fwriction

I cannot wait for Emma Straub’s collection, Other People We Married, to come out next year (from FiveChapters). In the meantime, enjoy this new piece from a Story of the Day favorite, thanks to Cal Morgan’s Fifty-Two Stories, and pre-order Emma’s collection, posthaste!

“Marjorie’s husband, Steve, had had a big personality and the kind of booming voice that often made people turn around in restaurants. In the end, it was his heart that stopped working, as they had long suspected it would be. There had been too many decades of three-hour dinners, too much butter, too much fun. Steve had resisted all the diets his doctors suggested on principle—if that was living, what was the point? He’d known that it would happen this way, that he would go down swinging, or swigging as the case may have been. Marjorie understood. It was the children who argued.”

(Bonus: Emma Straub’s first SoTD entry: “Puttanesca”)