Vanished

Description

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past.
Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship—as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.
  The stories in Vanished involve women and girls dealing with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to them, a friendship, a relationship—as they seek to make sense of the world around them in the wake of what’s been lost. Karin Lin-Greenberg is the author of the story collection Faulty Predictions, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have appeared in publications including the Antioch Review, the Southern Review, Story, and the Chicago Tribune. She is the author of the forthcoming novel, You Are Here.
 
  Still Life
Today Alice’s students will draw the pheasants. Alice unlocks
the props closet in Bantam Hall on the downtown campus and
sees the two taxidermied pheasants on a high shelf, exactly where
she left them last semester. The pheasants were purchased by the
Department of Art thirty-seven years ago, Alice’s first year teaching
at Juniper College. She places her tote bag on the floor and opens
the brown stepladder in front of the metal shelf with the pheasants
on top. She will ask the girls in her 10:00 a.m. Intermediate
Drawing class to render the pheasants in pastel, but she knows the
drawings will turn out poorly because these girls insist on buying
the absolute cheapest supplies, garbage with too much filler
and hardly any pigment. Bad supplies make bad art. Last week
she overheard a student boasting about paying only two dollars
for a box of pastels at Walmart. It is incomprehensible that these
students think Walmart is an acceptable place to buy art supplies.
One goes to Walmart to buy toothpaste and bug spray and cereal
and kitty litter, not to buy the supplies with which you create art.
But the girls in her classes don’t actually aspire to be real artists;
Alice knows they think her class is just a requirement to suffer
through so they can get their degrees and get jobs.
“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, let me,” calls a voice, and Alice turns and
sees a boy with a wispy, struggling goatee rushing toward her.
“I’m perfectly capable,” Alice says, and she puts one foot on the
bottom step of the stepladder. Why is he calling her “ma’am”? Isn’t
it obvious she’s a professor and owns a key to the closet? The boy
looks at her as if she’s an old vagrant who snuck into the building
to pilfer supplies but, really, who would want to steal driftwood
or cow skulls or cloth flowers? These items might be useful in a
still life but not in real life.
“I’d better do it,” says the boy as he walks toward her. “I’m Hutch.
I’m the keeper of the props closet.”
“The keeper of the props closet?” Alice cannot keep the incredulity
out of her voice. Is he being paid to guard a locked closet
containing objects of little to no monetary value? The closet is a
large space—about half the size of a classroom—but it houses
nothing any thief would want.
“It’s my campus job,” Hutch says, and Alice thinks this boy
actually looks proud of himself. But it’s not a necessary job, at
least when professors in the department take the time to instruct
their students about respecting the objects that inhabit the closet.
But a quick glance at the mess here—the tablecloths bunched up
in a corner, the upended armless mannequin, the brass tea kettle
dented all over—tells Alice no one has talked to students about
carefully putting things back in their proper spots after a still life
has been disassembled.
“I didn’t realize there was such a job,” Alice says. She is uncomfortable
now, with one foot still propped on the step, so she brings
the other foot up.
“Oh, no, no, ma’am, I’ll do it. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
The boy has the nerve to reach out and touch her elbow, trying
to guide her down the step as if she is a feeble blind person. Alice
swats away his hand.
“Do you know how many years I’ve been fetching these birds
from this shelf? And the other birds too?” Alice asks, sweeping
her hand toward the Canada goose, and the pileated woodpecker
mounted to a tree stump, and the crow with the cracked beak,
and the sleepy looking mallard. Still Life
Housekeeping
Roland Raccoon
Vanished
Perspective for Artists
Since Vincent Left
Aquatics
Lost or Damaged
Mrs. Whitson’s Face
Migration
 
Acknowledgments