May is National Short Story Month, so, coupled with a prompt from The Time is Now, please enjoy the following short story.
Guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2019, Anthony Doerr, discussed a list of dos and don’ts authors frequently hear mentioned when writing short stories. He described how much he loves when authors break those rules.
In the spirit of those rules, write a story that breaks some of the commonly suggested “rules” or suggestions authors get when writing a short story. (April 30, 2025, The Time is Now.)
Tell me I’m handsome. Tell me you love me. Tell me all the rules you’ll break just to be with me. Tell me you’ll leave your boyfriend just because you can’t live without me.
I know it sounds vain, but your lust is my elixir. I drink it up like the nectar of the gods. I gobble it down like it is the goddess’s ambrosia. Lying in your bed, watching the lazy rain droplets trickle down the windows, I know I’m where I’m meant to be. I don’t want to wake up. I want to stay here with you in this moment.
You say something stupid like, “But he’ll be home this afternoon. He comes back from his business trip today.” You tell me that every Sunday morning, and every 9 a.m., you break my heart by not wanting to spend your life with me.
I tell you how perfect we’d be together. I remind you of the way our bodies fit together like an open and closed parentheses, but sometimes, you close yourself off from me
like I’m a venom
and you haven’t found an antidote yet
like I’m a disease
and no one has bothered to search for a cure.
You stop me from telling you I love you. You stop me from telling you how perfect your curves are and yet, you’re the dream I don’t want to wake up from.
My eyes are gray from crying too much; I swear the color drained out of them, but you say I’m maudlin, you tell me it isn’t poetry I write you, it’s just sad.
You tell me I could find a girl at a coffeehouse or a bookshop. You tell me I could go to a record store. You tell me those hipster girls would love my photography and my poetry.
You tell me I need to leave you alone. You tell me that I need to stop dropping by, unannounced, that your boyfriend noticed my VW Bug down the street a few nights in a row. He mentioned it to you. He said something about the trampled sunflowers on the front porch.
The ones I thought were poetic and sad.
When I put a dead rat in your mailbox, you called the police.
When I started writing poems in blood, you put a restraining order on me.
But love has always been crimson, and my eyes have always been grey, even before all the crying.
Forgive me, my love. I must have crossed a line, but I just wanted to linger in your bed on a Sunday. I just wanted to hear you say that you loved me.
Isabelle Palerma 