Short story

An armed society is a polite society

Recently, early one morning at my sprawling estate in Swampland, Mississippi (a census non-designated place), I saw a bare-chested man walking across my back lawn beneath my office window. He wore a headband light, which gave him a semi-official appearance, but if he was working in some professional capacity, I reckoned, he’d be wearing a shirt. So I strolled out to the back deck and paused at the iron rail fence that surrounds it, connecting it to our guest house. Just beyond is an open outdoor shower that we use to clean off dogs and swamp muck. In it, with the water running was the bare-chested man — only now he was bare all over. I said, “Hey, buddy, what the heck are you doing?

The Road Not Traveled

Meredith Swann is driving in her new car under the M40 flyover, checking on her GPS system to see if she’s following the flowing arrows correctly. She has switched off the woman’s voice — “Turn left in 200 yards” — because it reminds her uncannily of her mother, all calm, quiet advice with a subtext of disapproval. She turns and turns again. Now she is on a road of towering glass office blocks. Is she lost? No, there it is — Sainsbury’s Homebase. She parks, steps out of her car and pulls down her T-shirt to cover the neat dome of her pregnant belly. The car magically locks itself as she walks away, its lights giving her a knowing wink of acknowledgment. In the vast Homebase she is daunted and diminished by the size of the place.

road traveled meredith