Quietwriter: Short Fictions

A dinner for nine. Eight come, and nobody mentions the empty chair. Julian is seated beside the hostess because he is pleasant to look at while she talks. At dessert the host asks for a gift, and Julian hands him one: every word the host says to him tonight, written down before he arrives. A serial, told cold. One table, one document at a time.

A garage in the last heat of summer, a wall of tools hung in black outlines, and two brothers dividing what is left. The good tools go first, without argument. Then there is only a hammer, and a summer only one of them remembers. A short story about who was actually there.