For our eleventh annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of talented debut authors. Read the July/August 2011 issue of the magazine to see interviews between Steve Almond and William Giraldi, Arthur Phillips and Eleanor Henderson, Hanna Tinti and Seth Fried, Rigoberto González and Daniel Orozco, and Kate Bernheimer and Vanessa Veselka. But first, check out these exclusive excerpts from the debut novels and story collections.

Busy Monsters [3] (Norton, August) by William Giraldi
Ten Thousand Saints [4] (Ecco, June) by Eleanor Henderson
The Great Frustration [5] (Soft Skull Press, May) by Seth Fried
Orientation and Other Stories [6](Faber and Faber, June) by Daniel Orozco
Zazen [7] (Red Lemonade, June) by Vanessa Veselka 

Busy Monsters
By William Giraldi

1. Antihero Agonistes

Stunned by love and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down South to kill a man. Gillian and I were about to be married and her ex-beau of four years, Marvin Gluck—Virginia state trooper, boots and all—was heaving his psychosis our way, sending bow-tied packages, soilsome letters, and text messages to the bestial effect of, If you marry that baboon I’ll end all our lives.

I, Charles Homar, memoirist of mediocre fame, a baboon?

Coercing him into kindness, Christian or otherwise, had already failed—large. For more than a year we had implored him to leave us be, appealed to the protector-of-the-peace in him, filed complaints with not-caring police here in our Connecticut town, suggested religion, yoga, even herbs as antidote to his crocodilian stance, his swamp of a heart: nothing worked. His threats were usually followed by some truly treacly pleas for forgiveness, a smattering of I’m sorrys all in a row. Regret is an acid; it pecked at his innards. Good. He wanted to be a better “humany person.” I wanted him dead. Seven thousand citizens die each day in our America—why couldn’t he be one of them? Traffic calamity, aneurism, lightning bolt: anything would have done, anything to keep me from doing this deed I wasn’t keen on doing and didn’t know whether I could do or not.

“I think he’s only bluffing,” Gillian said on the afternoon we received one of his murderous notes. “I know he can be really kind when he wants to.”

“Kind? Darling, that memo there says he’d like to impose trauma upon my person. He has the manners of a microbe.”

“I’m really sure he’s bluffing, honey. Let’s ignore him. He’ll go away,” she told me, but I could see that she was frightened, that all with her was not groovy. “Anyway, why don’t you write about it in your column?”

“Gillian, love, I don’t need extra material for my memoirs. They’re already depraved enough to warp the mind of any adolescent.”

“He’ll go away, Charlie.”

From Gillian’s pictures and videos I knew this vulgarian was a colossus of a gent whose voice and testicular presence could hush the human flotsam in any riled-up room. Furthermore, he had a face so uglified by his parents’ DNA that it recalled a clay-shaping exercise gone heinously wrong. Left eye like the oblong knot in a plank of pine. The kind of guy who eats a tomato like an apple. A disposition downright redneck. I’ve known fevered men like Marvin: they get a certain idea in their noggins or, worse yet, a funny feeling in their hearts, and nothing on earth can deter them from their channel. They go agog with havoc, get off on outlawry. Quite frankly, I was frightened, too.

Here’s the other end of it, and I have no shame: I couldn’t live with knowing there was a man out there who loved Gillian the way I did, who had swum in her sweet-scented flesh, who had eased apart her thighs and delved into her special center. Also, the bedlamite had her name tattooed across hi pectorals, from one fifty-inch side to the other, in large red Gothic letters, too. If her name were Jennifer or Michelle it might not have vexed me so; but Gillian is a rarity, and those letters on his chest could mean only her, always. It caused all the amino acids in me to swirl, swirl.

Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don’t bother me one bit. Having to silence a single man for the sake of solace does not make one homicidal. Of course I am a Christian and know the program, but love and sex have their own sacred creeds and they burn every bit as much as the ten laws of the Lord. I’ve perused the Kama Sutra. Listen: I was not proud of what I had to do, but I had to do it just the same. Some will understand, and those who don’t know yet one day will.

All I have to offer in my defense is the mathematical truth: I wanted to love my bride in peace and tranquility but Marvin Gluck was not going to let that happen. The way I see it, he made the decision, not I. He just had to go and pledge an undying love to Gillian and couldn’t grab hold of the fact that such pledges are made every day and most don’t mean a damn. I’ll give him that: the idiot makes a pledge and sticks to it. In that I suppose you can call us kin. Still, his pledge was crowding mine. What a man feels for his woman can be all-out unholy. When Gillian tried on her organza wedding dress for me, I wept with the joy of the resurrected.

I met her on the Ferris wheel at the local bazaar held to raise money for a children’s hospital. I had volunteered to run the wheel because when I was a teenager, my kid brother Bartholomew was chewed up by leukemia, plus I thought I could add the charity-giving experience to my weekly memoir column for New Nation Weekly—circulation a hearty six hundred thousand—and thus come across as a guy who cares, a balladeer with heart to spare. It rained that night and hardly anybody came, but then in floated Gillian under a green umbrella, a tantric Mary Poppins, handed me a ticket, and said she wanted to ride the wheel ’round and ’round. This dazzling babe alone on a Friday night? I couldn’t even speak; her odd beauty was the injurious kind, radioactive—it had physical effects on me, my anatomy in quake—lovely hawkish nose, straight black mane dyed with streaks of red henna, flat-teated and thickish through the bottom, symmetrical toes showing through her sandals. She was as if the word gustatory had grown legs and got a dress.

For twenty minutes she rode the wheel, and I watched her with her head thrown back and eyes peeled on the sky, patches of light aglisten behind evil gray clouds. And then, horrors: the rusty wheel stopped turning—the organizer of the bazaar had saved a wad by renting only semifunctional equipment—trapping my lady at the top, and this despite my frantic punching of buttons and yanking of levers, consulting with the bazaar electrician and other bewildered passersby. Can you imagine? The damsel a hostage sixty-some feet up there? Well, I in my valor and Levi’s jeans could not very well let her stew in the drizzle, and so, with very little pause and a showy casting-off of my rainwear, I began climbing, lemur-like, up the steel links and bars of the Ferris wheel.

“You’re gonna break your skull, fella,” the gal kept shouting down to me, to which I replied, “I’d break that and many a more in the name of your safety.” She stressed to me that she’d just as well wait for the fire department—those valiant buccaneers of Ladder Company Number 5, skirt-chasers and wannabe samurai, all of them—rather than risk bodily damage straddled across my back. I’d hear nothing of that.

“That is not romantic,” I told her. When I reached her in the cage I thrust out my strong grip just as I had seen numerous movie heroes do—Errol Flynn and the like—and then, reassuring her of my brawn, flexed a bicep. I was in excellent physical condition, it’s true, and could have modeled for one of those home gym systems with all the pulleys and wires and whatnot. Likewise, my hair had Vitalis shine, was not thinning.

She appeared incredulous and who could blame her? “Just hold on,” I said, “and put some trust in me, Charles Homar. Others have done so and not been badly disappointed.”

“I’d rather not die, thanks.”

“Not a chance. I am neither bogus nor brash, just a citizen out doing his duty. Look into my eyes, miss. What do you see there? That’s right: I was a Templar Knight a few lives ago. Let’s meet the earth.”

“Why do you speak that way?”

“What way?”

“That weirdo way.”

“No comprede, chica.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Are we really going to do this?”

And I said, “Really.”

Light as a bag of foam packing peanuts—I had once toiled for a shipping firm—she held on as I descended that metal mess Mr. Ferris would have disowned had he seen it. This feat of heroism came breezily and without much sweat, so jazzed was I on her pheromonal scent, the elements of lust just then coalescing into love, a single-celled splotch becoming a giraffe. Onlookers cheered, some clapped; one obese popcorn-eater, spellbound by the scene, had a swift back-slap for me and then mumbled something incoherent, though it sounded faintly congratulatory.

Soon the fireworks were done; boredom ensued and people dispersed. Gillian and I stood there, hands in pockets, not five feet apart, her breath still the nervous kind of the almost-harmed. Me: I was sweating, but not from the climb.

“Thanks for saving my life, fella,” she said. “I guess you’re a hero.”

“It’s just a job, madam,” I said

“But we could have waited for the fire department, you know.”

Where did her lips get their collagen pink puff? The last time I had seen lips like those in person was when unwise nuns had hired me to teach autobiography to a classroom stocked with teenage Catholic females. In my head now was a violin and organ ditty circa 1850. Something German.

“Local firefighters would have accidentally grabbed your breast while helping you down, believe me.”

“I see,” she said. “And your touching my breast was accidental?”

The record playing my dreamy German ditty scratched to a halt: you know the sound. “What? I touched your breast? No. I’m a gentleman. Really. No, I didn’t. Did I? What?”

“I’m kidding,” she said, and her teeth were so white! “Not touched. More like brushed.”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, really, this is an abomination, a breast-brushing abomination, I didn’t mean to, I mean, I was just, you know, saving you, and—“

“I’m just fooling with you. But I am grateful for your gallantry, so thank you. Tell me your name again.”

“Charles Homar,” and I proffered her my hand, a-tremble.

“Not the writer? New Nation Weekly?”

“The one and only, madam,” and I bowed here like a squire or some-such. Someone who owns property, fights criminals, admires estrogen.

“I like your columns. I don’t read them every issue, actually. But the ones I’ve read I like a lot. That silly one about how you almost burned down your house trying to kill the squirrel in your attic?”

“Oh, yes, that squirrel,” and I feigned modesty, looked bashful.

“They make squirrel traps, you know. Or you could have called an exterminator. You didn’t have to build your own flamethrower.”

“Right,” I said, her splendor slapping me sideways. “That makes more sense.”

The end of rain, some orange sky aglow, and the carnival got hopping again. All around us families and teenage kids—some on skateboards, some smoking, some with arm tattoos in advertisement of their parents’ bungling (even the girls! So unladylike and pubic)—scudded to and fro and fro again, clutching popcorn and cotton candy and the kind of acidic soda that makes lead vanish, all of them unaware of the enchantment happening right there in front of me, what the orange sky meant above.

Gillian said, “Is everything you write true, though? Sometimes I have a feeling you’re making things up.”

I must have been staring in silence, owlish, at those diamonds below her brows because she said, “Mr. Homar?

“Yes, yes. I mean, no, no, everything’s true, one hundred percent, absolutely.”

“But why is a, umm, kind of famous magazine writer working a Ferris wheel?”

Kind of?

“Charity,” I said. “Goodness. You know, Christian values. Hey, you don’t sound like you’re from around here. What brings you to the democratic state of Connecticut?”

“A job, what else? And I had to get away from my boyfriend.”

The overeager wolf in me, all woof and wow, couldn’t keep his jaw shut.

“So you don’t have a boyfriend still?”

She only shook her head ever so wanly and glanced down at my sneakers, new Nikes that made me feel younger by three or four wrinkles. Of course, what followed was an awkward, sweat-inducing pause, me trying to summon a sentence devoid of degeneracy.

“Well, thank you again, Mr. Homar. I look forward to reading more of your memoirs.”

She touched my shoulder just then before turning away, and I watched her leave, all the centimeters of me paralyzed in a way I had not felt before. But inside me: think Vesuvius. For many minutes I felt her hand still there on my deltoid, her scent lingering as if smoke from a much-needed flame.

Excerpted from Busy Monsters by William Giraldi, to be published by W. W. Norton in August 2011. Copyright © 2011 by William Giraldi. All rights reserved.

Ten Thousand Saints

By Eleanor Henderson



“Is it dreamed?” Jude asked Teddy. “Or dreamt?”

Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy’s life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas. If you were to spy them from above, between the slats of the bleachers—or smoking behind the school gym, or sliding their skateboards down the stone wall by the lake—you might confuse one for the other. But Teddy was the dark-haired one, Jude the redhead. Teddy wore opalescent, fat-tongued Air Jordans, both toes bandaged with duct tape, and dangling from a cord around his neck, a New York City subway token, like a golden quarter. Jude was the one in Converse high-tops, the stars magic-markered into pentagrams, and he wore his red hair in a devil lock—short in the back and long in the front, in a fin that sliced between his eyes to his chin. Unless you’d heard of the Misfits, not the Marilyn Monroe movie but the horror-rock/glam-punk band, and if you were living in Lintonburg, Vermont in 1987, you probably hadn’t, you’d never seen anything like it.

“Either,” said Teddy.

They were celebrating Jude’s sixteenth birthday with the dregs of last night’s bowl. Jude leaned over and tapped the crushed soda can against Teddy’s elbow, and Teddy sat up to take his turn. His eyes were glassy, and a maple leaf, brittle and threadbare from its months spent under the snow, clung to his hair. Since Jude had known him Teddy had worn an immense pair of bronze frames with lenses as thick as window panes and, for good measure, a second bar across the top. But last week Teddy had spent all his savings on a pair of contact lenses, and now Jude thought he looked mole-eyed and bare-faced, exposed, as Jude’s father had the time he’d made the mistake of shaving his beard.

With one hand Teddy balanced the bud on the indentation of the can, over the perforations Jude had made with a paper clip, lit it with the other, and like a player of some barnyard instrument, he put his lips to the mouth of the can and inhaled. Across his face, across the shadowed expanse of snow-stubbled grass, bars of sunlight brightened and then paled. “It’s done,” he announced, and tossed the can aside.

Bodies had begun to fill the grandstand above, galoshes and duck boots filing cautiously down the rows, families of anoraks eclipsing the meager sun. Jude could hear the patter of their voices, the faraway din of a sound system testing, testing, the players cleating through the grass, praying away the snow. Standing on his wobbly legs, Jude examined their cave. They were fenced in on all sides—the seats overhead, the football field in front, a concrete wall behind them. Above the wall, however, was a person-sized perimeter of open space, through which Teddy and Jude had climbed not long before, first launching their skateboards in ahead of them, then scaling the scaffolding on the outside, then tumbling over the wall, cat-like, ten feet into the dirt. They’d done it twenty times before, but never while people were in the stadium—they’d managed to abstain from their town’s tepid faith in its Division III college football team; they abstained from all things football, and all things college. They hadn’t expected there to be a game on New Year’s Eve.

Now Jude paced under the seats and stopped five or six rows from the front. Above him, hanging from the edge of one of the theater-style seats, was a pair of blue-jeaned legs. A girl. Jude could see the dirty heels of her tennis shoes, but not much else. He reached up, the frozen fingers through his fingerless gloves inches away from her foot, but instead of enclosing them around the delicate bones of her ankle, he lifted the yellow umbrella at her feet. He slid it without a sound across the concrete and down into his arms.

“What are you doing?” whispered Teddy, suddenly at Jude’s elbow. “Why are we stealing an umbrella?”

Jude sprung it open and looked it over. “It’s not the umbrella we’re stealing,” he whispered back, closing it. Walking into the shadows a few rows back, he held it over his head, curved handle up, like a hook. In the bleachers above, there were purses between feet, saving seats, unguarded, alone, and inside, wallets fat with cash. Teddy and Jude had no money and no pot and, since this morning, nothing to smoke it out of but an empty can of Orange Slice.

Last night they’d shared a jug of Carlo Rossi and the pot they’d found in the glove box of Teddy’s mom’s car, while they listened to Metallica’s first album, Kill ’Em All, which skipped, and to Teddy’s mom, Queen Bea, who had her own stash of booze, getting sick in the bathroom, retch, flush, retch, flush. Around midnight, they’d taken what was left of the pot and skated to Jude’s to get some sleep, but in their daze, had left Jude’s bong behind. When they returned to Teddy’s in the morning (this was the rhythm of their days, three rights and a left to Teddy’s, a right and three lefts to Jude’s), the bong—the color-changing Pyrex bong Jude’s mother had only given Jude that morning as an early birthday gift—was gone. So were Queen Bea’s clothes, her car, her toothbrush, her sheets. Jude and Teddy wandered the house, flipping switches. The lights didn’t work; nothing hummed or blinked. The house was frozen with an unnatural stillness. Jude, shivering, found a candle and lit it. When Teddy opened the liquor cabinet, it was also empty—this was the final, irrefutable clue—except for a bottle of Liquid-Plumr and a film of dust, in which Teddy wrote with a finger, fuck.

Beatrice McNicholas had run away a few times before. She’d go out for a six-pack and come home a week later, with a new haircut and old promises. (She was no nester or nurturer; she was Queen Bea for her royal size.) But she’d never taken her liquor with her, or anything of Teddy and Jude’s.

The boys had stolen enough from her over the years to call it even. Five-dollar bills, maybe tens, that Queen Bea would be too drunk to miss in the morning, liquor, cigarettes. She was the kind of unsystematic drunk whose hiding places changed routinely but remained routinely unimaginative—ten minutes of hunting through closets and drawers (she cleaned other people’s houses, but her own was a sty) could almost always turn up something. Pot was more difficult to find at Jude’s house—his mom’s hippie habits were somewhat reformed, and though she condoned Jude’s experimentation (an appreciation for a good bong was just about all Harriet and Jude had in common), occasional flashes of parental guilt drove her to hide her contraband in snug and impenetrable places that recalled Russian nesting dolls. In Harriet’s studio, Jude had once found a Ziploc of pot inside a bag of Ricola cough drops inside a jumbo box of tampons inside a toolbox. While Queen Bea seemed only mildly aware that teenagers lived in her midst, sweeping them off her porch like stray cats, Harriet had a sharp eye, a peripheral third lens in her bifocals that was always ready to probe the threat of fast-fingered boys. So Jude and Teddy stole what was around: a roll of quarters from her dresser, the box of chocolates Jude’s sister Prudence had given her for Mother’s Day. They took more pleasure in what they stole out in the world: magazines and beer from Shop Smart (Shop Fart), video game cartridges from Sears (Queers), and cassettes from the Record Room, where Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph worked. And half the items in Jude’s possession—clothes, records, homework—were stolen, without discretion, from Teddy.

But this bold-faced thievery beneath the bleachers embarrassed Teddy. It was so obvious, so doomed to failure. Sometimes Teddy thought that was the prize Jude wanted—not the money or the beer or the cigarettes but the confrontation, the pleasure of testing the limits. Jude was standing on his tiptoes, umbrella still raised like a torch, eyeing the spilled contents of a lady’s bag. His tongue, molluscous and veined with blue, was wedged in concentration in the cleft under his nose.

“Hey,” said someone.

Teddy tried to stand very still.

A pair of eyes, upside-down, was framed between the seats above them. It took Teddy a few seconds to grasp their orientation—the girl was leaning over, her head draped over the ledge. “What are you doing?” she said.

Jude smiled up at her. “You dropped your umbrella.”

“No, I didn’t.” She had her hands cupped around her eyes now, staring down into the dark. No one else seemed to notice.

“It fell,” Jude insisted, hoisting the umbrella up to the girl, his arm outstretched, letting it tickle one of her fingers.

“Just give it back,” said Teddy. It was the way Jude always made him feel—tangled up in some stupid, trivial danger. Teddy closed his eyes. He didn’t have time to mess around; his mother was gone. He needed money, more money than Jude could pick-pocket with an umbrella. His body clenched with his last memory of her—the acrid, scotchy stink of her vomit through the bathroom door; the blathering hiccups of her sobs. Had she been crying because she was leaving, or just because she was wasted?

Then the umbrella, the pointy part, speared him in the gut.

“Ow, man.” Teddy opened his eyes.

“You were supposed to catch it,” said Jude.

Teddy looked up into the bleachers. The girl was gone. But a moment later, a pair of blue-jeaned legs appeared over the wall behind them.

They watched as the girl jumped from the ledge, her jacket parachuting as she plummeted. She landed feet first and fell forward to catch her balance, then strutted a slow-motion, runway strut in their direction. She stopped a car-length away and stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting them. Her eyes were shining with disdain.

If you were a girl, Jude Keffy-Horn was a person you looked at, hard, and then didn’t look at again. His blue eyes, set wide apart, watched the world from under hooded lids, weighed down by distrust, THC, and a deep, hormonal languor. A passing stranger would not have guessed them to be the eyes of a hyperactive teenager with attention-deficit disorder, but his mouth, which rarely rested, betrayed him. He was thin in the lip, fairly broad in the forehead, tall and flat in the space between mouth and upturned nose, the whole plane of his face scattered with freckles usurped daily by a lavender brand of acne. He wore not one but two retainers. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a tall person, with skinny arms and legs and big knees and elbows that knocked around when he walked. He wasn’t bad-looking. He was good-looking enough. He was the kid whose name you knew only because the teacher kept calling it. Jude. Jude. Mr. Keffy-Horn, is that a cigarette you’re rolling?

Teddy shared Jude’s uniform, his half-swallowed smirk, but due to the blood of his Indian father (Queen Bea was purebred white trash), his hair was the blue-black of comic book villains, his complexion as dark and smooth as a brown egg shell. By the population of Ira Allen High School he was rumored half-heartedly to be Jewish, Arab, Mexican, Greek, and most often, simply “Spanish.” When Jude had asked, Teddy had told him “Indian,” then quipped, nearly indiscernibly, for he was a mumbler, “Gandhi, not Geronimo.” With everyone else, though, he preferred to allow his identity to flourish in the shadowed domain of myth. Teddy’s eyelashes were long, like the bristles of a paintbrush; through his right eyebrow was an ashen scar from the time he’d spilled off his skateboard at age ten. Then his face had been cherubic; now, at fifteen, it had sloughed off the baby fat and gone angular as a paper airplane. He had a delicate frame; he had an Adam’s apple like a brass knuckle; he had things up the sleeve of that too-big coat—a Chinese star, the wire of a Walkman, a cigarette for after class, which he was always more careful than Jude to conceal.

What’s that kid up to?

That was the way the girl was looking at both of them now, under the bleachers. “What are you people doing down here?”
Jude stabbed the umbrella into the ground. “Hanging out.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“You can’t smell it,” Jude said. “We’re out in the open.”

“Can I have my umbrella, please?”

“Why? It’s not raining.”

“It’s supposed to snow, for your information.”

“Oh, for my information, okay.” Now he was pretending that the umbrella was a gun. He held it cocked at his hip, the metal tip against his cheek, ready to shoot around a corner.

“Jude,” Teddy said. “Over here.”

He clapped his hands, and Jude obediently, joyfully tossed him the umbrella.

“Motherfucking monkey in the middle!” said Jude.

Teddy walked three paces toward the girl, head down, and returned it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Hey,” Jude said.

“Brit?” In the bleachers above, two more girls were peering down at them. They never came alone, girls; they always came in packs. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right there!” A moment later, she was gone.

“Brit the shit,” Jude said, but Teddy didn’t say anything.

Excerpted from Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson, published in June 2011 by Ecco. Copyright © 2011 by Eleanor Henderson. All rights reserved.

The Great Frustration
By Seth Fried

"Those of Us in Plaid"

Our job was simple: get the monkey in the capsule. Our superiors made sure to point out that it was one of the easiest and therefore least important tasks, a task that anyone could do, just as they always pointed out that our plaid coveralls were not as sharp looking as their coveralls. But we felt that every step of the sequence was equally important, that, coveralls aside, everyone involved shared an integral role in the project’s success. After all, if we didn’t get the monkey in the capsule, then the capsule couldn’t be sent to the first prep station. If the capsule never made it to the first prep station, then it’d never get to the Transport Operator, who would end up sitting there in his hydraulic lift, empty-handed, chewing on his moustache and writing swear words on his clipboard. If the capsule never made it to transport, it’d never get to the Project Elects in their snazzy red coveralls, whose job it was to slap the thermal readers on the capsule and signal the helicopter to come round and pick the damn thing up. Which would mean the pilot would just have to keep circling, wasting gas. He’d probably end up crashing before he realized he’d run out of time to fly the capsule over the volcano and drop it in. And if the capsule never made it up with the helicopter and down into the volcano, then the Advanced Project Elects, in their stunning blue coveralls with silver piping and decals in exquisite copper brown, wouldn’t have any occasion to flip the detonator on the incendiary bomb planted along the throat of the volcano. The whole experiment would be ruined.

And in fact that’s exactly what did happen. We never got that monkey in there.

It was embarrassing, watching all those Project Elects throw their headsets down onto the tarmac, their obscenities obscured by the sirens of all the fire engines racing toward the wrecked chopper. We knew we’d never hear the end of it.

As it was, we couldn’t get through a whole day without having to suffer some kind of abuse from the Project Elects. They were always calling us the most awful names or putting us into headlocks and making us smell their farts. Ned, our group leader, had to be hospitalized after some Project Elects put hornet pheromone in our hand sanitizer. Ned likes to eat his lunch outside and had hardly unwrapped his ham and cheese before they were on him. The poor guy had to get twenty-eight stingers removed from his hands and face. None of the Project Elects apologized when the people in Human Resources told Ned that our insurance policy didn’t cover insect attacks. And when he returned a week later, covered in gauze? They put Monistat in his coffee.

They made up songs about us constantly and drew penises on the pictures of our wives and children that they stole out of our lockers. Sometimes they took the apples out of our lunch boxes, dipping them in the toilet, drying them off, and replacing them without telling us. In any given year, it was impossible to say just how many toilet apples we might have eaten.

But worse than these simple degradations was that we would have given anything to be exactly like them: their back-slapping, their cocksure attitudes, their dashing good looks and idiotic jokes. We would imagine we were them, allowing our minds to drift for a moment toward thoughts of ourselves smoking with our feet up in the break room, discussing the finer points of the project with the other Elects. And then we would look down at our plaid coveralls and remember once again our own intractable lameness.

Still, regardless of everything experience had taught us, we hoped that one day we’d deliver the beaker filled with strange liquid to the testing facility so promptly and so without incident, or paint the numbers on the capsule so perfectly and so without dribbles, that we would somehow win them over. That we’d begin receiving invitations to their famed barbecues, or to a raucous birthday party at the nudie bar near the airport. We held on, each of us, to the distant possibility that we might perform well enough to become Project Elects ourselves, thus abandoning our hideous plaid coveralls, designed specifically to designate us as the grunts of the project. Maybe replacing them with yellow coveralls or red ones or, God help us, blue.

So it was with this total commitment and total willingness to please our betters that we took on the monkey as our charge.

As far as tasks went, it certainly wasn’t the worst. Almost immediately, we liked the monkey. In addition to it being our inevitable responsibility to load him into the capsule for his descent into the volcano, it was also our job to take care of him until all other preparations were complete. And in doing so we were struck right away by how prepossessing the monkey seemed. How patient with captivity. He sat in his cage and observed us soberly, with a subtle curiosity. When we presented him with food, he received it gratefully, with a chatter that seemed almost friendly.

Before long, the monkey warmed to us completely. His cage became little more than a pretense; he moved around our workstation freely. He sat on our shoulders, searching our scalps for jiggers with a visible show of concern. We bought a lounge chair with our own money, and he would sit in our laps while we read to him out of Reader’s Digest. Of course, he didn’t understand any of it, but he seemed to like the attention. He would stay perched on our laps, his eyes fixed on us as we read, his mouth hanging open slightly. Whenever we finished reading, he would take the magazine from our hands, put it on his head, and just screech and screech. We would laugh and he would screech. Laugh. Screech. Laugh. Screech.

The only problem was that as we grew closer to the monkey, the idea of dropping him into a volcano and then blowing him up seemed, more and more, to be unbearably cruel. It seemed like a waste, destroying a perfectly good monkey—not to mention one to whom we had become so recently attached. The Project Elects assured us that dropping the monkey into the volcano was important. They scribbled impatiently on the blackboard in the demonstration room. They drew a picture of the monkey peeking out of the capsule’s small window and smiling. They drew themselves standing on the tarmac and smiling. They drew a picture of us having wild sex with each other in the locker room and smiling. Look, they said, everybody’s happy. And if our own happiness wasn’t enough to make us put the monkey in the capsule, they reminded us that we were replaceable, that we were, in fact, desirable only in the sense that we were so totally capable of being replaced, that we were all a bunch of yo-yos, that we were lucky to know there even was a monkey.

It didn’t help that as soon as we expressed an interest in the monkey’s well-being, the Project Elects started demanding time alone with him. They would kick us out of our workstation, insisting they had tests to conduct. We would come back later to find them drinking Pabst and trying to peg the monkey with empties. One afternoon, we found them in there with a keg and the small defibrillator that had been used for the dachshund experiment four months earlier. After they left, punching shoulders and grab-assing with one another on their way out the door, the monkey seemed deeply shaken. It took thirty minutes and seven Baby Ruth’s just to get him out of his cage. We tried to read to him, but he only clung to our chests in the lounge chair, eventually letting out one long, exhausted breath and falling uncertainly to sleep.

But when we grew quiet, and regretful, the Project Elects would catch us staring doubtfully at the monkey and clap us on the back of the head. They would tell us that there was no plausible reason to be nervous. They would remind us that our job was in no way even close to brain surgery. Put the monkey in the capsule. That was it.

We imagined barbecue sauce on our fingers in beautiful backyards. We imagined the strange camaraderie brought on by booze and naked women, a dark room filled with smoke. Put the monkey in the capsule. A no-brainer.

The day we finally received orders to proceed, we let the monkey sit in the lounge chair by himself and eat as many candy bars as he could. Meanwhile we all stood in a circle and took turns reading to him. For the occasion, we picked his favorite article out of Reader’s Digest. It was the one written by an explorer who had gotten lost in Antarctica and suffered unthinkable hardships until falling in with a friendly group of penguins who had helped him to survive. We liked to think that he saw something of himself in the explorer, lost in a barren, inhospitable landscape with no real means of returning home. We also liked to think maybe he saw a little bit of us in the penguins that regurgitated fish into the explorer’s mouth. Typically when we read it to him, he seemed to screech a little louder than usual, in a happy way, or hop up on to our shoulders and pull tenderly at our ears. On that day, though, with the capsule prepped and glittering in the corner, he seemed to ignore the story altogether. Instead, he watched our faces, perhaps attempting to discern in them the reason behind the extra candy bars, the certain heaviness in our voices as we read.

Of course, we wished there could have been some kind of alternative. But what could we do? Not put the monkey in the capsule? Not let him spend his last moments on earth terrified and alone? Not let him get liquefied and blown up? When the article was finished, we closed the magazine and placed him in the capsule without much ceremony. We did pause briefly before securing the hatch. It felt important to give him one last remorseful look, to let him know that, while we understood that this was necessary, it also brought us no joy.

It was at that point, by all accounts, that we lost the monkey.

Maybe it was the force of that remorseful look. Maybe it was our tone of voice. Maybe it was the bottle of Pabst that one of the Project Elects had put in the capsule as a joke. Whatever the case, one second he was our special little friend, calmly sitting in the fore of the capsule—the next he was biting Ned’s neck. Poor Ned, he always seems to get the worst of it.

Cleared of all sentiment, we attempted to regain control of the monkey—but he was everywhere. He was around our ankles, his feral teeth tearing through the gabardine of our coveralls. He was on top of shelves, whipping down bookends. He was darting toward us, pummeling us with his date-like fists. He jumped from one place to the next with an unfathomable quickness, pulling our hair out at the roots, throwing feces, and urinating on us from across the room with an accuracy that we would all admit to later as being completely disturbing.

Eventually, he found a toolbox that someone from maintenance must have left unattended and armed himself with a Phillips head. Sensing his advantage, he grabbed two more candy bars before backing slowly out of the room.

Once he made it to the tarmac, he used the screwdriver to stab out the eye of an Advanced Project Elect who had tried to stop him.

Horrible, horrible.

When they pulled the pilot out of the wrecked chopper with a gigantic piece of tail boom in his abdomen, we were mortified. The murky room filled with naked women disappeared in its own smoke. The barbecue sauce that had haunted our fingers revealed itself for what it really was: flecks of monkey crap thrown in anger. Our hopes were dashed, most likely forever. Though, in the disciplinary meeting much later, when they showed us the security tape of the monkey outrunning several more Elects and making it all the way to the tree line, where he stopped for a moment in order to turn toward his captors and wave his screwdriver in a mad show of freedom, we had to admit that we were glad to see him go. In the meeting room, the Elects were all disheveled and ridiculous-looking: frayed piping dragging behind them as they walked, decals dangling from their chests. We didn’t look any better, of course. And with the Elects already razzing us, already gearing up for a whole new level of torment, we knew that regarding the monkey’s escape as something that was somehow good was a thought that was, if not our stupidest, then at least one that served to show why we were so worthy of our superiors’ contempt, why we were the ones stuck in plaid. We probably always would be.

"Those of Us in Plaid" from The Great Frustration by Seth Fried, published by Softskull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint. Copyright © 2011 by Seth Fried. All rights reserved.

Orientation and Other Stories
By Daniel Orozco

"Orientation"

Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can't find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He'll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

These are your in- and out- boxes. All the forms in your inbox must be logged in by the date shown in the upper- left- hand corner, initialed by you in the upper- right- hand corner, and distributed to the Processing Analyst whose name is numerically coded in the lower- left- hand corner. The lower- right- hand corner is left blank. Here's your Processing Analyst Numerical Code Index. And here's your Forms Processing Procedures Manual.

You must pace your work. What do I mean? I'm glad you asked that. We pace our work according to the eight- hour workday. If you have twelve hours of work in your in- box, for example, you must compress that work into the eight- hour day. If you have one hour of work in your in- box, you must expand that work to fill the eight- hour day. That was a good question. Feel free to ask questions. Ask too many questions, however, and you may be let go.

That is our receptionist. She is a temp. We go through receptionists here. They quit with alarming frequency. Be polite and civil to the temps. Learn their names, and invite them to lunch occasionally. But don't get close to them, as it only makes it more difficult when they leave. And they always leave. You can be sure of that.

The men's room is over there. The women's room is over there. John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women's room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better, but we let it pass. John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women's room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull, flatline of his life.

Russell Nash, who sits in the cubicle to your left, is in love with Amanda Pierce, who sits in the cubicle to your right. They ride the same bus together after work. For Amanda Pierce, it is just a tedious bus ride made less tedious by the idle nattering of Russell Nash. But for Russell Nash, it is the highlight of his day. It is the highlight of his life. Russell Nash has put on forty pounds and grows fatter with each passing month, nibbling on chips and cookies while peeking glumly over the partitions at Amanda Pierce and gorging himself at home on cold pizza and ice cream while watching adult videos on TV.

Amanda Pierce, in the cubicle to your right, has a six- year-old son named Jamie, who is autistic. Her cubicle is plastered from top to bottom with the boy's crayon artwork—sheet after sheet of precisely drawn concentric circles and ellipses, in black and yellow. She rotates them every other Friday. Be sure to comment on them. Amanda Pierce also has a husband, who is a lawyer. He subjects her to an escalating array of painful and humiliating sex games, to which Amanda Pierce reluctantly submits. She comes to work exhausted and freshly wounded each morning, wincing from the abrasions on her breasts, or the bruises on her abdomen, or the second-degree burns on the backs of her thighs.

But we're not supposed to know any of this. Do not let on. If you let on, you may be let go.

Amanda Pierce, who tolerates Russell Nash, is in love with Albert Bosch, whose office is over there. Albert Bosch, who only dimly registers Amanda Pierce's existence, has eyes only for Ellie Tapper, who sits over there. Ellie Tapper, who hates Albert Bosch, would walk through fire for Curtis Lance. But Curtis Lance hates Ellie Tapper. Isn't the world a funny place? Not in the ha- ha sense, of course.

Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom's left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand, and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker's wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you'll die, never talk to Anika Bloom.

Colin Heavey sits in that cubicle over there. He was new once, just like you. We warned him about Anika Bloom. But at last year's Christmas Potluck he felt sorry for her when he saw that no one was talking to her. Colin Heavey brought her a drink. He hasn't been himself since. Colin Heavey is doomed. There's nothing he can do about it, and we are powerless to help him. Stay away from Colin Heavey. Never give any of your work to him. If he asks to do something, tell him you have to check with me. If he asks again, tell him I haven't gotten back to you.

This is the fire exit. There are several on this floor, and they are marked accordingly. We have a Floor Evacuation Review every three months, and an Escape Route Quiz once a month. We have our Biannual Fire Drill twice a year, and our Annual Earthquake Drill once a year. These are precautions only. These things never happen.

For your information, we have a comprehensive health plan. Any catastrophic illness, any unforeseen tragedy, is completely covered. All dependents are completely covered. Larry Bagdikian, who sits over there, has six daughters. If anything were to happen to any of his girls, or to all of them, if all six were to simultaneously fall victim to illness or injury—stricken with a hideous degenerative muscle disease or some rare toxic blood disorder, sprayed with semiautomatic gun fire while on a class field trip, or attacked in their bunk beds by some prowling nocturnal lunatic—if any of this were to pass, Larry's girls would all be taken care of. Larry Bagdikian would not have to pay one dime. He would have nothing to worry about.

We also have a generous vacation and sick leave policy. We have an excellent disability insurance plan. We have a stable and profitable pension fund. We get group discounts for the symphony, and block seating at the ballpark. We get commuter ticket books for the bridge. We have direct deposit. We are all members of Costco.

This is our kitchenette. And this, this is our Mr. Coffee. We have a coffee pool into which we each pay two dollars a week for coffee, filters, sugar, and Coffee-mate. If you prefer Cremora or half-and-half to Coffee-mate, there is a special pool for three dollars a week. If you prefer Sweet'N Low to sugar, there is a special pool for two-fifty a week. We do not do decaf. You are allowed to join the coffee pool of your choice, but you are not allowed to touch the Mr. Coffee.

This is the microwave oven. You are allowed to heat food in the microwave oven. You are not, however, allowed to cook food in the microwave oven.

We get one hour for lunch. We also get one fifteen- minute break in the morning and one fifteen-minute break in the afternoon. Always take your breaks. If you skip a break, it is gone forever. For your information, your break is a privilege, not a right. If you abuse the break policy, we are authorized to rescind your breaks. Lunch, however, is a right, not a privilege. If you abuse the lunch policy, our hands will be tied and we will be forced to look the other way. We will not enjoy that.

This is the refrigerator. You may put your lunch in it. Barry Hacker, who sits over there, steals food from this refrigerator. His petty theft is an outlet for his grief. Last New Year's Eve, while kissing his wife, a blood vessel burst in her brain. Barry Hacker's wife was two months pregnant at the time and lingered in a coma for half a year before she died. It was a tragic loss for Barry Hacker. He hasn't been himself since. Barry Hacker's wife was a beautiful woman. She was also completely covered. Barry Hacker did not have to pay one dime. But his dead wife haunts him. She haunts all of us. We have seen her, reflected in the monitors of our computers, moving past our cubicles. We have seen the dim shadow of her face in our photocopies. She pencils herself in in the receptionist's appointment book with the notation “To see Barry Hacker.” She has left messages in the receptionist's Voicemail box, messages garbled by the electronic chirrups and buzzes in the phone line, her voice echoing from an immense distance within the ambient hum. But the voice is hers. And beneath the voice, beneath the tidal whoosh of static and hiss, the gurgling and crying of a baby can be heard.

In any case, if you bring a lunch, put a little something extra in the bag for Barry Hacker. We have four Barrys in this office. Isn't that a coincidence?

This is Matthew Payne's office. He is our Unit Manager, and his door is always closed. We have never seen him, and you will never see him. But he is there. You can be sure of that. He is all around us.

This is the Custodian's Closet. You have no business in the Custodian's Closet.

And this, this is our Supplies Cabinet. If you need supplies, see Curtis Lance. He will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Authorization Log, then give you a Supplies Authorization Slip. Present your pink copy of the Supplies Authorization Slip to Ellie Tapper. She will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Key Log, then give you the key. Because the Supplies Cabinet is located outside the Unit Manager's office, you must be very quiet. Gather your supplies quietly. The Supplies Cabinet is divided into four sections. Section O ne contains letterhead stationery, blank paper and envelopes, memo pads and note pads, and so on.

Section Two contains pens and pencils and typewriter and printer ribbons, and the like. In Section Three we have erasers, correction fluids, transparent tapes, glue sticks, et cetera. And in Section Four we have paper clips and pushpins and scissors and razor blades. And here are the spare blades for the shredder. Do not touch the shredder, which is located over there. The shredder is of no concern to you.

Gwendolyn Stich sits in that office there. She is crazy about penguins and collects penguin knickknacks: penguin posters and coffee mugs and stationery, penguin stuffed animals, penguin jewelry, penguin sweaters and T-shirts and socks. She has a pair of penguin fuzzy slippers she wears when working late at the office. She has a tape cassette of penguin sounds, which she listens to for relaxation. Her favorite colors are black and white. She has personalized license plates that read PEN GWEN. Every morning, she passes through all the cubicles to wish each of us a good morning. She brings Danish on Wednesdays for Hump Day morning break, and doughnuts on Fridays for TGIF afternoon break. She organizes the Annual Christmas Potluck and is in charge of the Birthday List. Gwendolyn Stich's door is always open to all of us. She will always lend an ear and put in a good word for you; she will always give you a hand, or the shirt off her back, or a shoulder to cry on. Because her door is always open, she hides and cries in a stall in the women's room. And John LaFountaine—who, enthralled when a woman enters, sits quietly in his stall with his knees to his chest—John LaFountaine has heard her vomiting in there. We have come upon Gwendolyn Stich huddled in the stairwell, shivering in the updraft, sipping a Diet Mr. Pibb and hugging her knees. She does not let any of this interfere with her work. If it interfered with her work, she might have to be let go.

Kevin Howard sits in that cubicle over there. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for the mutilations across town. We're not supposed to know that, so do not let on. Don't worry. His compulsion inflicts itself on strangers only, and the routine established is elaborate and unwavering. The victim must be a white male, a young adult no older than thirty, heavyset, with dark hair and eyes, and the like. The victim must be chosen at random before sunset, from a public place; the victim is followed home and must put up a struggle; et cetera. The carnage inflicted is precise: the angle and direction of the incisions, the layering of skin and muscle tissue, the rearrangement of visceral organs, and so on. Kevin Howard does not let any of this interfere with his work. He is, in fact, our fastest typist. He types as if he were on fire. He has a secret crush on Gwendolyn Stich and leaves a red-foil-wrapped Hershey's Kiss on her desk every afternoon. But he hates Anika Bloom and keeps well away from her. In his presence, she has uncontrollable fits of shaking and trembling. Her left palm does not stop bleeding.

In any case, when Kevin Howard gets caught, act surprised. Say that he seemed like a nice person, a bit of a loner, perhaps, but always quiet and polite.

This is the photocopier room. And this, this is our view. It faces southwest. West is down there, toward the water. North is back there. Because we are on the seventeenth floor, we are afforded a magnificent view. Isn't it beautiful? It overlooks the park, where the tops of those trees are. You can see a segment of the bay between those two buildings over there. You can see the sun set in the gap between those two buildings over there.

You can see this building reflected in the glass panels of that building across the way. There. See? That's you, waving. And look there. There's Anika Bloom in the kitchenette, waving back.

Enjoy this view while photocopying. If you have problems with the photocopier, see Russell Nash. If you have any questions, ask your supervisor. If you can't find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers. He sits over there. He'll check with Clarissa Nicks. She sits over there. If you can't find them, feel free to ask me. That's my cubicle. I sit in there.

Excerpted from Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco, published in June 2011 by Faber and Faber Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Orozco. All rights reserved.