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Baffler Archives: Stories

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Juan Garín
Spain, 9th century He lived as a hermit in a cave in the mountains, performing austerities. Satan, jealous of his piety, assumed the form of another hermit, living in a nearby cave. The Count of Barcelona, convinced that his beautiful teenaged daughter was possessed, sent her ...

Agnes Blannbekin
Austria, 1243–1315 Although called a saint by many, the Vatican never recognized her. She was a poor peasant who became a nun and practiced extreme fasting in solidarity with the suffering of the world and of Jesus on the cross. She was considered strange and was disliked in ...

Brief Lives (IV)
Vanna of Orvieto (Italy, d. 1306) Her heart burned so intensely that she took off all her clothes to pray and still was drenched in sweat; when she went into a rapture, stretched out as though on the cross, mosquitoes would land on her unblinking eyes. Frederick of ...

Margaret Of Città Di Castello
Italy, 1287–1320 She was born blind, a hunchback, a dwarf who could barely walk. Her aristocratic parents had hoped for a son; ashamed, they kept her hidden in a locked room. At sixteen, she was secretly taken to a church in another town where miracles had occurred. There was ...

Hadewijch*
Belgium, 13th century I saw a queen, wearing a gold dress, and her dress was full of eyes, and all the eyes were transparent, like fiery flames and yet like crystals. The crown she wore on her head had as many crowns, one above the other, as there were eyes in her dress. She ...

Magdalena of the Cross
Spain, 1487–1560 A devout child, at the age of five she was praying in her church in Córdoba when she heard beautiful, ethereal music and a handsome young man with long black hair appeared before her. He was assumed to be Jesus himself, and word spread through the city. She ...

The Men
You could almost call them a squad—sometimes as many as seven, when they all pitched in. They were reliable for plumbing, basic carpentry, minor electrical fixes, and digging holes. They liked to dig holes. They liked it a lot. Twice she’d ordered a bunch of seedlings for ...

The Octopus Dilemma
December 04, 2017
The terms of the bet declared that for every ten seconds under sixty seconds it took the diver to wrestle the octopus out of the tank, Elias Coehorn Jr. would lose a hundred dollars, and for every ten seconds over sixty seconds, he’d win the same increment. The diver that ...

Intervention
My father called to tell me that my sister was going off the rails at college. According to him she was distracted by trivial fascinations, like communal living, and now owned a ferret. She was a sophomore at Oberlin and I hadn’t yet visited, so I used dad’s concern as an ...

Captain’s Table
For the past decade or so, I have been obsessed with news stories about cruise ships, in particular the idea of minor disasters at sea on a floating pleasure dome: norovirus outbreaks; engine room fires that result in drifting without power for five days off the coast of Mexico; ...