The Best Short Stories I Ever Read

Well, I suppose the headline is a shorn sheep, and we need to fish through the bale of wool for a more accurate assessment of the list. These are the best short stories I ever read that I can remember off the top of my head. Since the top of my head is a barren wasteland, at least on the underside, I can’t answer for what’s growing in there from day to day. Tomorrow I might have put McElligot’s Pool on the list. I can’t be trusted.

So it might not be a good list, but by golly, it’s a list. But please, don’t read anything into the numbers. You can rank them if you want, but I didn’t. And remember, no wagering.

1. The Dead – James Joyce
Of course The Dead is the last story in Dubliners, a compendium of short stories. Any one could have made this list. It’s just the best, and he knew it. Not many people know that before he decided to show off, and molest the dictionary for 900 pages at a time, Joyce was a profoundly good short story writer. The story is a memento mori that beggars my ability to describe it. It explains being Irish, being married, being drunk, and being invited into a woman’s mind. Unlike Joyce’s other stuff, the meaning is very dense, but there’s no textual congeries to unravel.

2. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber – Ernest Hemingway
I’ve never even gotten the urge to read Hemingway’s big books, or watch the movies made from them. I respected the comma-starved style he invented, but that’s about it. His autobiographical book, A Moveable Feast, ended up getting thrown across my living room about halfway through it. Man, I thought I was a self-absorbed jerk, but that book taught me I’m just a piker. The Old Man and the Sea is terrific, though, but it’s technically a novella, not a novel or a short story, so I wouldn’t put it on this list. It sums up Hemingway’s whole shtick, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I found out only fairly recently that Hemingway was a superb short story writer. Macomber illuminates the fight between heroism and cowardice in men, and how some women are either at your feet or at your throat, and how far they’ll go to get the last word.

3. The Devil’s in the Cows – Sippican Cottage
Speaking of self-absorbed writers, how about this guy? I’ll recuse myself from talking about it, at least. According to Chad, it’s a “stark, poetic reflection on rural labor, generational duty, and quiet sacrifice. Told through a father’s aching address to his son, the piece captures the brutal rhythms of farm life with lyrical grit. At once tender and unflinching, it evokes the weight of inheritance and the ghosts that come with it.”

4. Esmé – Saki
Ah, another pen name. H.H. Munro died pretty young in a shell crater during World War I, so his output is fairly small. In many ways, he was the prototype for comic writers like P.G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward. Esmé is a wild tale of two aristocratic ladies who more or less adopt a hyena while out foxhunting. It’s a wonderfully camp skewering of the upper class, with witty asides.

5. The Kiss – Anton Chekhov
An impressionable young man gets a kiss meant for someone else in a darkened room, and his mind runs wild afterwards. Men are, after all, the hopeless romantics in this world. Like lots of Russian stories, it’s straightforward and inscrutable at the same time.

6. The Man Who Would Be King – Rudyard Kipling
Lots of people encounter this tale via the superb 1975 film adaptation directed by John Huston with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. It’s a revelation to read the story afterward, and see how short it is. Hubris meets nemesis in one of the greatest tales of adventure ever written.

7. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
I was always staggered by Conrad’s ability to write in English. He was a Pole, and didn’t learn to speak English fluently until his twenties. His descriptive ability is unmatched by his peers, while he’s able to subtly weave in subtext that many overlook. Many writers can’t do either thing. A look at what happens to men unmoored from civilization and abstract morality.

8. The Gift of the Magi – O. Henry
O. Henry was a pseudonym. I love those. William Sydney Porter was about as prolific a short story writer as you could name. He wrote more than 400 of them, none better than the Gift of the Magi. The story can seem a little trite to modern folks, but then again, many people think Shakespeare’s stuff is full of hackneyed phrases, because they don’t know he invented them all. The lesson that generosity doesn’t require a bankroll is rather lost on people nowadays.

Sometimes prolific short story and novel writers have pretty unsophisticated vocabulary, but O. Henry was a lively stylist as well as a gifted storyteller.  Porter’s life story might be even more interesting than his stories. Accused of embezzling from a bank he worked at, he escaped to Honduras. His best friend there was a train robber. Porter wrote Cabbages and Kings, a collection of loosely related short stories about Central America, in which he coined the term “banana republic.” He eventually returned to the US to care for his sick wife, did a stretch in prison where he became the pharmacist, was let out early, and resolutely drank himself to death over a period of nine years. People still leave $1.87 in change on his grave.

9. To Build a Fire – Jack London
A man faces death in the wilderness. He learns the hard way that nature has no opinion. It’s the kind of story that intellectuals try to write, and fail miserably at, because they’ve never been outside during daylight. Jack was the man for the job.

10. Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was always a loopy writer, which made a lot of his output interesting for its own sake. Harrison Bergeron plowed the same fields as other dystopian stories like 1984, but had Vonnegut’s usual entertaining tics in it. It’s the best disquisition on the inequality of forced equality ever written. And if you’ve been paying attention to events recently, perhaps more prescient than any other dystopian scenario.

The “Not Quite a Short Story” Hall of Fame:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the greatest writer who ever lived, maybe save one. Mark Twain is famous for his short stories, but honestly, the ones he’s famous for aren’t his best work. For instance, The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County made his name, but it’s a minor work. The best Twain short stories are from his books like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. Most of his output was serialized in newspapers as he wrote it, and then collected, so they’re basically short stories stitched together. And the fact that they’re supposedly factual doesn’t make them any less of a story. As Twain once wrote, get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.

You can pluck out any number of vignettes in Innocents that are the funniest things ever written, like his butting heads with a gondolier in Venice, or trips to barbarous barbers, or being fumigated in Naples. But his rundown of the wonders of the Turkish bath in theory, and its repellent nature in fact, is one of his finest. Read it here, at the tail end of Chapter 34.

You can argue with me in the comments if you like. But not about Twain.

I Must Not Do It

I MUST NOT DO IT

I couldn’t buy her a birthday present. I have no money. That is to say: there is no money. Money can’t be had.

I have seen money. Felt it in my hand. I have wasted it one day and built temples to my fellow man the next with money, with no good reason to do either. I have watched it slumber in a bank book with my name on it waiting for nothing more than a notion and a signature. All gone. Gone for good, I think but must not say. She hears everything I say. I utter the sounds but I don’t listen to what I’m saying. What is the line? I must remember the line. Strut and fret upon the stage, I think. Strut and fret his hour, it goes. Yes, that’s it. I strut and fret though my hour is long over. Oh, I’m full of sound and fury.

The fury is nothing, just like in the play. I say these extravagant things and they roll off my tongue but they signify nothing to me or the rest of the world, except for her. That is why I must not say them. I must not, I must not. She hears them and they burrow deep and make a nest in her heart. She takes them in like a stray cat or a rain dog and gives them the home they don’t deserve. Same as she did for me, I guess. But my words are born hunchbacked. They foul their new nest and they break her heart.

It’s her birthday and I needed to find something. I chant it in my heart like a monk murmuring over his beads. I know why the monks chant. They chant to keep themselves from thinking about the topic at hand. They say words they can’t bring themselves to believe, over and over again, to keep from thinking about what’s coming out of their mouths. They have committed the great sin of being born, and they can’t handle it. They whisper some dread god’s name time and again hoping it will ease the expected blow if they bow and scrape. They never learn that dread comes with earplugs. Deafness comes with the job description. Gods or devils, it makes no never mind. What difference does it make if they brain you with a scepter by accident or poke you with a trident with a purpose? Either way, we’re just the front pins in their game of skittles, whether we’re good or bad. Sorry, I had to install a pillar of salt somewhere, and you’re in the way. Nothing personal.

Nothing is ever personal anymore. A man with eyes like a rat in the starlight put us in the street and said it was nothing personal. Something about having the sheriff tagging along made me suspect he was worried that there might be something personal in it for me. Our little boys looked dazed, and they naturally fear a man in a uniform. My wife never says much of anything but I could read it in her eyes – do not do what I was thinking of doing. I would have made it very, very personal right up until someone brought in the cosh, and she knew it. I yielded to her eyes, like I always have, and I began my new life of living by my wits.

I wasn’t trained to live by my wits, because I am educated. There aren’t any wits required in an office. There’s just a steady drip of nothing personal written in the ledgers and you tend them like a gentleman farmer. In a ledger, people are like carrots in a field. There’s a little bit of green showing to keep track of, but it’s the part you don’t see, the part that’s hidden from view, that defines what you are. Our ledgers were the turnrows that looked down the long winding field of useless green that a man waves over his head to prove to the world that he’s still there. When you grab that green and pull it out of the ledger, when you pull that carrot of a man out of the ground, that’s when you see what he’s really made of. The green was nothing. The green is separated, chop, chop, and the part that’s always kept below stairs is consumed. That’s why it’s a rare man that can afford to be pulled from the ledger.

I farmed men in ledgers all the livelong day without a care in the world until the man I worked for said stop. It was all I was good for, to keep track of the little useless tuft of green that testified that there was a man under there. I was pulled from the ledger like any other man and set in the street where a man lives by his wits or perishes. I’m not allowed the luxury of perishing, not with three other faces arranged around my kitchen table, and I have no wits. That is a hard place to find yourself.

I told her not to worry, that I would reason it out. That’s what I’m good for, reasoning it out. I said it like I say everything. Only she heard it. What could I figure out? The clocks ran backwards now, the sun rose in the west, and there were no ledgers to lord over anymore. I might as well have told her not to worry because tomorrow I’d teach myself to be left-handed. I don’t know what to do. How can I learn how to do it?

I took our little all and squandered it on men that said they had the answer. They said they’d let me in on it for a few pennies. These were men that knew how to live by their wits, I thought. I thought correctly, as it turned out. The only way for a man to live by his wits in this world is to find other men that don’t have any. They found me.

She never complained. Never. Sometimes I’d see her linger over the dishes in the sink, her back turned, her head hung down. There was a pause. She’d lean on the sink for a long moment and perhaps you’d hear the plosh of a drop of water that didn’t come from the tap. Then it would pass and she’d wash the dishes again. I never tried to conjure what was passing by the window of her mind. I’m ashamed to admit it but it’s true. I was afraid to think about it. I sat stock still like a coward until the moment passed, every time. There are some fears a man cannot face.

It was her birthday and I had to find something. I had to. I picked over the winter field of our possibilities one more time like a crow. Could I pawn a present from years gone by, when money leapt into my pocket? No, they were pawned already. I couldn’t steal. I could steal for myself, commit murder, even, if not for money, then for spite at least. But I could not steal for her. It would be like taking the washing from the line behind an angel’s house. She must never touch a stolen thing. It was a disease she must not catch from me without knowing.

I laid in the bed like the undertaker put me there, and turned it over in my head. Tomorrow was the very day and I couldn’t pick the lock of my mind to find what I needed. She was on her side, facing the far wall, and I didn’t know if she was asleep or not. Out of nowhere, she spoke like a whisper in a confessional.

“I know your mind. You must not do it. You must not try it. I know what is in your heart. You will want to make a big show of it but I can’t have it. If you robbed a train and bought me a tiara I’d wear it like a crown of thorns. No matter what gimcrack you bought I would have to ooh and aah over it, and keep it where you could see it. The money buried in it would haunt me every day. It would be a shrine to one more meal that the children would never get to eat, shown to me daily like a penance for a sin I did not commit. You must not do it.”

Just like that, the whisper stopped, and I was left to examine the ceiling again.

I would take my own life, you know, put an end to it, and gladly. One big thing, finally, that was more than just talk. Linger below the chin while shaving. Nothing to it. But I can’t leave her alone in this world. I must not do it.