Little Frogs in a Ditch by Tim Gautreaux

Old man Fontenot has a grandson who has been deserted by his parents. He (the grandson) schemes up a way to make money off of people selling homing pigeons to them. Old man Fontenot is embarrassed that his grandson would stoop so low as to sell stupid birds to innocent people. He wants his grandson to go and make a confession. '"Remember what Sister Florita told you one time in catechism class? If you close your eyes before you go to confession, your sins will make a noise."

Lenny closed his eyes. "A noise."

"They'll cry out like little frogs in a ditch at sundown."

"Sure," Lenny said with a laugh, his eyeballs shifting under the closed lids. "Well, I don't hear nothing." He opened his eyes and looked at the old man. "What's the point of me confessing if I don't hear nothing?"

His grandfather stood up with a groan. "Keep listening," he said.

This is another one of Tim Gautreaux's great stories.

From Willow Temple by Donald Hall

Unlike Junot Diaz's story Fiesta, 1980, From Willow Temple is written in a rather lengthy narrative. There is little dialogue to the story, but Hall is able to capture the voice of a woman. On reading this story one becomes lulled away by the narrative, and then quickly drawn back to the essence of the story as Hall narrates vivid scenes of sadness and horror:
"After an hour of searching outside the house the men came back, thinking to look in the root cellar. It was Agnes's young father, cousin Michael, who found Rudolph where he had hanged himself in the attic. As Michael walked up the steep stairs with his lantern low, his face brushed against the boots. The impact pushed the boots away, and they swung back to hit him."

Later in the story Hall draws several examples in to one word:

"The word in arbitrary," she went on . . . "Why did the pigs die? Why do poets write poems? . . . Why did Raymond [another person in the story] put a noose over his head? Some mistakes you don't point out . . .

Fiesta 1980, by Junot Diaz

This is a wonderful story told from the view of a teenage boy. Yunior and his family have come to America but have carried with them their Dominican customs. One of them is based on a patriarchal society where males rule. Yunior's dad is abusive and is pretty much a typical male. I found parts of this story comical. I knew which author I was reading and would have guessed if the author's name wasn't listed. Diaz is able to cleverly and adroitly combine both English and Spanish into his narrative to capture the real voice of this teenage boy.

Chez Lambert by Jonathan Franzen

Enid and Alfred are an older couple who have lived together for many years and yet each has their own tendencies and imperfections. "She was looking for a letter that had come by registered mail some weeks ago. She had stashed it somewhere quickly because Alfred had heard the mailman ring the bell and shouted, 'Enid! Enid!' but had not heard her shout, 'Al, I'm getting it!' . . . 'There's somebody at the door!; and she'd fairly screamed, 'The mailman! The mailman!' and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all."

Both voices in this story are surprisingly similar to what one would hear from an older couple. One part of the story is particularly worth quoting:

"Until he retired, Alfred had slept in an armchair that was black...The chair was made of leather that you could smell the cow in. His new chair, the great blue one to the west of the Ping-Pong table, was built for sleeping and sleeping only. It was overstuffed, vaguely gubernatorial. It smelled like the inside of a Lexus. Like something modern and medical and impermeable that you could wipe the smell of death off easily, with a damp cloth, before the next person sat down to die in it.

The chair was the only major purchase Alfred ever made without Enid's approval. I see him at sixty-seven, a retired mechanical engineer walking the aisles of those Midwestern furniture stores that only people who consider bargains immoral go to . . . For his entire working life he has taken naps in chairs subordinate to Enid's color schemes, and now he has received nearly five thousand dollars in retirement gifts . . . After a lifetime of providing for others, he needs even more than deep comfort and unlimited sleep: he needs public recognition of this need."

The end of the story is equally wry and witty: "Al? What are you doing?" . . ."I am ---. . . packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing." . . .

"Its Thursday," she said, louder. "We're not going till Saturday."

"Saturday!" he echoed.

This is by far one of the more funny short stories that I have read: I only look forward to the time when I will be just like Alfred.