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Baffler Archives: Stories

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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; ...

Brother
Let’s call him Brother. He walked into one of the cash-only coffee shops on Valencia Street, which was crowded with white folk, mostly writers or aspiring ones, I could tell from the thick, unbreathable air of seriousness, I mean self-importance (to which I contributed my own ...

The Festival of Sadness
December 05, 2016
It was a chilly afternoon but we had come out anyway, wearing hats and jackets to prepare our float for the Festival of Sadness, when one of us, and I think it was Nickerson, spoke up. “I know it’s a little late for this,” he said, “and I know that ...

Dazzle Speaks with the Dead
September 05, 2016
Dazzle was neither a mystical nor a metaphysical sort of dog. He didn’t believe in karma, redemption, the transcendental ego, or the immanence of Platonic forms. For Dazzle, the world was a meaningless and immutable mess—and the byproduct of entirely material ...

Spring
Once last spring, shortly before lunch and setting off for town, I stood halfway up the mountain where one enjoys a beautiful view of the country. The damp earth was fragrant with spring; I had just stepped out of the fir forest and I now stood unmoving next to a shrub or bush ...

Remember This
Remember how you rejoiced at the sweet, fresh green spring, how enchanted you were by the silver-white, sky-blue lake, how you greeted the mountains, how you found everything beautiful that encountered you and you encountered, how you were enfolded by a splendidly vast, ...

Drums of Zaragoza
We practiced in the attic of her father’s orthodontic surgery. Stacked neatly against the back wall were hundreds of small white boxes each containing chalky casts of patients’ teeth. Orthodontistry is a good source for band names. We settled on Acid Etch, the process by ...

The Precious One
Yes, this delicate one led a precious existence. I don’t doubt this for a moment because I understand him, and this being the case, my pen hardly dares to describe or, let’s say, sketch the one who was sitting in a room, reading and trying his best to believe himself happy. ...