Collected Stories

he’d given the subject thought and made a careful decision. She still thought he was wrong, but it wasn’t her decision to make, and it occurred to Sylvie that perhaps the truth was more complicated for William because of his past. Now that she knew about his lost sister—a baby girl who had died—it made sense to Sylvie that his worry over his daught

The story that isn’t Mark Nechtr’s by Mark Nechtr concerns a young competitive archer, named Dave, and his live-in lover, named L____. Dave, who is not nearly so healthy as Mark, believes that the only things that give his life meaning and direction are his competitive archery and his lover, L____, who is a great deal more attractive and sympatheti

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves.

The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.