Category: Short Story

A Short Story For Saturday

The haunting opening paragraphs of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic story, “Harrison Bergeron“:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

Read the rest here. Check out other Vonnegut short stories in his collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. Previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

Here’s the opening paragraphs of Benjamin Markovits’s “Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History,” first published in the Fall 2008 Paris Review:

I used to be friendly with a kid called Sam Bamburger, whose mother was the first woman I ever heard of to get divorced. Sam was about nine at the time and up to that point something of an all-American kid, except maybe shorter and paler. He had fair hair and a small nose and the kind of face that looked either innocent or cruel. Sam played shortstop on my Little League team and had the reputation among the fathers of being a prospect—if he grew, that is. He never grew much.

Hard to say how we became friends. He lived not far from me, just the other side of Speedway, in a small corner house that overlooked a park. The park had the nearest swimming pool—nearest, I mean, to me. I used to bike there in the summer and lock my wheels against the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool. Afterwards, when I was tired of swimming, I looked around for kids to play basketball with on the court next door. Sam’s house was close enough that we could run back for a ball if no one was playing, but that can hardly be how I got to know him in the first place. I remember feeling that I didn’t have much choice in the matter—in our friendship. Maybe he took me in a game of pickup, and together we held court for an afternoon. (I was already about a head taller than Sam.) Sam liked leading; I liked winning.

Read the rest here. For more, check out Markovits’s latest novel, Childish Loves. Previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

by Jessie Roberts

Today’s story has remarkable staying power: E.M. Forster wrote “The Machine Stops” in 1909, but it’s proved so prescient that technologist Jaron Lanier has called it “that preternatural oracle of internet culture.” An excerpt:

For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Keep reading here. Previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The avant-garde writer Yi Sang’s dreamlike 1937 short story Child’s Bone (pdf) – one of 20 modern Korean classics now available free online – opens dramatically:

This is the scene that my feelers detect.

After a long period of time I open my eyes to find myself on my own, lying in a neat, empty room on the city’s outskirts. When I look around me, the room settles like a memory. The window is dark.

Soon after, I’m shocked to discover a suitcase that I must guard. I also discover a young woman placed like a potted plant beside the suitcase.

When I continue to look at this strange sight, would you believe it, she gives me a smile! Ha ha, this I remember. I think hard. Who is it that loves this woman? While I’m still thinking, I start by asking, “Is it dawn? Or is it dusk?”

She nods and then smiles again. Her skirt and jacket, which are suitable for May, swish as she opens the suitcase. She takes out a gleaming knife.

Keep reading here (pdf). Check out previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

Neil Gaiman’s 1200 word short story, “Down to a Sunless Sea,” makes for a perfect quick dive into fiction. It begins:

The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.

It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.

Read the rest here. For more, check out Gaiman’s most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

James Franco reads Amie Barrodale’s short story, “William Wei,” first published in the Summer 2011 Paris Review:

The opening paragraph:

I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t remember where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her. She said that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that. I remember I woke up with the cops in my house, asking me if I knew this girl. I said of course, she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really funny. After that, I didn’t drink for about five months. I was mostly celibate, except for my upstairs neighbor, until she moved away. She was this Indian girl. She liked to do it from behind, in this one position. That was the only thing she wanted to do. The other things were boring, she said. When I went to the shower, she got up on all fours to masturbate.

Keep reading here. Check out our previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The intriguing opening lines of George Saunders’s “Sea Oak“:

At Six Mr. Frendt comes on the P.A. and shouts, “Welcome to Joysticks!” Then he announces Shirts Off. We take off our flightjackets and fold them up. We take off our shirts and fold them up. Our scarves we leave on. Thomas Kirster’s our beautiful boy. He’s got long muscles and bright-blue eyes. The minute his shirt comes off two fat ladies hustle up the aisle and stick some money in his pants and ask will he be their Pilot. He says sure. He brings their salads. He brings their soups. My phone rings and the caller tells me to come see her in the Spitfire mock-up. Does she want me to be her Pilot? I’m hoping. Inside the Spitfire is Margie, who says she’s been diagnosed with Chronic Shyness Syndrome, then hands me an Instamatic and offers me ten bucks for a close-up of Thomas’s tush.

Do I do it? Yes I do.

Keep reading here. For more, check out Saunders’s latest collection of stories, Tenth of December. Previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening paragraph of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” published in the May 15, 1948 issue of The New Yorker:

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

Read the rest here. For more, check out The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Explore previous SSFSs here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening lines of Chris Offutt’s “Mr. Cartoon“:

We got one channel that came over the mountains from West Virginia, and bad weather just about ruined that. On stormy winter nights Papaw went outside to turn the antenna while my big brother, Wendell, stayed in front of the TV, watching for the picture to get better. I stood in the doorway and yelled back and forth between them.

Papaw twisted the pole and hollered, “What now?”

“What now?” I said to Wendell.

“Nothing yet,” Wendell said.

“Nothing,” I yelled to Papaw.

He moved the antenna some more. When the picture got good, Wendell said, “Stop!” and I said, “Stop!” but usually Papaw was done past the stopping place and the picture went bad again.

Read the rest here. For more, check out Offutt’s collection Out of the Woods: Stories.

A Short Story For Saturday

Zachary S. Tompkin’s “Magic Wand” begins:

The magician stood in front of the children. The parents stayed in the kitchen – the men standing at the bar swigging bottled beer and jawing about sports; the women sitting at the table swirling pink wine and rehashing the happenings of their own children’s birthday parties.

Raymond Badgely Jr. was turning five. His parents had every intention of booking a room at the Party Palace, but since Raymond Badgely Sr. lost his job earlier that month the family had been making cuts. Late one evening, Marie Badgely flipped through channels hoping to drown out her husband’s snoring when she caught an ad for a children’s magician on the station that runs a low-budget slideshow of local advertisements.

Continued here. Previous SSFSs here.