Best Debut Short Stories 2021 Read online

  In 1992, Ana begins her clinical coursework during the siege of Sarajevo. A city known for its unity, as a place where Serbs, Muslims, and Croats have lived together for half a millennium, Sarajevo has always been a city of pride in the Balkans. Bosnia has declared its independence; after a murder at a wedding in Belgrade, there are concerns that an independent Bosnia will not be safe for its Serbian population. Ana sees the first newspaper reports on her way to the hospital for her first rotation: Serbian paramilitaries taking up sniper positions from the tops of buildings, mortars firing from a police station, a barricade ringed with concertina wire set up in the middle of the city. A medical student Ana’s age, a Muslim girl from Dubrovnik, is shot in the chest crossing the Vrbanja Bridge. Ana throws herself into the clinics, where she sees men, women, and children. Rheumy eyes, scraped knees, broken arms, pregnancies. Many of the people in the clinic are refugees, Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, escaping violence. In the evenings, Ana spends her time in the cadaver lab. It is a kind of meditation, to take bodies apart, to see why they are broken. She has become obsessed with the origin of things, with pathology, with sickness. The beginnings of a cancer, an infection, a disease. At the front, Sarajevo is locked in from all sides to keep the location safe for ethnic Serbs. On her way between the hospitals and the cadaver lab, she sees newspaper pictures of tanks and gray-fronted buildings. The number of casualties is telegraphed across the front of the newspaper. The UN, she hears, has been dispatched. She wills herself to ignore it. Her father is out at the front, busy all the time. On the streets of Belgrade, he is heralded as the great defender of the Serbs. When he comes home and she is off shift, they relax and play Battleship together. He always lets her win. But in the cadaver lab, she is her own. The more bodies she takes apart, she thinks, the better she will understand them. In the clinic, she misses the sheer, tense reality of gristle, of muscle, of sinew, of bone. Slowly, she picks up the bone saw, secures the head in front of her. She puts the blade down, she slices. The blade shaves a snowfall of bone dust. The room is white and quiet, save for the whirring of the saw. The doctor who supervises her sits behind, watching. There is no blood; these bodies are no longer living. Ana holds her face and hands steady as a sheet; they no longer shake. She has been practicing how to anesthetize herself to this process of cutting and opening; soon it will be replaced by healing.

  Goran rotates in the emergency room. He is tired. The shifts stretch over twelve, twenty-four hours; he exists on cups of black coffee, on shouting attending doctors, on ringing phones. The fluorescent lights, the smell of antiseptic has seeped into the pores of his skin. He does not know his hands from the metal ends of instruments. Every day, the airlifts come to Belgrade with the injured from the siege of Sarajevo. Soldiers from the Yugoslav People’s Army, covered in sheets, their legs and arms wrapped in tourniquets, their fingers and toes white. His attending tweezes out slugs while Goran carefully unravels bandages. The bodies in triage are marked with colored tags. Green, yellow, red, black. Ana’s father is their commander. He hears of the hospitals in Sarajevo treating their wounded by candlelight, without antibiotics or blood transfusions. Some have even had to amputate without anesthetic. A barbaric practice, Goran thinks; medicine has slipped back fifty years. Goran sees a man with gangrene, with black fingers, the coil of his intestines. Slowly, he attempts to suture them back together with coarse, black thread. He wonders what has become of the injured civilians, if they hide together with their doctors and nurses in the dark of the hospital basement, listening for mortars. He wonders what has happened to those who are not Serbs. In his mind’s eye, he sees Ana’s face, then Ratko’s. Every day, he grows angrier with her; he feels she has caused this.

  Outside of Sarajevo, Ratko Mladić stands in a field. He has ordered his soldiers to use their largest mortars on the city. Behind him, concrete buildings rise. Their windows have been blown out in jagged edges. They begin to look like faces. It is winter. In the field, it is cold, and snow clings to the tops of dead grasses. He raises his hands. “Shoot the raw meat!” he shouts. He laughs. It is the same way he has shown his son, Darko, to shoot sparrows. The target must be spotted through the sights. The sights must be aligned immediately below the target. The rifle must be carefully seated in the shoulder to avoid the recoil force. He laughs as his men shoot at retreating soldiers and cowering civilians. It is the power to choose who lives and who dies that interests him. He has become a modern-day liberator; Miloš Obilić, the hero who killed the Turkish sultan in Serbian legend. He watches as the bodies pile next to each other. Blood stains their shirts. Allah cannot save them, he thinks, God cannot save them. Only me.

  Ana goes to Moscow for a conference. Her father does not want her to go, but her mother argues for her to have a place. “Let her go to Moscow,” Bosa says. “It is all she wants.” Ratko sulks, relents, and leaves. Ana kisses Bosa on the head and goes up the stairs to pack her bags. How glad she is for her mother. She goes to Moscow with Goran and other medical students. They walk across Red Square, look at pickled Lenin. The Kremlin is a fierce fortress; the red stars on the top of its spires wink in the fading light. The sun sets below St. Basil’s Cathedral; rays glance off colored domes. GUM, Moscow’s State Department Store, is illuminated in thousands of tiny pinprick lights. Ana and Goran trip over cobblestones, watch goose-stepping soldiers. Ana is content; she slumps against Goran. Goran is anxious. He rolls and chain-smokes cigarettes as they walk. One by one, the ashes and the papers and the filters drop on the ground. His hands shake. He becomes snippy with Ana. Every day, he hears stories of Mladić: Mladić the general in charge of the siege of Sarajevo, the man ordering squads of soldiers to wipe out entire towns of Bosniaks, Bosnia’s Muslim population. Mladić, the Butcher of Bosnia. In Moscow, Ana stares at the television in the lobby of the hotel where they are staying for the conference. They beam up pictures of her father. She cannot believe it; she cannot think of her father in any other way than as her protector, the protector of all Serbs. The father she loves. All of it must be slander. All of it must be made up. Goran can no longer allow her willing disbelief. He finds her vile. “What other Ratko Mladić would it be?” he shouts.

  When they return to Belgrade, Goran is finished. “You need to speak with your father,” Goran says. “Or I will not love you.”

  Ana turns and looks at him. The cobblestones outside of the medical school are rough underneath her feet. In the distance, the bells of tramcars clang together. He does not know what it is like. Just as she struggles to deliver bad news to a patient in the clinic, so she cannot tell such a thing to her father. She cannot bear it. “I can’t,” she says. “Last night he was being so kind. He is always so kind. He called me his little angel.” Her father was only back for a short while; she did not want to upset him. This she knows: she loves her father. She cannot imagine that he is the same man the newspapers and the televisions say he is.

  Goran is relentless. With someone like Ana who has been so coddled, with no responsibilities, a person who can remain so willfully ignorant, he must be. She appears like a child to him, whose stability, whose livelihood, has been built on the bodies of thousands. Every time he looks at Ana, that is all Goran can see, Ratko, the face like a piece of gray meat, the olive-green uniform. “You can’t accept that you’ve been raised by a war criminal,” he says.

  Ana stands, silent. She is desperate to keep Goran, even if she does not know why. It is better to have him than to have nothing. “No, I will,” she says. The concession to Goran, to herself, seems like enough.

  The next week, when Ratko returns from the front, Ana goes to speak with him. He sits outside, on the balcony of the flat in Belgrade. She walks through his study. His pistols sit in their glass case. Outside, red-tiled rooftops rise, studded by the bare branches of trees. He rises when she comes and kisses her on the head. She tells him she has seen his face on television, that people are saying he is responsible for terrible things. “I don’t know what to think,” she says. She t
ells him that she is going to quit her studies and become a nurse on the front, to draw her own conclusions. She will wear camouflage and ferry patients on stretchers across uneven fields. Noble, but as she says it, she wonders if her patients will find any refuge with her, in a woman with the name Mladić.

  “My diligent girl, you would never quit your studies,” her father says. He smiles and kisses her, as though he thinks she is joking. She doesn’t move; it is the same smile she has seen on the television, in the newspaper pictures. The expressionless face, like a piece of gray meat. The bulky uniform, the thick forearms, the strange half smile, half grimace, as though he is beyond reproach. It is true, she realizes, all of it. Her father is responsible for monstrous things.

  She does not tell Goran, for a night, for a week, until finally she agrees to meet him. When she tells Goran, he won’t be swayed. He cannot imagine Ana speaking to Ratko or becoming a nurse. She has always been one for consistency, for following rules. “You know you wouldn’t,” he says. “You wouldn’t dare. You never do.” Ana stands across from him silently. Her father’s voice echoes inside her head: “My diligent girl, my little angel.” It is the way that her father dismisses her, that Goran has just dismissed her, which removes the air from her lungs. She cannot comprehend why they will not believe her, that they will not give her a chance, that they will not have faith in her decisions. “You don’t know how hard it is,” she says.

  In the picture I find of Ana, she is pretty. She has dark hair, cut short, a heart-shaped face. She wears a red scoop-neck shirt with long sleeves. It is a family picnic; she is with her mother and father. They are outside. One arm loops around her father’s shoulders. She smiles.

  It is evening. Ana enters her father’s study. She wonders how she could have been so naïve, how she could not have realized. She wonders if her father, or Goran, has ever loved her for who she is: a woman who asks questions, a woman who forges her own path. Outside of the window, pink light spreads across the sky of Belgrade, behind the gray blocks of apartment buildings. It is pink as tissue, like the inside of gums, like healthy intestines. Ana’s face is red; she has been crying. The night before, she fought with Goran. He shouted at her, called her terrible things. On the side of the room, up against the wall, is a glass case. Inside are three pistols, given to her father by the Yugoslav military, for distinguished service. She removes his favorite pistol and looks at the inlaid panel, the smooth barrel, the hard-edged trigger. Life has become a closed-off corridor with no doors or windows, a ceiling that is ever lowering, walls that are ever coming closer together. It is crushing her, and she is no longer able to escape, either by running or by refusing to see it. At either end of the corridor are the men, Goran and her father, on the opposite ends of the same spectrum. She sees no choice. She kneels down, she swallows. She is a brave woman, she has dissected a cadaver, she has seen trauma patients, she has become numb to death, but to be faced with her own, that is a different story. But she is not brave enough for confronting Goran, for confronting her father, for living with his crimes. She cocks the safety, presses the muzzle of the pistol to her temple. She pulls the trigger; the bullet accelerates.

  We do not know who found Ana, maybe Darko or Bosa. It is impossible to wade through the theatrics of Ratko’s grief to the truth. Whatever it was that they found, I imagine blood and bone and brain, splattered across the walls, stuck to the ceiling. The thin wall of the skull at the temple would have aided with this. When the gun was fired, the force from the bullet would have been so great it killed her instantly.

  Ratko Mladić rages and sobs. As soon as his son calls him, he returns from the front. In the morgue, Ana is laid out on a white sheet on a steel gurney. The morticians do not want to show him her body, because of the condition of her head. Her father sobs, collapses next to the gurney. Dried blood the color of rust blots the sheet. He has demanded to see her body. After so much death, so much killing, he has found himself unprepared for this.

  At home, Ratko is angry. His boots pound up the stairs, as if in an ambush. He pulls all of his wife’s bone china out of the cupboard and smashes it against the tile floor. He demands that they return to the coroner’s. It must be a mistake, an elaborate political conspiracy, his enemies turned against him. They have killed his daughter. It is impossible that she has killed herself. In the kitchen, his wife sobs, her head on the table. He opens the door, shouts at her to be quiet and then slams it again. He is angry with Bosa, angry with himself, but he will never admit that. How could she have allowed Ana to do such a thing? He returns to the barracks, to the scent of dirty straw, leather, and spent gunpowder. He orders his troops to another exercise, makes them run and run until it is evening. It is where he has always belonged.

  After all, he has always loved his family only so much as they have loved him.

  In the apartment blood splatters the walls, the ceiling. It will take forever to clean; perhaps it will never be clean. Bosa does not go into the room; they have hired someone to do the cleaning. She has given up. She sits with her head in her hands at the kitchen window. Yellow light streams through it. She begs Ratko to allow them to move out of the apartment in Belgrade to somewhere else, where she does not see her daughter at every turn, in every room, where she does not walk in the stupor of misery. Soon, she and her husband will be on the run to the countryside, but they cannot know this yet.

  In the trauma room, Ana angles the scalpel. It is her first surgery. She has graduated from medical school, moved on to her training to become a trauma surgeon, a future that will never exist. The attending stands behind her, blue gloved, blue gowned. All of the surgical team seems suspended; their gowns hang like the robes of angels. Ana looks down at the patient in front of her. She angles the scalpel, makes her first incision, parting curtains of pink dermis, yellow adipose, down to the shimmer of white bone. She slices again and hits an artery. Blood rolls down her cheek. No matter how she has trained herself, she has failed.

  One year later, Ratko Mladić stands in Srebrenica. He has just returned from rounds, handing out candy to children. “Not one hair on your heads will be harmed,” he says, holding up fat sausage fingers, “not one.” He pats the heads of young boys. He is careful to watch while the cameras are rolling. They are shut off.

  He gestures to his men and the waiting trucks. There is where they will load them. From the back of his own truck, he looks out over the houses, the roads, the fields, at the people held in circles. Men, women, children. How unjust it is that each of them is able to live, he thinks. They are Muslims, the great oppressors of the Serbs. To breathe the air, to smell the earth, when his Ana is dead. He holds up his hand. “Leave none of them alive,” he says to his troops. Ratko sits in the truck, his hand on the side of his pistol. His troops gather men in a field and shoot them as they run. When the bullets hit the men, they drop like sacks of potatoes. In the air, a metallic scent rises.

  What remains to be known is Ratko. Here, I have tried to imagine him, but no amount of imagination can change the facts. The collapsed bodies, the torn hair, the faces with the noses and lips and ears cut off. Faces blown to pieces from the force of the bullets’ acceleration. Eight thousand sons and daughters, lain unceremoniously, one on top of the other.

  After he is found guilty, Ratko Mladić is taken to Scheveningen prison in the Netherlands. He stares out the barred window of his cell and watches the ball of the sun fall behind the concrete walls. Before leaving Serbia, his last request was to see his daughter’s grave. He always left her flowers; who will leave them now? He wonders about shaving razors and support beams, about ties and belts and capsules of cyanide. He wonders if he will see his Ana again. The bells of The Hague ring, closing out the evening, one more in the endless span of a life sentence in prison. This much he knows is certain: like the men in the field, he, too, will die.

  Heather Aruffo holds an ScB in chemistry from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She is an alumna of the Ti
n House Writer’s Workshop and has received support from StoryKnife. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review and The Laurel Review. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, and works as a regulatory medical writer.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Isaac Hughes Green’s “The First Time I Said It” impressed us immediately with its engaging narrative voice, rich character development, wit, and insight. We did not know at the outset that the story was a debut, and due to the long lead time of our print publication, we did not know when considering it that the horrific murder of George Floyd would bring activism against anti-Black racism to the forefront of our national discourse. Today’s conversations are in no way new to Black Americans, of course, as Green shows us through the memories of his young, unnamed protagonist in this coming-of-age story that reflects on the narrator’s run-ins with the most notorious racist slur in the English language. While exploring “the pain and the connectedness” the narrator feels as a Black person, Green also memorably portrays an individual character navigating family, identity, ambition, and growing up. We are thrilled to see Green’s work honored with the Robert J. Dau Prize and look forward to watching this talented writer’s career unfold.

  C. J. Bartunek, Managing Editor