Little Things by Raymond Carver

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! she said. Do you hear?

He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?

Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up.

He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.

Bring that back, he said.

Just get your things and get out, she said.

He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.

She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.

I want the baby, he said.

Are you crazy?

No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.

You’re not touching this baby, she said.

The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.

Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.

He moved toward her.

For God’s sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.

I want the baby.

Get out of here!

She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.

But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.

Let go of him, he said.

Get away, get away! she cried.

The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.

He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.

Let go of him, he said.

Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said.

I’m not hurting the baby, he said.

The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.

No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.

But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.

In this manner, the issue was decided.

“Mirrors crack in my teeth. I have to squint to see the scar on my belly and through the blur imagine a cesarean scar, press its ridges, consider something once grew beneath it. I see mostly difference. My hands versus her hands. My uterus versus hers. She tells me she refuses to have children and I imagine cutting babies from her womb, taking them into my dreams. Her womb is milky, full, pulsing. What the doctor must have removed from my body - charred tissue, lung-like, a worthless parachute. The pain visible along its ridges, cuts, where they scraped the growths away. I take my pills with beer or wine and don’t care how they look at me. When I call an ex, I latch onto nostalgia - the sound of a familiar lover, his hands on my belly, our plans for a family - I think of his new lover versus me, her laugh, her eyeliner, her hips, and still he tells me not to worry, that no, my voice has not changed, not one bit.”

Excerpt from “Nothing or next to nothing,” by Barry Graham

“History made sense to me, not because you need to learn where you came from in order to know where you’re going, or because you must learn from past mistakes or you’ll be destined to repeat them, or even because it helps explain why things are the way they are, none of that cliche bullshit. History made sense to me because once something’s done it’s done and there ain’t a fucking thing anyone can do but talk about it. Things happen, then it’s history, then everyone forgets and it becomes nothing.”

From Twenty poems by Anna Akhmatova

“It is not with the lyre of someone in love
that I go seducing people.
The rattle of the leper
is what sings in my hands.”

“In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed
With all the griefs in their arms,

I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.”

“It is strange how old interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by the fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings. Silence, vitiated and demoralized, ferments into recriminations. Why hide it? The excessive excitements and paroxysms of fever have had to be soothed here, night after night by injections of secret drugs, and the wallpapers have provided imagined visions of gentle landscapes and of distant mirrored waters.”

Excerpt from “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” by Bruno Schulz

“Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps, which in direct line are derived from stamp albums?”