fwriction

Happy Monday to all. Today’s Story of the Day comes from a fwriction favorite: David Means, whose new collection, The Spot, is out now and pretty fantastic. (“Reading Chekhov” may be tops in the collection for me, followed closely by “Facts Toward Understanding the Spontaneous Human Combustion of Errol McGee.”)

I hope you enjoy today’s story, from The New Yorker:

Five days of trading the field glasses and taking turns crawling back into the trees to smoke out of sight. Five days on surveillance, waiting to see if by some chance Carson might return to his uncle’s farm. Five days of listening to the young agent, named Barnes, as he recited verbatim from the file: Carson has a propensity to fire warning shots; it has been speculated that Carson’s limited vision in his left eye causes his shots to carry to the right of his intended target; impulse control somewhat limited. Five days of listening to Barnes recount the pattern of heists that began down the Texas Panhandle and proceeded north all the way up to Wisconsin, then back down to Kansas, until the trail tangled up in the fumbling ineptitude of the Bureau. For five days, Barnes talked while Lee, older, hard-bitten, nodded and let the boy play out his theories. Five days reduced to a single conversation.