Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Stories

Columns

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 ...

The Act
November 06, 2013
The boy grows up in Toledo in the fifties, where his father works at the tire plant and for the union as a shop steward. He does well in school, studies hard, and on the advice of a teacher applies to a bunch of small, East Coast schools. His father thinks he should go to Ohio ...

Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls
September 05, 2013
The Red Scarf As soon as Pronek stepped out of the plane (an exhausted steward, crumpled and hoary, beamed an “Auf Wiedersehena’ at him), he realized that he had left his red wool scarf with a mustard stain from the Vienna airport cafe in the luggage compartment. He ...

The National Highway Defense Fund
My father had left Kansas City after he finished high school. He’d joined the Navy in ’44, learned to operate destroyer guns, and then shipped quietly off to watch the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. He’d been on leave, visiting a shipmate in Asheville, North Carolina, ...

Four Minutes and 33 Pairs of Sweatpants
You’re both musicians, so I’ll put it to you in musical terms. Certain people have volume problems, simply. They have what you might call an awkward sense of dynamics. They’re loud when the rest of us are soft, and when the rest of us are loud, they fall silent. And ...

Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit
He came to see me at my Atlanta office, after his move back to Plains. It was a slow afternoon and the day’s sessions were already over when the Secret Service men stepped into my foyer. I wasn’t expecting company; my first thought when I opened the door on them—with their ...

Something to Be Proud Of
In Edinburgh an American looked up at the castle, if it was the castle and not a housing project. He saw a crowd of citizens and tourists beginning to gather against the railings on the other side of Princes Street. He crossed the road and looked down into the park. Nothing ...