The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.  Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as "Beth Israel North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock.  This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
--From The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir by Joan Didion (Knopf/Random House/Vintage, 2006).  This passage is from pages 6 and 7 of the Vintage paperback.

        July 26 2010.
        Today would be her wedding anniversary.
        Seven years ago today we took the leis from the florist's boxes and shook the water in which they were packed onto the grass outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.  The white peacock spread his fan.  The organ sounded.  She wove white stephanotis into the thick braid that hung down her back.  She dropped the tulle veil over her head and the stephanotis loosened and fell.  The plumeria blossom tattooed just below her shoulder showed through the tulle.  "Let's do it," she whispered.  
--From Blue Nights, a memoir by Joan Didion (Knopf/Random House/Vintage, 2011).  This passage is from page 5 of the Vintage paperback.

Children's voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time: 
--From "New Hampshire," a poem by T.S. Eliot, referenced on page 163 of Blue Nights.  (The other poem mentioned there is "Domination of Black" by Wallace Stevens.)

Fiction by Meg Pokrass and other short pieces from First Class Literary Magazine and Right Hand Pointing

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We waited for the phone to ring, for money to plump itself up and walk through our door.  Plenty of moments passed with yarn and crochet hooks.  I made hats that never fit and were put away in a trunk with the old games we didn't have the energy to play.  
--From "Diagram," one of ten pieces of microfiction by Meg Pokrass, FRiGG (Spring 2009).  

My husband, Gordon, looked as though he'd found religion—as though he'd never tasted real food before this beef stew meal at Angie and Ron's.  He appeared to be sucking his teeth after every bite, taking his time, thinking about what he'd sucked—then stabbing a new forkful.  
--From "I Married This," short fiction by Meg Pokrass, The Literarian, Issue 9.

Look at the Korean woman.  How she uses her teeth to pull a prawn off a chopstick.  How she catches the tail from her mouth on a fork.  
--From "Ajumma," postcard nonfiction by Peyton Lunzer, First Class Literary Magazine (January 5, 2015).

I ask 
if you
have put
the sheets
I washed
back on 
the guest
bed . . .
--From "The Problem," postcard poetry by Rebecca Lartigue, First Class Literary Magazine (July 27, 2015).

At Subway, I politely but firmly order a drink and cookie with my sandwich hoping they don't say anything.  And the cashier always says "the meal comes with a drink and TWO cookies."  And I'm always like "yeah, I just don't need two cookies."  And they're always like "well you're paying for two cookies.  It's actually more to just get one." 
--From The Note for Issue 89 of the journal, by Claire Wisely, Right Hand Pointing, Issue 89 (2015).

Because the world is mean . . .
--From "I Study Her Like an Escape Plan," a poem under 25 words by Glen Armstrong, Right Hand Pointing, Issue 89 (2015).

Scrawled on the side . . .
--From "Graffiti," a poem under 25 words by Tammy Bendetti, Right Hand Pointing, Issue 89 (2015).

Nobody showed up for the premiere of my play Performing Privacy.  
--From three pieces on the concept of "sort" by Mark Cunningham, Right Hand Pointing, Issue 88 (2015).

"Get It Back for Me," a short story by Elizabeth Tallent, and two short pieces by Nicole Rollender and Rachel Peters

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The mashed potatoes had dried in peaks, the roast beef was both gray and, depressed with a fork, bleeding.  Shining small peas each contained a glint of unthawed, original cold as brilliant and brief-lived as a snowflakes's.  How she managed this, he said, was beyond him.  Half the food cooked to death, half the food raw.  She knew he was coming home.  All she had to do, all she had to do was have dinner ready.  His answer to her: One night, one night he'd like to come home to some kind of order.  One night, one night of his life he'd like his wife to be happy to see him.  The other guys' wives were happy when they walked in the door.  She said, How did he know anyone else was so happy?  How did he know?  He wasn't walking in their doors, he was walking in this door, and all he could really talk about was this life, and he said they had to be happier than this, had to be.  
--From "Get It Back for Me," a short story by Elizabeth Tallent, first published in Lear's and reprinted in her story collection Honey (Vintage, 1993), pp. 101-117.

You wanted 
to be buried in the green dress

you always wore with pearls.  We'd sit outside your back
door, watching bats swing over the lake.
--From "Scattering," a poem by Nicole Rollender, Linebreak (April 21, 2015).

I hate writing.  Other people go to the gym after work, or see friends on the weekend, and they don't walk around not realizing they have pens in their hair and under their bra straps.  A friend actually told me once that sometimes he has nothing in his head.  Nothing at all.  Radio silence.  I can't imagine how wonderful that must feel.  Other people sleep at night.  Other people read a good book just for the story.  Other people go entire weeks without an e-mail that says you're not a good fit, not quite what they're looking for, the tone just isn't right.  But best of luck elsewhere.  Other people are allowed to keep their own secrets.  
--From "Why I Write: Rachel Peters," an essay by Rachel Peters for the "Why I Write" column, Fiction Southeast (June 26, 2015).

Laura van den Berg's second collection of short stories

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The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris.  The whole time my husband had been talking--telling me, presumably, why he was leaving--I was watching these acrobats do backflips and handstands in synchrony, an open violin case at their feet.  They wore black masks over their eyes and white face paint.  The little gold bells that hung from the sleeves of their red silk jumpsuits jingled like wind chimes.  My husband and I were in the Jardin des Tuileries, sitting on a bench underneath a tree.  We had come to Paris for the weekend, to revive our marriage.  It was what the books and the couples counselor had recommended.  The day he left was our last day there.  We were, in fact, supposed to fly home that evening. 
--From "Acrobat," a short story by Laura van den Berg, first published in American Short Fiction and reprinted in her collection The Isle of Youth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), pp. 93-116.

Ocean of Words: Stories by Ha Jin, a poem by Rachel Morgan, and stories by Anya Groner, Natalie Rogers, and Annie Hartnett

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But the two sisters didn't hesitate at all and started wheeling before us so naturally.  They enacted "The Korean People Love Great Leader Chairman Mao," a sort of Loyalty Dance.  Their long silk skirts waved around while their mother clapped her small hands, crying, "Chaota!  Chaota!"  That means "wonderful" in Korean.  The flame of the kerosene lamp was flickering with the women's movements.  Their shadows were flowing on the floor and the walls as if the whole house was revolving. 
          When they finished, they bowed to us, and we all applauded.  Shunji looked like a young bride in her loose, white dress.
          Guzhe and Guhua, Uncle Piao's grandsons, began to set off firecrackers outside.  I went out to join them.  They dared not light the big ones, so I helped them.  With a burning incense stick, I launched the double-bang crackers into the sky one by one.  It was snowing lightly.  The air smelled of gunpowder as clusters of explosions bloomed among the dim stars.  
--From Ocean of Words, a collection of short stories by Ha Jin (Vintage, 1998).  This segment is from "Uncle Piao's Birthday Dinners," pp. 28-29.

Amy Brown's mother was the bus driver, and so to get to her birthday party all the girls had to do was stay on the bus.  Amy Brown's mother yelled, Sit your asses down.  The girls leaned headfirst over the vinyl seats.  No one sat.  Amy sat.  The sun set.  The suburbs stopped.  Amy Brown's trailer was on the highway.  Amy Brown's mother parked the bus in the grass.
--From "Wood Swallows," a short story by Anya Groner, NANO Fiction (May 8, 2015).

In a child's vision marriage is a house.  Fine lines bisect each plane, clean bleak, like the edge of a farmhouse: flat land, flashes of power lines, old trucks lopsided in gravel, corn, soy, soy, corn.
--From "The Marriage Letters," a poem by Rachel Morgan, DIAGRAM, 14.1.

When I was a child, my mother worried that I would eventually abandon her for the company of friends. But when I still had not made a friend by the end of the second grade, she worried about my social ineptness. Mom blamed my diffidence on my genes. She believed that I felt self-conscious about being bun jan bun gwai, "half-human, half-ghost." Whatever the cause, she knew that I needed help.
          "Little girl," she said in Cantonese. "Is there anyone you'd like to be friends with?"
          She had just served Joe and me our dinner—fried spam over rice. I swallowed a juicy bite of spam and thought of Molly, who sat across from me in Mrs. Singer's class. I liked Molly because she was pretty, and because whenever she chatted with the other kids at our table, she also glanced at me. Her eyes always remembered that I was there.
          "There's one girl," I said. "But she already has a best friend."
          "Joe," Mom said. "Ask your sister what she's mumbling about."
          "I can't be best friends with Molly," I replied, "because she already has a best friend, Chloe."
          "Joe," Mom said. "Tell your sister that if she doesn't want to end up all alone, she better change her attitude."
--From "One-Legged Crow," a short story by Natalie Rogers, New Orleans Review (June 2015).

I called my grandma in Florida.  It was bound to happen, she sighed.  He just needs a hobby, she explained.  But he's wearing your reading glasses, I said, and he has perfect vision.  She suggested I get him a cat.  I hung up the phone when I heard my father clicking knitting needles in the living room.
--From "Dad Grandma," a short story by Annie Hartnett, NANO Fiction (May 10, 2015).

A novel by Per Petterson, stories by Alice Munro and Amy Hempel, and a memoir by Mary Karr

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Early November.  It's nine o'clock.  The titmice are banging against the window.  Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again.  I don't know what they want that I have.  
--From Out Stealing Horses, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (Picador, 2008; Copyright 2003/English translation 2005; first published in the United States by Graywolf Press).

Muriel Snow had not been Millicent's first choice for best friend.  In the early days of her marriage she had set her sights high.  Mrs. Lawyer Nesbitt.  Mrs. Dr. Finnegan.  Mrs. Doud.  They let her take on a donkey's load of work in the Women's Auxiliary at the church, but they never asked her to their tea parties.  She was never inside their houses, unless it was to a meeting.  Porter was a farmer.  No matter how many farms he owned, a farmer.  She should have known.  
--From "A Real Life," a short story by Alice Munro, first published as "A Form of Marriage" in The New Yorker and reprinted in Open Secrets (Knopf, 1994), pp. 52-80.

On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet.  We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater.  I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance.  Throughout the evening, the dog's head moved, following the dancers across the stage.  Every so often the dog would whimper slightly.  "Because he can hear high notes we can't?" my husband said.  "No," I said, "because he was disappointed in the choreography."
--From "The Dog of the Marriage," a short story in four parts by Amy Hempel, from her collection The Dog of the Marriage: Stories (Scribner, 2005), pp. 59-83.  Part 1 was published as "Now I Can See the Moon" in Elle, and Part 4 was first published in The Mississippi Review.   

I knew that neither of my parents was coming.  Daddy was working the graveyard shift, and the sheriff said that his deputy had driven out to the plant to try and track him down.  Mother had been taken Away--he further told us--for being Nervous.   
--From The Liars' Club, a memoir by Mary Karr (Penguin, 1995).

Two stories from Granta and a novel by Ha Jin

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I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn't have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn't, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine, until one day I couldn't stand it any more and I bought myself a pair of black swimming trunks at a store in the centre of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the water and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the water or not . . .  
--From "Beach," a short story by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Granta, Number 114 (July 18, 2011). 

Some time ago, when my husband went to stay at the American Academy in Rome in order to do research, I accompanied him because I had never seen the Roman Forum.  I had a book Harold had given me for my birthday that showed how the ruins looked in the present day, and each page also had its own transparent sheet with drawings that filled in what was missing, or completed the fragments that remained, so you could see what the scene had looked like in ancient times. . . .  At dinner, our first night there, we were introduced to other visitors, and here is where the story starts: they were the parents of a young man to whom our daughter, Angela, had briefly been engaged at the end of her senior year at Yale--so briefly that I had never met his parents, though Harold and Donald Stipley had a passing acquaintance.  
--From "Lavande," a short story by Ann Beattie, Granta, Number 94 (December 10, 2008).   

Finally Taotao got his passport and visa.  For weeks his parents had feared that China, even if not closing the door outright, would restrict the outflow of people.  After the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, all the American airlines except United had canceled their flights to Beijing and Shanghai.  At the good news, Pingping burst into tears.  She quickly rinsed the colander in which she had drained the shredded turnip for her jellyfish salad, took off her apron, and set out with her husband, Nan Wu, for the town center of Woodland, where the office of Travel International was located.
--From A Free Life, a novel by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books, 2007).