The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joy Williams

Elizabeth always wanted to read fables to her little girl but the child only wanted to hear the story about the little bird who thought a steam shovel was its mother. They would often argue about this.

Her depression became general. They had been married for almost six years but they were still only twenty-four years old. Often they would go to amusement parks. They liked the bumper cars best.

The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor, actually.

“That is real messy writing,” Jane said. “It’s all scrunched together. If you were writing to anyone other than a dog, they wouldn’t be able to read it at all.”

“Two teenagers escaped without a scratch,” the man said. “Lived to laugh about it. They are young and silly but it’s no joke to the engineer. The engineer has a lot of paperwork to do after he hits something. The engineer will be filling out forms for a week.” The man’s tattoo said MOM AND DAD.

He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake.

In the car again, Janice remarked that Leo seemed like a good man. “He’s all right,” Rose said. “Whenever he gets drunk he threatens to kill the kids’ rabbits, but he hasn’t done it yet.”

“My first stroke,” her mother said. “I remember it as though it were yesterday.” “Well,” Toby said, “it wasn’t.” “There was a sound like cloth ripping. The thing zigged through me just like that and then I was on the floor for no one knew how long before anybody came.”

Toby sat on the porch of the next house she was about to unload and looked at the street. There would be no trick-or-treaters. It was a bad neighborhood and many of the kids were undoubtedly in jail.

“What I like about our group is that it isn’t a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn’t handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.” They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.

“There it is, Steadman,” Denise said. It all just hung there for an instant before the car swerved around them and turned in inches beyond their front bumper. Then, whatever was driving it slammed on the brakes.