This is another story where, when I go to talk about it, it feels most appropriate to just reproduce for you its opening line: “I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph — or rather, what was being done to her — just that when I saw it for the first time, in the museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead five years.” I mean, if that doesn’t engage your interest, if that doesn’t engineer serious narrative momentum for you, I don’t know what will. To say too much would be to risk spoiling a story that you can only read for the first time once, so I will only say that Kathleen Alcott’s is one of my favorite voices to read on the page and this story is all the evidence I need to present my case that she is among the strongest sentence-level writers in her generation. I first read this story in Zoetrope, and predicted — correctly, if I can toot my own horn for a second — that it would be included in Best American Short Stories in 2019. It’s simply unforgettable.

First published in Zoetrope 22.1, soon will be more widely available in Alcott’s debut collection of stories Emergency, W. W. Norton, 2023