The Shortlist for May 23, 2025

There’s a line in the last paragraph of this story that took my breath away. With one phrase adds such depth to the protagonist of this story about a woman stuck in a relationship with an idiot. I won’t quote it below, read the story.

…she slides in across from Cam who leans towards her and she thinks he might kiss her in public only he says he’s going to go to the bathroom and can she order potato skins and that he’s going to try to get them free drinks when he gets back so just go with it, but she doesn’t want any more to drink.

A heartbreaking story about a single dad who loses his job and falls into depression. This one froze me to my chair for a few minutes after it ended.

The last time my father left the house was for a trip with us to Kmart one sunny day when I was eight: Dad shopped for household items, and my older brother and I walked the aisles, looking at the toys and games. Then, never again. He came home for good.

Jennifer was a star when she was young and now she’s a working stiff like everyone else, dreaming about what could have been. It’s not quite clear where Polzin’s story is going, and the ending caught me off-guard. It’s great:

Whenever Jennifer has a glass of wine or two (or three), she thinks about things she might do: she might just hike the Appalachian Trail, or backpack across Europe like some of her friends did in college, or she might go on a camelback desert safari. There’s nothing stopping me, she’ll say to her wine.

In Canada, the narrator of this story would be called a Hockey Dad, even though the story takes place at his kid’s basketball game. Hueller inhabits the man’s head so clearly, and has a couple of sneaky narrative tricks that bring this stressful, kinetic story together:

(And don’t get him started on cell phones, please and thank you. He’d heard on the radio that in some places you could now text 9-1-1, because apparently even when your loved one is lying near-dead on the floor, people can’t be bothered to call and talk to a human voice.)

It’s been a while since I’ve shared an Amy DeBellis story, but this one about the one that got away was funny and bittersweet:

I wake up the next morning with the sensation that my lips weigh ten pounds and are about to drop off my face. I’m too scared to look in the mirror, so I just touch them at first. This is a mistake: my immediate thought is hot dogs. I’ve got two uncooked sausages stapled to my mouth, so fat they’re about to burst out of their casings.  

The narrator’s voice in this story is pitch-perfect, talking with a friend who’s about to go through a divorce, with a sprinkling of some small-town bullshitting:

Looks like the pope is about to die he said and I said that I had heard that.

They put out a statement asking for everyone’s prayers he said. But if he can’t even get his calls picked up then what were any of us supposed to do about it?

What a title, and what a great story to back it up.

Mary finds a file called ‘jesus.pptx’ on the shared work drive, and starts confessing to it.

I told myself to close the file, to get back to work. But I couldn’t. My hands moved without me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I started typing.

I wrote:
I was the one that stole Rachel’s underwear at the 6th grade sleepover.

I had never admitted that to anyone, though the memory haunted me awake with guilt many times in the 20 years since. 

It felt good.