"The Lie"

"The Lie"
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Rating: 7.5



Short story about a man who plays hooky from work and lies to his boss about his baby dying. The narrator had used up all his sick days, but when the alarm went off and the baby started squalling, he knew he wasn’t going to work.

She wasn’t asking a question, she was making a demand. And I wasn’t about to answer her because the baby was dead and she was dead, too. Radko was dead, Jeannie the secretary whose last name I didn’t even know, and Joel Chinowski, and all the rest of them. Very slowly, button by button, I did up my shirt. Then I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter as carefully as if it were full to the lip and went on out the door and into the night, looking for somebody I could tell all about it. ♦

"Ash Monday"

"Ash Monday"
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Rating: 8.0



Short story about two neighbors in a California canyon, a thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, who lives with his mother, and a Japanese man, Sanjuro, who lives with his wife. A thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, stand outside of his house, smelling gasoline.

She just stood there motionless, as the wind took the flames out of the bamboo and into the yard, rolling on across the hill away from her house and her garden and her tea things and the memory of her mother to set them down in a brilliant sparking burst that was exactly like a fireworks display, cleansing and pure and joyful, on the roof of the house below. ♦