartment as us, who shook off her Virginia accent and conquered the town. I believed she was tiny, with dancer’s legs, and she cut her dark hair short the day after the divorce. When she was lonely, she drank tea and watched The Apartment again and again, just to see the part with the tennis racket and the spaghetti.
“Markus is a gifted crier. We just say, “Tell us how your grandfather would feel,” and he gushes like Miss America. “My grandfather would be so proud of me,” he says, and blows a kiss to the sky.
Or we ask if he feels that his whole life has been a struggle. He says, “I just feel like my whole life has been just this huge struggle,” and then he starts snorting and choking and holds up a finger.
The producers love the criers, and they love the cocky bastards, and they love the snarky gay men. The others, we try to get drunk. We flirt with the straight guys, if there are any. If necessary, we feed them lines.
“ When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.
The Best American Short Stories 2010 →
“ What she hadn’t been able to describe really to anyone about that day in Tumby Bay was the sublimity, the blinding beauty of that bird as it flew, and as it lay where it fell. She could bring back in an instant that moment of white light rising beyond the leaves, her hand shaking against the gun. The echo of the shot seeming to come first because her ears went dead, then the load roar as they woke again. The flapping and cracking as something fell down through the trees, branch by snapping branch.
Viking Press
In Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel, a librarian and a young boy obsessed with reading take to the road. Kirkus Reviews calls The Borrower “smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.”
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