‘Something that Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July

“We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

Short stories aren’t about things; they are the things themselves. Sure, they’re braided with thematic skeins simply by virtue of possessing characters with human sensibilities. But unlike the vast canvases of their flabby cousin, the novel, they tend to revel in artifice, an authoritative geometry of their own. July’s achingly poignant and at times hilarious tale of a complex, often unreciprocated friendship achieves its unifying identity from the vulnerable, compelling narrative voice. It’s a heavily stylised story that transcends its own themes of loneliness, coming-of-age, alienation and sexual identity by having us ache alongside the narrator, accompanying her in the kind of intimate possession all great stories achieve.

First published in the New Yorker, September, 2006 and available to subscribers to read here; collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You, Simon & Schuster, 2007, as well as in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, HarperPress/HarperCollins, 2008