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Baffler Archives: Stories

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Solitude
I’ve got money. But money means nothing. I have no visa. So I can’t leave the airport. I can’t take the express train to Vienna. So I drink Viennese coffee and eat Sachertorte. I’ll be trapped in Terminal C for a full seven hours. How many perfumes can you try out in the ...

A Beauty
Peter Fedorovich was gorgeous as a morning star. The moment office ladies glimpsed his shimmering locks at the door they fell on the floor in a deadly swoon. A bookkeeper once had to be hospitalized: she fainted still hugging her enormous electric typewriter, and it crushed two ...

The Agony of Leaves
April 10, 2014
I do not want to beat about this bush or that bush. I will say it straight: I am not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone ...

Up in Birdland
They could eat and not care about bad cholesterol, heart disease, or cancer. They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again. No more wearing a mouth guard at ...

Invasion of Grenada
Maybe we weren’t meant to be foster parents. It’s important to learn these things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed us up for the project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn’t have firearms scattered around the house or ...

Lancelot Gomes
February 14, 2014
It was Filomena Rodrigues who broke the news at the Panjim fish market. She ran into her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, who was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky ...

Mr. Secondhand
February 13, 2014
When Cajetan Xavier sold his ten-year-old Vespa to buy a ten-year-old Maruti 800 it came as no surprise to the other residents of St. Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula. The wiry frame of Cajetan putt-putting on his aging scooter up the steep slope before the National Institute of ...

Bhutas
February 12, 2014
Sant Ram did not have a drinking problem when he started working at the museum. That was a year ago. It was L.M. Pant, the museum’s director, who gave Sant Ram the job as a watchman. Sant Ram arrived in Delhi from the hills to stay with a cousin’s uncle, who was the ...

Bcc: Dridge
B: There’s an asp. A: I follow you. B: You knew? A: No. B: But you follow; you do follow. A: Yes, now. B: I see. A: I failed to mention that reportedly there was some mix-up. Maybe I should have said this in the meeting just now, to everyone. It’s nothing to concern yourself ...

Give Her to Me
This Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, “Fifth” and “Tenth,” so named as a joke. Misha survived by ...

2312
Take an asteroid at least thirty kilometers on its long axis. Any type will do—solid rock, rock and ice, metallic, even iceballs, although each presents different problems. Attach a self-replicating excavator assembly to one end of the asteroid, and with it hollow out your ...

Edge Lands
The morning after the coup d’etat, we walked up the rocky trail behind Elkin’s house to the Prozac Tree. Our late dinner party had gone all night, fueled by old records and new wine. Elkin’s earthen neo-adobe sheltered us from the arroyo-cleansing thunderstorm we watched ...