The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories (Danielle Evans)

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other. —James Baldwin

When Lyssa was seven, her mother took her to see the movie where the mermaid wants legs, and when it ended Lyssa shook her head and squinted at the prince and said, Why would she leave her family for that?

Two by two the animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way. Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.

In that December’s deluge of instant nostalgia, the photo made more than one best-of-the-year list. Rena had not lacked for freelance jobs since its publication. Aesthetically, it was not her best work, but JT, handsome, tanned, and blond, was what the public wanted as a symbol of America in the small and shrinking world, the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When America has one natural blond family left, its members will be trotted out to play every role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.

Rena thought the point of the game was to identify the proverb that was the worst of all possible proverbs, and make a case for its failure. She’d run through a number of contenders before deciding on In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.

It seemed characteristic of the present that everyone, even the worst of us, was practicing being famous.