On "Remove Yourself" by Catherine Lacey (1396 words) ***

Some stories require you to warm up to them, while others speak to you from the first lines. This is one of the latter for me. It's a piece about "removal," first a literal and immediate removal, and then a longer-term and deeper removal. We start off with a car, a place where the narrator is being told that she is no longer welcome. But, as she notes, she has nowhere else to go. Our sympathies are with her. What's going to happen to her? And why is this happening to her? And then we learn the answer to the first--and a little to the second--and our sympathies shift a bit. Read the story here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "Kids' Choir" by Catherine Lacey (161 words) ***

More of a description of a couple of times juxtaposed against one another than a full-fledged story with a sense of rising action and denoument, Lacey's short piece is admirable for its extremely engaging first sentence and first paragraph and for the letdown that comes with the second paragraph among all of the children. Read the piece here at Matchbook.