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Baffler Archives: Stories

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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 ...

Epic Freight
Michael rowed the boat ashore and moored it to a gnarled stake. He reached into the fold of his turtleneck sweater and pulled out a map drawn on the back of a wallet-sized photograph. In a clump of cattails he found the beat-up giftbox marked “Dirt Towers,” his orders ...

from How Late It Was, How Late
Alright? Just find this damn bloody button … The doors shut on him. They opened again. Fucking bastard, muttered the guy. The doors shut. Sammy waited a wee minute then wandered. A door opened. He called: Hullo? Yes? said a man with a polite voice. I’m looking for ...

Meeting Polanski
I should have seen it coming. I should have known it was going to happen. I mean it’s not like I wasn’t forewarned. All the signs were there that this was going to be the worst day of my life, and the very best I could probably expect from it was an over-the-counter ...

What Jane Wore to Jamaica
January 23, 2013
Emerging from the subway into the miasma of workers, men striding superbly in their splendid suits streaming currents of thick-headedness and cologne, ripe to bursting with self-confidence and generalized contempt, lost in thought no doubt of cigars growing cold on their ...

Springs
January 18, 2013
It’s so damn long ago that I started remembering myself from a movie. Walking around in circles in a widely-striped tan and white turtleneck sweater in the middle of the winter when I was 32. I had that one basic shape. Looking around, confused, nothing to do. I kept ...

To the Magical Memory of Rain
January 17, 2013
Out of the supermarket, on their way home with three bags full of groceries in their arms, foul weather struck down the day and swept up the loveliness in a monstrous rain. Felicity felt that she had been momentarily prevented from making any revelations to Desirée. They ...

Heather
The day my father told me he was leaving for China he found me sitting on the back steps digging my toe into the dirt and playing with an errant stick I’d found far from whatever tree had rejected it. Twelve was my age. We were reading Johnny Tremain in school and dominating ...