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Short stories by Canadian writers

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Deep-Holes. Sally packed devilled eggs—something she usually hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts—also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the boys, a half bottle of Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for the occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones—a wedding present—out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing. “Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme,” Kent would say to Sally a few years later, when he was in his teens and acing everything at school, so sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.

“Don’t make fun of your father,” Sally said mechanically. “I’m not. The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo paper, in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. Why the hyphen? “She did. Face. [Harper’s Finest] | Alice Munro’s “Train” (2012) Dimension. Doree had to take three buses—one to Kincardine, where she waited for one to London, where she waited again, for the city bus out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles. All that sitting, either on buses or in the depots, was not a thing she should have minded. Her daily work was not of the sitting-down kind. She was a chambermaid at the Comfort Inn. She scrubbed bathrooms and stripped and made beds and vacuumed rugs and wiped mirrors. None of the people she worked with knew what had happened. Since then, she had cut her hair short and bleached and spiked it, and she had lost a lot of weight.

This was the third time she had made the trip. On the first bus she was not too troubled. On the second bus she began to feel jittery, and she couldn’t help trying to guess which of the women around her might be going to the same place. Mrs. Fiction: Meneseteung. The narrator describes "Offerings," a book of poems by Almeda Joynt Roth, published in 1873. Writer describes the poetess from a photo in the book. In the book's preface, Roth wrote that her father brought the family to the wilds of Canada West (as it then was).

She was 14, the eldest child. The third summer after they moved, her brother and sister grew ill and died. Three years later, her mother died. Almeda cared for her father until his death 12 years later. Writer quotes parts of Almeda's poems. Alice Munro. Undefined undefined "Boys And Girls" My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders. Back To Main Page. Leaving Maverley - The New Yorker. In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. Morgan Holly was the owner and the projectionist. He didn’t like dealing with the public—he preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story on the screen—so naturally he was annoyed when the girl who took the tickets told him that she was going to have to quit, because she was having a baby.

He might have expected this—she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show—but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise. Fortunately, she came up with somebody who might replace her. A girl who lived on her street had mentioned that she would like to have an evening job. She was not able to work in the daytime, because she had to help her mother look after the younger children. Amundsen. On the bench outside the station, I sat and waited. The station had been open when the train arrived, but now it was locked. Another woman sat at the end of the bench, holding between her knees a string bag full of parcels wrapped in oiled paper.

Meat—raw meat. I could smell it. Across the tracks was the electric train, empty, waiting. No other passengers showed up, and after a while the stationmaster stuck his head out the station window and called, “San.” The men got off at a sawmill in the bush—it wouldn’t have been more than ten minutes’ walk—and shortly after that the lake came into view, covered with snow. All avoided looking at me as I climbed down behind the meat woman. The doors banged together, and the train started back. Then there was silence, the air like ice. But the birch bark not white after all, as you got closer. “Where you heading?” “I’m not a visitor,” I said.

“Well, they won’t let you in the front door, anyway,” the woman said with some satisfaction. “Are you? “Yes.” Haven. All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver. The boys’ hair was longer than it had been, but not straggling down their backs, and there didn’t seem to be an unusual amount of liberation or defiance in the air.

My uncle started off by teasing me about grace. About not saying grace. I was thirteen years old, living with him and my aunt for the year that my parents were in Africa. I had never bowed my head over a plate of food in my life. “Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” Uncle Jasper said, while I held my fork in midair and refrained from chewing the meat and potatoes that were already in my mouth. “Surprised?” “They don’t say anything,” I told him. “Don’t they really?” In Ghana, where my parents were teaching school, they seemed not to have come across any heathen. “My parents are Unitarians,” I said, for some reason excluding myself. “See? Deep-Holes - The New Yorker. Sally packed devilled eggs—something she usually hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts—also a packing problem.

Kool-Aid for the boys, a half bottle of Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for the occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones—a wedding present—out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing. “Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme,” Kent would say to Sally a few years later, when he was in his teens and acing everything at school, so sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.

“Don’t make fun of your father,” Sally said mechanically. “I’m not. The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo paper, in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. Why the hyphen? “She did. We. How_i_met_my_husband_by_alice_monroe. Growing Pains in Wingham, Ontario. I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me. Behind me, as I walked home from primary school, and then from high school, was the real town with its activity and its sidewalks and its streetlights for after dark. Marking the end of town were two bridges over the Maitland River: one narrow iron bridge, where cars sometimes got into trouble over which one should pull off and wait for the other, and a wooden walkway, which occasionally had a plank missing, so that you could look right down into the bright, hurrying water. I liked that, but somebody always came and replaced the plank eventually. Then there was a slight hollow, a couple of rickety houses that got flooded every spring, but that people—different people—always came and lived in anyway.

And then another bridge, over the mill race, which was narrow but deep enough to drown you. That westward road was mine. During my time at the first school, I did make one friend. The wages of sin is death. Face. I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there. In those days, they didn’t let fathers into the glare of the theatre where babies were born, or into the room where the women about to give birth were stifling their cries or suffering aloud. Fathers laid eyes on the mothers only once they were cleaned up and conscious and tucked under pastel blankets in the ward or in semi-private or private rooms. My mother had a private room, as became her status in town, and it was just as well, actually, seeing the way things turned out.

I don’t know whether my father saw my mother before or after he stood outside the window of the nursery for his first glimpse of me. I know what he said. “What a chunk of chopped liver.” Then, “You don’t need to think you’re going to bring that into the house.” One side of my face was—is—normal. My birthmark not red but purple. Of course, my father could not do anything to prevent my coming home. Great Drama. The View from Castle Rock. On a visit to Edinburgh with his father when he is nine or ten years old, Andrew finds himself climbing the damp, uneven stone steps of the Castle. His father is in front of him, some other men behind—it’s a wonder how many friends his father has found, standing in cubbyholes where there are bottles set on planks, in the High Street—until at last they crawl out on a shelf of rock, from which the land falls steeply away.

It has just stopped raining, the sun is shining on a silvery stretch of water far ahead of them, and beyond that is a pale green and grayish-blue land, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky. “America,” his father tells them, and one of the men says that you would never have known it was so near. “It is the effect of the height we are on,” another says. “There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties and even the beggars is riding around in carriages,” Andrew’s father says, paying no attention to them. “What is this?” More lamentation. “Aye. Boys and Girls. Runaway. Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill.

It’s her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson—Sylvia—home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door—but far enough inside that she could not easily be seen—she watched the road where Mrs. Jamieson would have to drive by, her place being half a mile farther along than Clark and Carla’s. If it was somebody coming to see them, the car would be slowing down by now. It was. So. Maybe Clark didn’t know yet. But he would have to know before long. On the other hand, she might telephone. This was the summer of rain and more rain. Nobody showed up for trail rides—even though Clark and Carla had gone around posting signs at all the campsites, in the cafés, and on the tourist-office bulletin board, and anywhere else they could think of. There was still some income from the three horses that were boarded. On the Web, right now, he was hunting for a place to buy roofing.

Et cetera. “So,” he said. Passion. When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago.

There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge. Now there is a village. It is the same with the Travers house, when she finds it, a quarter of a mile farther on. Mr. Mrs. Mr. Wenlock Edge. My mother had a bachelor cousin a good deal younger than her, who used to visit us on the farm every summer. He brought along his mother, Aunt Nell Botts. His own name was Ernie Botts. He was a tall, florid man with a good-natured expression, a big square face, and fair curly hair springing straight up from his forehead.

His hands, his fingernails were as clean as soap itself; his hips were a little plump. But I meant no harm. After Aunt Nell Botts died Ernie did not come to visit anymore, but he always sent a Christmas card. When I started college in the city where he lived, he began a custom of taking me out to dinner every other Sunday evening. I always ordered the most exotic offering on the menu—chicken vol au vent or duck à l’orange—while he always ate roast beef. Ernie looked a little too young to be my father. He inquired about my courses, and nodded solemnly when I told him, or reminded him, that I was in Honors English and Philosophy. They gave me unwelcome advice.

“Arthur.” Dimension. Free Radicals. At first, people kept phoning, to make sure that Nita was not too depressed, not too lonely, not eating too little or drinking too much. (She had been such a diligent wine drinker that many forgot that she was now forbidden to drink at all.) She held them off, without sounding nobly grief-stricken or unnaturally cheerful or absent-minded or confused. She said that she didn’t need groceries; she was working through what she had on hand. She had enough of her prescription pills and enough stamps for her thank-you notes.

Her closer friends probably suspected the truth—that she was not bothering to eat much and that she threw out any sympathy note she happened to get. She had not even informed the people who lived at a distance, to elicit such notes. Not Rich’s ex-wife in Arizona or his semi-estranged brother in Nova Scotia, though those two might have understood, perhaps better than the people near at hand, why she had proceeded with the non-funeral as she had done.

Rich died in June. Deep-Holes. Gravel. Train. Amundsen. The Bear Came over the Mountain. Alice Munro 18 Free Short Stories, Interviews, Review & Articles. Dear Life by Alice Munro – review | Books | The Guardian. Margaret Atwood | Underbrush Man. Fifty-Two Stories » 7. Sunshine Cleaners. AGNI Online: Man from Allston Electric by Daphne Kalotay. AGNI Online: Calamity by Daphne Kalotay. Conversations with Authors: Daphne Kalotay, Boston, 2011. Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay. Antonya Nelson reads Mavis Gallant - New Yorker: Fiction. Rue de Lille" by Mavis Gallant (1985) The Stories of Mavis Gallant | Brick Magazine. Fiction: In Italy. Florida: A new short story by Mavis Gallant - Life & Style. Firebugs. TheBurn-1.pdf.

TheBurn-1.pdf. Untitled Document. Official website of author Craig Davidson | Home.