Now that Joy, my book of very short stories, is set to come out, I thought I might turn back to more traditional forms of storytelling. But it turns out that these tiny stories aren’t quite done with me yet. My computer file, now titled “Short Shorts” Not Joy,” is quickly filling up with new ideas, or scraps of ideas, or scraps of portions of ideas. The stories are always all around us. The hard part is tuning our ears to hear them.

Here are two new stories that might have been part of Joy if I’d written them a little sooner. Maybe now they’ll be in the next book.

Fed

I didn’t want people to think we were about Jesus or sobriety. We’re there to feed people.  I started the kitchen after my husband Paul died, an aneurysm extracting him from our lives as neatly as tweezers.

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The Third Stillness

Once or twice I thought about suicide, the de rigueur move. But the people who assume dark + solitude = suicide have never paused to feel the plushness of night, supple as a cat. Night is sexier than anyone I’ve ever shared a bed with.