“It was in the uterus and had travelled from there to the lungs. In the end, she had accepted it.”
Stories that turn on a singular moment run the risk of appearing gimmicky, like the punchline of a joke, the denouement of a magic trick – briefly thrilling but ultimately facile. Salter, however, sets up this spectral moment so surgically that the thrill endures, the reader both fascinated and appalled as it plays out. Charged with eroticism, betrayal and cowardice, ‘Last Night’ offers none of its protagonists a redemptive escape lane – if you like emerging from a story with a semblance of hope, this one isn’t for you. Humans, men especially, in Salter’s stories, are deeply flawed and self-destructive.
First published in The New Yorker, November 2011,and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Last Night, Penguin Books, 2005
A Personal Anthology 