Post a short story or essay that you like

[Wetzelbill]

I'll start:

Here is "Ranch Girl" by Maile Meloy. It's from her short story collection "Half In Love."

If you're white, and you're not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it's hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch. It doesn't matter if your dad's the foreman or the rancher -- you're still a ranch girl, and you've been dealt a bad hand.

If you're the foreman's daughter on Ted Haskell's Running H cattle ranch, you live in the foreman's house, on the dirt road between Haskell's place and the barn. There are two bedrooms with walls made of particleboard, one bathroom (no tub), muddy boots and jackets in the living room, and a kitchen that's never used. No one from school ever visits the ranch, so you can keep your room the way you decorated it at ten: a pink comforter, horse posters on the walls, plastic horse models on the shelves. Outside there's an old cow-dog with a ruined hip, a barn cat who sleeps in the rafters, and, until he dies, a runt calf named Minute, who cries at night by the front door......


http://mailemeloy.com/excerpts/halfinlove.php

[Maddy McCall]

1. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" - Salinger

J. D. Salinger
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
The New Yorker, January 31, 1948, pages 21-25

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun-or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left--the wet--hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and--it was the fifth or sixth ring--picked up the phone.

"Hello," she said, keeping the fingers of her left hand outstretched and away from her white silk dressing gown, which was all that she was wearing, except mules--her rings were in the bathroom.

"I have your call to New York now, Mrs. Glass," the operator said.

"Thank you," said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray.

A woman's voice came through. "Muriel? Is that you?"

The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. "Yes, Mother. How are you?" she said.

"I've been worried to death about you. Why haven't you phoned? Are you all right?"

"I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here's been--"

"Are you all right, Muriel?"

The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. "I'm fine. I'm hot. This is the hottest day they've had in Florida in--"

"Why haven't you called me? I've been worried to--"

"Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl. "I called you twice last night. Once just after--"

"I told your father you'd probably call last night. But, no, he had to-Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth."

"I'm fine. Stop asking me that, please."

"When did you get there?"

"I don't know. Wednesday morning, early."

"Who drove?"

"He did," said the girl. "And don't get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed."

"He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of--"

"Mother," the girl interrupted, "I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact."

"Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?"

MORE: http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/perfectday.html

[Heidi]

4. :thumbsup:

Another one of my favorites. :)

Hey, Maddy. :hug:

[Maddy McCall]

6. Hey, Heidi.

:hi: :hug:

You know, I've never discussed that story with anyone. I was telling Monkeyfunk a couple of days ago, that I wish he would reread it (he's read it before, but said he needed to read it again) so that we could discuss it.

That story haunts me...I'm not sure why. The child on the beach with the man, maybe? What it means? What DOES it mean?

Anyway, I love the story, and it's one of the short stories I've read that I'll never forget.

[Heidi]

13. I've always thought of the child, Sybil, as a symbol of Seymour's innocense.

This story haunts me, too. :hug:

[Heidi]

2. "Are These Actual Miles?" by Raymond Carver.

I can't find it online and wouldn't want to violate Mr. Carver's copyright, but it's beautifully written. :hi:

[petronius]

3. "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." - Ernest Hemingway (supposedly)

I can't find my two favorites on line, so I'll offer another from high on my list:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/jaguarhunter.htm

[Maddy McCall]

5. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" - Flannery O'Connor

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."

The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.

"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.

MORE: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html

[montanto]

20. Parker's Back, but anything by O'Connor will do.

[Wetzelbill]

7. "An Act of Vengeance" Isabel Allende

An Act of Vengeance

Isabel Allende

On that glorious noonday when Dulce Rosa Orellano was crowned with the jasmines of Carnival Queen, the mothers of the other candidates murmured that it was unfair for her to win just because she was the only daughter of the most powerful man in the entire province, Senator Anselmo Orellano. They admitted that the girl was charm- ing and that she played the piano and danced like no other, but there were other competitors for the prize who were far more beautiful. They saw her standing on the platform in her organdy dress and with her crown of flowers, and as she waved at the crowd they cursed her through their clenched teeth. For that reason, some of them were overjoyed some months later when misfortune entered the Orellano’s house sowing such a crop of death that thirty years were required to reap it.

On the night of the queen’s election, a dance was held in the Santa Teresa Town Hall, and young men from the remotest villages came to meet Dulce Rosa. She was so happy and danced with such grace that many failed to perceive that she was not the most beautiful, and when they returned to where they had come from they all declared that they had never before seen a face like hers. Thus she acquired an unmerited reputation for beauty and later testimony was never able to prove to the contrary. The exaggerated descriptions of her translucent skin and her diaphanous eyes were passed from mouth to mouth, and each individual added something to them from his own imagination. Poets from distant cities composed sonnets to a hypothetical maiden whose name was Dulce Rosa.


http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812967074&view=excerpt

[Wetzelbill]

8. "The Harvest" Amy Hempel

The Harvest

by Amy Hempel

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn't see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn't look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn't that I couldn't.

My blood was on the front of this man's clothes.

He said, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."

I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room — I just didn't know whose pain it was.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The five days they didn't know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.

http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/413/

[Wetzelbill]

9. "Loverboys" Ana Castillo

Loverboys
By Ana Castillo


Two boys are making out in the booth across from me. I ain't got nothing else to do, so I watch them. I drink the not-so-aged house brandy and I watch two boys make out. It's more like they're in the throes of passion, as they say. And they're not boys, really. I think I've seen them around before, somewhere on campus maybe. Not making out though.

One gets up, to get them each another drink I guess, and he and I check each other out briefly as he passes me up on his way to the bar. He's a white boy wearing a T-shirt with a graphic of Malcolm X on it.

This is the way my life is these days or maybe it's a sign of the nineties: a white boy with a picture of Malcolm X on his T-shirt and me, sitting here in a gay bar trying to forget a man.

Well, okay. He must not have been just any man and I'm sure not just any woman. Before him there were only women. Puras mujeres (!sino mujeres puras)! A cast of thousands. Women's music festivals, feminist symposiums, women of color retreats and camp-outs, women's healing rituals under a full moon, ceremonies of union and not-so-ceremonious reunions, women-only panels and caucuses at conferences, en fin, women ad infinitum.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/loverboys.htm

[ulysses]

17. Castillo is a great writer.

I read "So Far From God" some years back - real talent with the magical realism. :thumbsup:

[Wetzelbill]

18. Yeah she is awesome

We read that in a class I was in, Mexican American Literature, or something like that. Lots going on in that book. Hauntingly beautiful.

I first came across her in a class called "Feminist Literary Theories." We read a book of interconnected short stories of hers called "The Mixquiahuala Letters." Brilliant stuff. I liked it better than "So Far From God." It's a fast read too. I highly recommend it.

[ulysses]

19. I have that one but haven't read it.

I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

[Wetzelbill]

27. I went and picked it up again at the library today

I had to go grab a few things and it was on the shelf. I'd like to revisit some of the concepts for some things I am writing. Like the concept of the Sovereign "i". I use it in one of my stories, so I want to go over the was she does it again. For theory purposes. :)

[Maddy McCall]

10. "Good Country People" - Flannery O'Connor...

And I'll quit monopolizing your thread...I just love O'Connor's short stories. :D

**********
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”

They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonds girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report.

Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.

She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept them four years.

Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.

MORE: http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/oconnorgoodcountry.html

[Wetzelbill]

11. monopolize all you want

It's good to read later on. I get material this way. :)

[bridgit]

12. Scarlet Stockings - Louisa May Alcott

Chapter 1

I. HOW THEY WALKED INTO LENNOX'S LIFE.

"COME out for a drive, Harry?"

"Too cold."

"Have a game of billiards?"

"Too tired."

"Go and call on the Fairchilds?"

"Having an unfortunate prejudice against country girls, I respectfully decline."

"What will you do then?"

"Nothing, thank you."

And settling himself more luxuriously upon the couch, Lennox closed his eyes, and appeared to slumber tranquilly. Kate shook her head, and stood regarding her brother, despondently, till a sudden idea made her turn toward the window, exclaiming abruptly,

"Scarlet stockings, Harry!"

http://www.americanliterature.com/Alcott/SS/ScarletStockings.html

[Wetzelbill]

14. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" Sherman Alexie

What You Pawn I Will Redeem
by Sherman Alexie

NOON

One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.

I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy. Of course, crazy is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I don’t think asocial disorder fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or, at least, not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. And I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disappearing ever since.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421fi_fiction

[crimsonblue]

15. my 2 word essay.

Piss off.

[Orsino]

16. Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

[terrya]

21. "The Necklace" - Guy de Maupassant

She was one of those pretty and charming girls, born by a blunder of destiny in a family of employees. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, married by a man rich and distinguished; and she let them make a match for her with a little clerk in the Department of Education.

She was simple since she could not be adorned; but she was unhappy as though kept out of her own class; for women have no caste and no descent, their beauty, their grace, and their charm serving them instead of birth and fortune. Their native keenness, their instinctive elegance, their flexibility of mind, are their only hierarchy; and these make the daughters of the people the equals of the most lofty dames.

She suffered intensely, feeling herself born for every delicacy and every luxury. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the worn walls, the abraded chairs, the ugliness of the stuffs. All these things, which another woman of her caste would not even have noticed, tortured her and made her indignant. The sight of the little girl from Brittany who did her humble housework awoke in her desolated regrets and distracted dreams. She let her mind dwell on the quiet vestibules, hung with Oriental tapestries, lighted by tall lamps of bronze, and on the two tall footmen in knee breeches who dozed in the large armchairs, made drowsy by the heat of the furnace. She let her mind dwell on the large parlors, decked with old silk, with their delicate furniture, supporting precious bric-a-brac, and on the coquettish little rooms, perfumed, prepared for the five o’clock chat with the most intimate friends, men well known and sought after, whose attentions all women envied and desired.

http://www.bartleby.com/195/20.html

[MrCoffee]

22. I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone - Richard Brautigan

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.

I couldn't say "Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she's got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she's not a movie star..."

I couldn't say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio "... the President of the United States... "

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio....

And that's how you look to me.

[MrCoffee]

23. My very favorite Brautigan story - "Coffee"

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you; it stimulates all the organs.

I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but as time goes by I have found out that it makes sense in its own limited way. I’ll tell you what I mean.

Yesterday morning I went over to see a girl. I like her. Whatever we had going for us is gone now. She does not care for me. I blew it and wish I hadn’t.

The whole story here

[Callalily]

24. I read this as a kid.

Thanks for reminding me. I always thought I had a bit of Mr. Mitty in me! :)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," first published in 1941, is one of James Thurber's most well-known and beloved stories. Its famous protagonist holds a place in the cultural lexicon, meriting his own entry in English-language dictionaries. In 1947, Norman McLeod directed an MGM Technicolor musical with the same title based on Thurber's story. The film, which extends Mitty's imaginary adventures over a two-day period, stars Danny Kaye as the affable daydreamer.


"We're going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The old man will get us through" they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of Hell!" . . .

http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=100

[Wetzelbill]

28. That's a great story

I read it in... I think my freshman English class. Lots of fun,

[YankeyMCC]

25. The Amazing Adventures of Master Rabbit

This a link to the first portion: http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ne/al/al42.htm

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF MASTER RABBIT
WITH THE OTTER, THE WOODPECKER GIRLS, AND MOOIN THE BEAR.
ALSO A FULL ACCOUNT OF THE FAMOUS CHASE, IN WHICH HE FOOLED LUSIFEE, THE WILD CAT. 1
I. How Master Rabbit sought to rival Keeoony, the Otter.

OF old times, Mahtigwess, the Rabbit, who is called in the Micmac tongue Ableegumooch, lived with his grandmother, waiting for better times; and truly he found it a hard matter in midwinter, when ice was on the river and snow was on the plain, to provide even for his small household. And running through the forest one day he found a lonely wigwam, and he that dwelt therein was Keeoony, the Otter. The lodge was on the bank of a river, and a smooth road of ice slanted from the door down to the water. And the Otter made him welcome, and directed his housekeeper to get ready to cook; saying which, he took the hooks on which he was wont to string fish when he had them, and went to fetch a mess for dinner. Placing himself on the top of the slide, he coasted in and under the water, and then came out

p. 209

with a great bunch of eels, which were soon cooked, and on which they dined.

"By my life," thought Master Rabbit, "but that is an easy way of getting a living! Truly these fishing-folk have fine fare, and cheap! Cannot I, who am so clever, do as well as this mere Otter? Of course I can. Why not?" Thereupon he grew so confident of himself as to invite the Otter to dine with him--adamadusk ketkewop--on the third day after that, and so went home.

"Come on!" he said to his grandmother the next morning; "let us remove our wigwam down to the lake." So they removed; and he selected a site such as the Otter had chosen for his home, and the weather being cold he made a road of ice, or a coast, down from his door to the water, and all was well. Then the guest came at the time set, and Rabbit, calling his grandmother, bade her get ready to cook a dinner. "But what am I to cook, grandson?" inquired the old dame.

"Truly I will see to that," said he, and made him a nabogun, or stick to string eels. Then going to the ice path, he tried to slide like one skilled in the art, but indeed with little luck, for he went first to the right side, then to the left, and so hitched and jumped till he came to the water, where he went in with a bob backwards. And this bad beginning had no better ending, since of all swimmers and divers the Rabbit is the very worst, and this one was no better than his brothers. The water was cold, he lost his breath, he struggled, and was well-nigh drowned.

===
For the rest go here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ne/al/index.htm and scroll down to the rabbit stories.
on edit: I just noticed you don't have to do that there is a "next" button at the end of each segment.

[YankeyMCC]

26. 118 Very, Very short stories

By Michael Swanwick based on the Periodic table. I'm sorry I had to induldge in two posts in this thread, these little gems are excellent demonstrations of Swanwick's skill in the short form.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html

One example picked at random (because it's been a long time since I first read them and I knew no matter which I picked it would be good)


61
Pm
Promethium
144.9128

Foresight

"No thank you," Prometheus said. "I don't smoke. It leads to lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and any number of pregnancy-related health problems."

"I didn't offer you a cigarette!" I declared.

"You were about to." Prometheus rattled his chains complacently. "I know these things."

"Actually, the reason I'm here," I said, "is to—"

"—ask me just a few questions for the readership of Mythology Today. I know, I know." He sighed. "Yes. No. Yes, of course. He's my own brother—how did you think I'd feel? Of course. Never. Well, you folks looked so wet and miserable that I couldn't help feeling sorry for you. Yes. I never look back—that's simply not my 'thing,' if I might be forgiven the vernacularism. No, never. I try to maintain a philosophical frame of mind. Also, I'm a vegetarian."

"Wait!" I said, scribbling madly. I lost track. Which questions was I about to ask?"

"If you can't be bothered to keep track yourself, why should I?"

"Well, for the sake of our readers, if nothing else. There's a great deal of sympathy for your plight—chained to this mountain, tormented by an eagle that eats by day your liver which, fiendishly enough, grows back by night. That, and the fire thing. We're all very grateful for fire."

"Like heck you are. I employ a clipping service. For every headline reading 'Fire—What a Marvelous Thing!' there are a hundred 'Nuns and Innocent Children Killed by Fire!' and the ilk. You're wasting your time talking to me about gratitude. Come to think of it, you're wasting my time whatever you say."

I had to admit, the guy was beginning to get my goat. I glanced about at the bleak, night-clad mountain. "You had something better to do?" I asked sardonically.

"Yes. Working on my memoirs, for one. Looking forward. Thinking about the heat-death of the universe. Having my liver eaten. Oh, there are a million things to do!" He turned his gigantic head away from me and stared nobly up at the stars. Then, with a sidelong glance at me, "Any of them preferable to be bothered by a second-rate hack like you."

"Damn it, you could at least pretend to be polite!"

"I don't see why," Prometheus said coldly. "The article you're going to write will be downright snotty."

Then it was dawn, and the eagle came again and began to eat his liver, and of course there was no talking to him then. So I left.

Down from the mountain I stamped, fuming with every step.

Gods, what an arrogant creature! No wonder he was chained on that cliff! I'd've done it myself. Zeus was probably just waiting for the excuse.

Damn right, my article was going to be snotty!



© 2002 by Michael Swanwick and SCIFI.COM.

[Neshanic]

29. "A Christmas Memory" Truman Capote also "The Santaland Diaries", by my fave

http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/capotechristmas.html