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“Without Inspection,” Edwidge Danticat
The invited response upon finding Arnold hurtling through the air toward his death is to wonder what put him in that position. Even with the idyllic, flashing memory that follows—of his son, Paris, and Paris’s mother, Darline, the three of them happy and together on Paris’s kindergarten graduation day—it’s very possible that Arnold’s story will be the story of a fall: his descent from family happiness to the decision to end his life. But the context added by the following paragraph reveals that Arnold’s is a different type of fall entirely, one “he had neither intended nor chosen,” but a…
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“The Narayans,” Akhil Sharma
The story is told from the perspective of a community of Indian immigrants in Edison, New Jersey. It centers on an act of incest and its aftermath, to which the first-person plural “we” bears imperfect and scathing witness. Not everyone in the community views or responds to the events in the same ways, but the tide set in motion by Madhu’s pregnancy casts her and the crime’s other victims out to sea, adrift from the community and with no hope for peaceful harbor. The reader learns about Madhu’s pregnancy from Nehali, who, like Madhu, is fourteen at the time. She…
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“Los Angeles,” Ling Ma
Ma employs a “mash” of striking imagery throughout “Los Angeles.” The story opens with three “wings,” one of which, the wing housing the narrator’s 100 ex-boyfriends, is “like a gnarled, broken arm.” It’s an image of a grounded, broken-winged bird that, like the narrator’s ties to these boyfriends, is incapable of flight. It’s an image of damage and decay that immediately invites the reader to question the cause. Why is it broken? And why is it left to rot in a withering, unhealed state? Later, the image becomes definitively violent when it’s revealed that the narrator was the victim of…
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“Pulse,” Cynan Jones
The story opens in a tense period of waiting. A couple and their young, unexpected but very present child are holed up in a cabin in the middle of a storm after two weeks without heating, and a pine tree is threatening to fall on nearby power lines. There’s a glaring sense of powerlessness, of incompetence in the face of uncontrollable events whose consequences could (should) have been ameliorated by past action. How did we get here? And who can save us now? These questions and their accompanying fear, regret, longing, and uncertainty are the pulse of the story, which…
Short Story Stack 