A Little Piece of Fiction by Dale Vaughn

You know, there was a time when this body, so ugly and undefined, was once chiseled. This body was once cheered and lauded by friends and fans, and envied and hated by others. These hands so large and strong once held things and people of great beauty and esteem. 

They once cradled beautiful girls in their strength and protection. The girls, god, I remember them. Hanging all over me, fawning after me and pawing me like a trinket. Who was the arm candy in that situation; me, with the looks and the body or them with their innate beauty and shimmering eyes and clothes?  Even then, I knew that there was maybe, something wrong with me. But I paid no attention, what’s the use in worrying when there is nothing physically broke to fix?

I glided through high school on my looks and charisma, even though there was a working and very intelligent brain in my head. But no one wants intelligence from the “likes” of me, as the “normal” kids would say. 

By “normal” I mean the ones who would or could never have what I had. Maybe they were fat, had asthma, poor, or just too damn lazy to have what I worked so damn hard for! I apologize, that is the old me talking, the one who could never see past his own persona or even care what others thought or said about him, or for the world for that matter. What happened out there didn’t affect me, because it didn’t touch me physically. 

The kids at school who were poor, who’s parents worked two jobs just to keep clothes on their backs, food on the table, or a roof over their heads, I didn’t talk to them, hell, I didn’t even associate with them. They weren’t like me and could never be, in my eyes.

I got to college and life got a little harder, but not much. I still had my pick of the girls and fraternities for that matter. All of them wanted me to boost their self -esteem and prestige, but what about my own. About this time was when I started to notice what could possibly be wrong with me. 

Gone by Rhiannon Root

The fork stabbed at a bite of syrup soaked pancake and scooped it upward. The triangular bite disappeared in three seconds. The fork floated down to the table. Then the coffee cup floated up and an audible slurp filled the IHOP booth.

Jack hadn’t gotten used to eating with Helen since her accident eight months ago. Watching her eat was skin crawlingly creepy, like a surrealist painting.

“What did you want to talk about, Helen?” Jack asked, wishing she would stop eating. He hoped that the gooseflesh prickling on his arms would die down.

            The coffee cup floated down. “Jack, I don’t want this,” she said.

            “The meal? We can send it back.”

            “Us, Jack. I don’t want this anymore,” Helen’s voice was pointed. She seemed angrier these days. Jack wasn’t entirely sure why. 

            The coffee cup floated up again. Slurp. “It’s like you can’t stand me anymore,” she said.

            “That’s absurd!”

2014 Hugo Winners

This Weekly Read offers up samples from this year's Hugo Award winners. Because everyone needs good sci-fi. Enjoy! 

BEST NOVEL

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

BEST NOVELLA

Equoid by Charles Stross

BEST NOVELETTE

The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal

BEST SHORT STORY

The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu 

New Harry Potter Short Story

It's true! As part of her growing HP-related literature, JK Rowling has released a new short story about the wizarding world, told by everyone's favorite rotten-to-the-core reporter Rita Skeeter.

 

You can find the whole story at Today.com, but enjoy this excerpt:

 

 

Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final

By the Daily Prophet’s Gossip Correspondent, Rita Skeeter

 

There are celebrities – and then there are celebrities. We’ve seen many a famous face from the wizarding world grace the stands here in the Patagonian Desert – Ministers and Presidents, Celestina Warbeck, controversial American wizarding band The Bent-Winged Snitches – all have caused flurries of excitement, with crowd members scrambling for autographs and even casting Bridging Charms to reach the VIP boxes over the heads of the crowd.

 

But when word swept the campsite and stadium that a certain gang of infamous wizards (no longer the fresh-faced teenagers they were in their heyday, but nevertheless recognisable) had arrived for the final, excitement was beyond anything yet seen. As the crowd stampeded, tents were flattened and small children mown down. Fans from all corners of the globe stormed towards the area where members of Dumbledore’s Army were rumoured to have been sighted, desperate above all else for a glimpse of the man they still call the Chosen One.

Accepting Weekly Read Submissions

Dear Readers,
    Currently, we are accepting submissions from indie authors for our Weekly Read short stories. Short stories can be any genre, previously published, never published, really anything you think we'd find delightful. The Dying Book Affair holds no first publishing rights, first online print rights, etc. We are simply looking to share dynamite short stories with voracious readers. If you have a work you'd like to submit, details are below.

Happy reading!
TDBA editors


Genres accepted: All
Manuscript chapters: Accepted as long as they function as a short story
Word count: No more than 1,500 per story
Multiple submissions: Yes, but each story should be sent in a separate email
Closing date: 9/1/14
Submissions sent to: thedyingbookaffair@gmail.com, subject line Weekly Read Submission

Micromegas by Voltaire

On a planet revolving around the star Sirius there lived a young man of great intelligence, whose acquaintance I had the honor of making during his recent visit to our little anthill. He was called Micromegas, an appropriate name for great people. He had a stature of eight leagues, or 24,000 geometrical paces of five feet each, or 120,000 statute feet.

 

We earthmen have an average stature hardly more than five feet--one pace--so Mr. Micromegas' world must in turn have a circumference 24,000 times greater than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler, more a matter of course. The dominions of certain potentates in Germany or Italy, around which you can walk in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Russia, or China can give but a faint idea of the vast disparity Nature has set between different orders of being throughout the universe.

Given his Excellency's height, any sculptor or painter would agree his waist should, proportionally, be about 50,000 feet around. His nose being one third the length of his handsome face, and his handsome face being one-seventh the height of his handsome body, it follows that the Sirian's nose is some 5,714 statute feet long.

 

His mind rivals the most cultivated among us; he knows many things, some of which are his own inventions. He had not yet reached his 250th year, and was studying, as was customary at his age, at the most famous school on the planet, when he solved 50 propositions of Euclid--18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having, according to his sister's account, solved 32 for his own amusement, became a pretty fair geometer, and a very poor metaphysician.

 

When Micromegas was about 450 years old, and already passing out of childhood, he dissected, with the aid of powerful microscopes, many little insects less than 100 feet in diameter; he wrote an interesting book about them, which got him into trouble.  

The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

 

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”

—Algernon Blackwood.

 

I.

The Horror in Clay.

 

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

      Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

      My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of Saint Nicholas, there lies a small market town which is generally known by the name of Tarry Town.

 

     This name was given by the good housewives of the adjacent country from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley among high hills which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook murmurs through it and, with the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks the uniform tranquillity.

 

     From the listless repose of the place, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow. Some say that the place was bewitched during the early days of the Dutch settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson.

 

     Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the descendants of the original settlers. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.

 

Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker

When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer.

 

Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d'hotel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door: "Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late." Here he smiled and added, "for you know what night it is."

 

Johann answered with an emphatic, "Ja, mein Herr," and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling him to stop: "Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?"

 

He crossed himself as he answered laconically: "Walpurgisnacht." Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high, wind-swept plateau.

As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used and which seemed to dip through a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop — and when he had pulled up I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I said: "Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask." For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something — the very idea of which evidently frightened him, but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: "Walpurgisnacht!"

 

The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Neil Gaiman

I sat in my office, nursing a glass of hooch and idly cleaning my automatic. Outside the rain fell steadily, like it seems to do most of the time in our fair city, whatever the tourist board says. Hell, I didn't care. I'm not on the tourist board. I'm a private dick, and one of the best, although you wouldn't have known it; the office was crumbling, the rent was unpaid and the hooch was my last.

Things are tough all over.

To cap it all the only client I'd had all week never showed up on the street corner where I'd waited for him. He said it was going to be a big job, but now I'd never know: he kept a prior appointment in the morgue.

So when the dame walked into my office I was sure my luck had changed for the better.

"What are you selling, lady?"

She gave me a look that would have induced heavy breathing in a pumpkin, and which shot my heartbeat up to three figures. She had long blonde hair and a figure that would have made Thomas Aquinas forget his vows. I forgot all mine about never taking cases from dames.

"What would you say to some of the green stuff?" she asked, in a husky voice, getting straight to the point.

"Continue, sister." I didn't want her to know how bad I needed the dough, so I held my hand in front of my mouth; it doesn't help if a client sees you salivate.

She opened her purse and flipped out a photograph. Glossy eight by ten. "Do you recognise that man?"

In my business you know who people are. "Yeah."

"He's dead."

"I know that too, sweetheart. It's old news. It was an accident."

Her gaze went so icy you could have chipped it into cubes and cooled a cocktail with it. "My brother's death was no accident."  

A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka

I was in great difficulty. An urgent journey was facing me. A seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant. A severe snowstorm filled the space between him and me.

I had a carriage—a light one, with large wheels, entirely suitable for our country roads. Wrapped up in furs with the bag of instruments in my hand, I was already standing in the courtyard ready for the journey; but the horse was missing—the horse. My own horse had died the previous night, as a result of over exertion in this icy winter.

My servant girl was at that very moment running around the village to see if she could borrow a horse, but it was hopeless—I knew that—and I stood there useless, increasingly covered with snow, becoming all the time more immobile. The girl appeared at the gate, alone. She was swinging the lantern. Of course, who is now going to lend her his horse for such a journey? 

I walked once again across the courtyard. I couldn’t see what to do. Distracted and tormented, I kicked my foot against the cracked door of the pig sty which had not been used for years. The door opened and banged to and fro on its hinges. A warmth and smell as if from horses came out. A dim stall lantern on a rope swayed inside. A man huddled down in the stall below showed his open blue-eyed face. “Shall I hitch up?” he asked, crawling out on all fours. I didn’t know what to say and bent down to see what was still in the stall. The servant girl stood beside me. 

“One doesn’t know the sorts of things one has stored in one’s own house,” she said, and we both laughed. 

Fall by Emma Donoghue

Harnessed and pillowed in her pod as tight as an unborn, Annie waits. Gives herself up. Too late to uncurl, scramble out, escape this watery fate. Knees to double chin, she can’t straighten so much as an elbow. Beyond all hope of an easy way out. Her lid is nailed down and it was she who paid the young boatman to do it, that’s the joke.

Her tapered barrel hangs upright in the water, bobbing on its rope. The wicked hag at the end of the fairytale gets packed in a barrel for her just deserts. Annie’s mummified in darkness. She adjusts her grip on the handles, twitches in her bindings. Her stomach is empty, in case she might vomit. One of the seams must be starting to give already, because Annie’s feet are wet.
 

Outside, she knows, the afternoon sun is glittering on the crowds that clog both shorelines. The motion picture company will have set their camera rolling. The bookies are offering a thousand to one on Annie coming through. Her manager has her letter in his pocket, fully exonerating him.

Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them.

Far ahead they could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows, farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as endless, telegraph-posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and beautiful the country was.
 

"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were going to tell me a story."
 

"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."
 

Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.
 

"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is close by."
 

"Very well."

The Bear Came Over The Mountain by Alice Munro

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.

Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absent-minded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason.

Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns.

She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
 

“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
 

He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
 

The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Voznesensky Prospekt (his family name is lost now — it no longer figures on a signboard bearing a portrait of a gentleman with a soaped cheek, and the words: “Also, Blood Let Here”) — for that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch awoke early, and caught the smell of newly baked bread. Raising himself a little, he perceived his wife (a most respectable lady, and one especially fond of coffee) to be just in the act of drawing newly baked rolls from the oven.
 

“Prascovia Osipovna,” he said, “I would rather not have any coffee for breakfast, but, instead, a hot roll and an onion,” — the truth being that he wanted both but knew it to be useless to ask for two things at once, as Prascovia Osipovna did not fancy such tricks.

“Oh, the fool shall have his bread,” the wife thought, “So much the better for me then, as I shall have that much more coffee.”

And she threw one roll on to the table.

Ivan Yakovlevitch donned a jacket over his shirt for politeness' sake, and, seating himself at the table, poured out salt, got a couple of onions ready, took a knife into his hand, assumed an air of importance, and cut the roll open. Then he glanced into the roll's middle. To his intense surprise he saw something glimmering there. He probed it cautiously with the knife — then poked at it with a finger.

“Quite solid it is!” he said to himself. “What in the world is it likely to be?”

He stuck in his fingers, and pulled out — a nose! .. His hands dropped to his sides for a moment. Then he rubbed his eyes hard. Then again he probed the thing. A nose! Sure enough a nose! Yes, and one familiar to him, somehow! Oh, horror spread upon his feature! Yet that horror was a trifle compared with his spouse's overmastering wrath.

Maria by Vila Spiderhawk

Maria's been down for such a very long time. I think she might have gone too deep. She's so damned reckless. She never listens to me. I tried to warn her of the risks, but she just shooed me off the way she always does.

"I'll be just fine," she grinned the way she does, the way that melts my heart. And the uncanny thing is that she's always right. I grind my teeth and pull my hair, pace back and forth and bite my nails each time she's gone. And yet she always comes back whole. However strong my sense of doom, however prickly my concern, she always triumphs, always greets me with that grin. So she goes deeper every time, her pockets bulging with success, and I wait here and tell myself that she's quick-witted enough figure out a way to slip from danger's grip. And yet there's always a first time. She could be facing dreadful harm. How would I know? She has no way to contact me.

What if she's lost to me forever? What if some jealous tortured soul steals her away and hides her in the catacombs? Or even worse, what if she's comfortable down there among the dead and she forgets that she belongs here in my arms? How would I sleep without her warmth all snuggled up against my back? What would I do without her playfulness, without her ready laugh, without her joy, without her light, without her tenderness and love?

The thought is just too horrible. My life would simply be too gray. She must return, that charming half-moon grin intact. I want to bargain with the angels, with the demons, with that pit. I want to give them all I have so they'll release her. I want to charm them with my song. Or offer tasty things to eat. Or sell my soul. Whatever works. I need Maria!

I have to banish these bleak thoughts. I have to see her in my mind--see how she'll bounce and point at me, laugh at my worry. I have to keep that image clear. How very happy we'll both be! Yes, she'll return! My love for her will pull her back.

Though in my heart I'll leap for joy at the first sign that she's unscathed and, though I'll want to make her promise not to go so deep again, I'll greet her calmly with a smile and a kiss and an embrace, and I'll assure her that I wasn't scared at all. I'll even casually ask her what she learned on this adventure. She won't have the slightest inkling that I want to grab her shoulders, shake her hard and screech some sense into her brain. I'll welcome her with such restraint that she won't have the smallest clue that terror clawed like cornered cats inside my belly.

It will be perfect. We'll go home and have linguine with red sauce. Oh no! A classic basil pesto! And a salad. I'll make an avocado dressing, open up a nice red wine. A Beaujolais. Then maybe cheesecake for dessert. We'll sip our coffee on the porch and watch clouds drift across the stars, and I'll forget this icy fear. If she comes back.

[The End]

 

(C) Vila SpiderHawk, 2012. All rights reserved.

Does Maria return unscathed? Pick up Hidden Passages: Tales to Honor the Crones for just 99 cents to find out. Available as a PDF file, Nook book or Kindle book. For more info on Vila Spiderhawk's other works, visit her author page.

 

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

     "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

     "What's wrong with it?"

     "I don't know."

     "Well, then."

     "I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

     "What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

     "You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."

     "All right, let's have a look."

     They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.

     Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

     "Well," said George Hadley.

     They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had said.

     The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

     George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

     "Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."

     "Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.

     Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley's upturned, sweating face.

     "Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.

     "The vultures."

     "You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to the water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."

     "Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."

    "Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

     "No, it's a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."

     "Did you hear that scream?" she asked.

Thank You For The Light by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mrs. Hanson was a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty, who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago. For many years her territory had swung around through Toledo, Lima, Springfield, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and her transfer to the Iowa-Kansas-Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.

Eastward, she had known her clientele chattily and had often been offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office after business was concluded. But she soon found that in her new district things were different. Not only was she never asked if she would like to smoke but several times her own inquiry as to whether anyone would mind was answered half apologetically with “It’s not that I mind, but it has a bad influence on the employees.”

“Oh, of course, I understand.”

Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

The last week of her first trip on the new circuit found her in Kansas City. It was mid-August and she felt somewhat lonely among all her new contacts, so she was delighted to find at the outer desk of one firm a woman she had known in Chicago. She sat down before having herself announced and in the course of the conversation found out a little about the man she was going to see.

“Will he mind if I smoke?”

“What? My God, yes!” her friend said. “He’s given money to support the law against it.”

“Oh. Well, I’m grateful for the advice—more than grateful.”

An Abduction by Tessa Hadley

Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the nineteen-sixties, when parents were more careless. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky, from which Jane couldn’t unfix the word “cerulean,” which she’d learned in the art room. (She wasn’t clever or literary, and was nervous of new words, which seemed to stick to her.) “Cerulean” was more of a blank, baking glare than mere merry blue.

 

It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. It wasn’t acceptable in Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice beside a streaming windowpane, reading about the Chalet School. But her mother said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone, and Jane couldn’t read outside with the same absorption; there was always some strikingly perfect speckled insect falling onto your page like a reminder (of what? of itself), or a root nudging into your back, or stinging ants inside your shorts.

 

The morning of the abduction, Mrs. Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind.

Good Neighbors by Jonathan Franzen

Walter and Patty Berglund were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. The Berglunds paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it.

Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, “Hey, you guys, you know what?”

Patty frightened nobody, but she’d been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint, and then “Goodnight Moon,” then Zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.