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Baffler Archives: Stories

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Goodnight Baby
September 06, 2021
Chase loved his bandmates like brothers. Riley, floppy-haired and gangly, manned the fake instruments—melodica and glockenspiel, donkey jaw and rattle—free-playing like a kid in music class. Matt, compact and forever frowning, kept a factory-correct drumbeat, the seatbelt ...

Indescribable Colors
On the palm-sized screen it looks curiously real, like something he’s already seen. She slouches in the drugstore aisle, clawing the skin on the back of her hands, sunglasses black and gleaming in the halogen daylight. This is the girl: a bored blonde, her head at once too big ...

Magus of the Ariegé
Let’s call him the Magus. He never called himself that but his followers did behind his back, the ones who hung on every word in his Amsterdam glory days. He was, in the years before the last century turned, the toast of the local underground, the man who led hundreds on ...

Town of Stairs
The town of stairs was built around a square at the bottom of a deep canyon. The town of stairs kept people in little pods, which branched off from the square, at the top of the canyon. Everyone lived alone in their little pods, and walking up someone else’s staircase was a ...

The Family Nude
1. April 1988: A Long-Distance Phone Call Capitalist families are all alike; every communist family is communist in its own way. My family’s ways of being American communists responded to the changing fortunes of Marxism in the United States over the decades. (And yes, I was ...

Claustropolis: 1984
November 08, 2020
In Bhopal, I could lie low. In Bhopal, there would be instructions for me. Because I had been told not to take the express, I traveled on a local, in an unreserved bogie. The whiskey was Director’s Special, a parting gift from Gupta’s people. I didn’t even wait till ...

Working Vacation
September 07, 2020
OK, so it’s 1850. This guy Allan Pinkerton claims he stopped someone from assassinating the president, and the president hires him to do his personal security during the Civil War, which was a very dramatic thing that happened when the South said WE WILL FUCKING KILL YOU IF WE ...

Shelves
“I was having coffee with my subconscious. He was a peculiar looking man. Small, with a waxed mustache and crossed legs. He repeatedly called me Escobar, though I told him, ‘My name is not Escobar. It is Verskin.’ And he said, ‘What do you know?’ And I said, ‘I know ...

Barn Fowl Drowning in the Rain
The pilgrims come every day, all of them the same: ducking underneath the garage door before it’s settled into its cradle up with the sawdust and the rafters and the cobwebs as fine as angel hair clogged with upward-floating prayers. The pilgrims’ lightning-veined faces all ...

The Promised Hostel
March 09, 2020
Carl is a bipolar orthopedic podiatrist, and he’s fussy at the nipple. He’s been on a nursing strike for the past several days, and Maddy is worried that she’s doing something wrong. She massages a breast, priming the milk for him. After a few false starts, he’s able to ...

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 ...