The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

Grace Paley, Mary Robison, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Cynthia Ozick, and Ann Beattie.

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Will Rogers called vets the noblest of doctors because their patients can’t tell them what’s wrong. The doctor has to reach, and he reaches with his heart.

My love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back?

But in the morning Chuck purrs against my throat, and it feels like prayer.

She agreed to take Chuck, too, when I said he needed a childless home. He gets jealous of kids and has asthma attacks.

He dropped it on the kitchen floor, a reminder of the cruelty of a world that lives by food.

Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed.

On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried, I enrolled in a “Fear of Flying” class. “What is your worst fear?” the instructor asked, and I answered, “That I will finish this course and still be afraid.”

I had accidents. Then I had bigger ones. But the part that hurt was never the part that got hurt.

I thought the present was the safer bet. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

He said, “I made those seconds live.”

She is unable to tell him, until she does, that the sheet goes first. “My God,” the man says quietly. He stares a thousand miles into the bed.

This was worse than it was because Baby was my neighbor’s dog, left in my care while my neighbor went away.

I knew there was pain in the room—I just didn’t know whose pain it was.

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

“So,” he says. He says, “So, what do you say?”

And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.

that if it’s true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

if you took only half a pill, did it work full-strength for half as long, or half-strength for the regular time?

In my head there’s a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.

that hoping he would call was like the praying you do after the bowling ball has left your hand.

I wish I could say smart things just by saying them.

On the nicer side of not a nice street, between God Bless the Cheerful Giver and his dog, and There But for the Grace of God Go I and his dog, a wino engaged me in the following Q and A: Miss, am I bleeding?

Pal Junior was part something and part something. In a cardigan with leather elbow patches, with his white fur brushed into spikes around his face, Pal Junior was Albert Einstein saving man.

the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

eucalyptus-scented fog.

A short time later, and her voice has lost weight. She is speaking so fast that her thoughts lose their breath catching up.

good clothes on bad bodies,

when I was born, my mother wore me like a fur.

Wildflowers galloped across thorn-free fields, stopping only when cut and placed in water.

There were lessons to be learned wherever one looked, which is not to suggest that those lessons were learned.

It was a time when the only pain was inflicted by bees, and an easy remedy—three kinds of weeds pressed together and rubbed on the sting—was right in your own backyard.

He poured us drinks, said, “This’ll change your handwriting.”

The dogs had been napping in the herb garden, and came inside wagging thyme, basil, and dill through the kitchen.

so the trip had not been a waste of time for him.

He watched me as I ate the cake. I said, “What—am I covered with frosting?” “Every day of your life,” he said, and went home to his wife.

Why get acquainted with what will be left, or leaving?

This is easier, I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less—not more—careful. We can say everything.

These sounds—this letter—it is my lipstick, my lingerie, my high heels.

Everyone here is better than they were there, “there” being anywhere else.

I am not quite myself, I think. But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we all are more ourselves than ever, I suppose.

She plays the drinking down, says she monitored herself using the Jimi Hendrix test: Am I choking on my own vomit? No? Then I can have another drink.

That was when I realized that I don’t mind seeing everything as long as everything is there for me to see.

has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon balloon.

He said it was for the moles in the garden, that we had to chew the gum, then put it down their holes because the moles like the taste and would eat it but couldn’t digest it and it would kill them.

Right Gophers

She says women who have only met her in line at a movie don’t like her.

On the bus on the way to our third and final stop, there was the cicada sound of automatic cameras on rewind.

I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.

“How foolish we were to fear loneliness!”

“It doesn’t have to be complete, your help. The goal is not to erase the problem. You do it to make the choice, to give and get joy in this life.”