On "Still Life with Dog" by Misty Urban (9750 words) ***

Sometimes telling a story is like juggling, although I don't juggle, so maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Maybe I should say a story is like juggling ideas and tasks and themes--but especially ideas, and thing. The trick is to bring them all together, and in a good story, this often happens all at once, some climactic scene near the end in which the dog meets the ice cream meets the concept of loneliness and that black hawk helicopter that keeps showing up in the boy's dream--you know, the whole 12 Monkeys thing. And that's what happens here, only this time it's men--several men, and a single woman. Not the making for a good time. Read the story here at Blackbird.