short stories

i have a weakness for well-crafted short stories. they're not supposed to be like little novels. short stories are slices of life. like when you slice an apple, from top to bottom. in some slices, something happens: you hit a seed, you cut the core in half. in most, though, you just get sweet apple and nothing else.

presently, i'm in love with amy hempel.

most of hempel's books are out of print. she just released a book of collected stories containing everything she's published so far. i can't help but share it with other people. maybe you'll love it as much as i do; probably you won't. but you should read it all the same. one of her stories starts with this line: "The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me." that story, "the harvest," is seven pages long and was originally published in her book "at the gates of the animal kingdom." this is a part of it.

***

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

"And you're going back in?" the boy asked.

I said, "And I'm going back in."