"Madman" by Lucy Corin (From New American Short Stories edited by Benjamin Marcus, 2015)

"I hugged him and took the bag. “What have we here!” I said, and dug in. It was a harness for my madman, the best kind, made of real leather with quality hand-stitching and brass appointments."

"Madman" by Lucy Corin is a wonderful story, funny, sad, wise and very original.  The prose is a sheer delight and Corin presents an alternative world that is a little to close for comfort.  In this society, when a girl has her first mensuration custom dictates that she go to a huge givernment medical type warehouse and picks out her very own personal madman (which can be a woman).  Boys go at thirteen.   The set up kind of like in an animal shelter where the madmen are kept in  with descriptive cards on the front of their cages.  Attendants take people around.  We never  learn how people end up in the facility or learn how this practice came about. We do learn there are millions of madmen.  

We tour the facility with the girl and her parents.  The descriptions of the various madmen are just flat out great, a pure delight to read.  We learn why people need to get a madman assigned to them when young.

"The whole idea is you take in a madman and that teaches you about Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference, and soon we are one big family."

The story takes a wonderfully even darker turn as it draws to a close. I did not see it coming but I loved the close.

I don't doubt there are deep points about contemporary American society made in "Madman".  

For sure I would like to read more by Lucy Corin.

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers:  A History for Girls (FC2).  The collection One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses was released in September 2013 from McSweeney’s Books.

Stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Tin House Magazine, and many other places.  She spent 2012-13 living at the American Academy in Rome as the 2012 John Guare Fellow in Literature.  She is at work on a novel, The Swank Hotel.

Lucy Corin has a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Brown.  She’s an Associate Professor at University of California, Davis where she teaches in the English Department and Creative Writing Program along with fiction writers Pam Houston, Lynn Freed, and Yiyun Li, and poets Joshua Clover, Joe Wenderoth, and Katie Peterson.  From lucycorin.com

Mel u