Granta 126

'The weekend her father left -- left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back -- he said 'You can raise Nickie by yourself. You'll be good at it. And I had said, 'Are you on crack?' And he replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, "Yes, a little."--Lorrie Moore 'Hey,' Paul yelled out. 'Why's everybody talking behind the patient's back?' 'Shut up, we're having sex,' she called back. She poured a cup for herself. 'He seems pretty chipper this morning.' 'Yeah, I don't know what to hope for,' I said. 'Quality, I guess. And then not too much quantity.'--David Gates'If everything we said had been a poem, the index of first lines would have formed a pattern: 'Do you remember', 'Tell me if I remember wrong', 'There was that time', 'Wasn't it funny when' --Anne BeattieAnd Abeer Ayyoub, Bernard Cooper, Olivia Laing, Laura Kasischke, Thomas McGuane, Colin McAdam, Katherine Faw Morris, Melinda Moustakis, Norman Rush, Edmund White and Joy Williams