Border to Border: A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

By Kevin Moffett

In this story from Kevin Moffett's dazzling new collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, an immigrant working at an amusement park faces a daunting, dramatic decision when he loses one of his dental crowns. "Having a choice," Maxim realizes, "only meant he was going to make the wrong choice."

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062233158

Kevin Moffett

Kevin Moffett's stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in three editions of The Best American Short Stories. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2010 National Magazine Award for the title story. He lives in Claremont, California.

Book preview

Border to Border

A Story from Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events

Kevin Moffett

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Border to Border

For More Stories from Kevin Moffett

Copyright

About the Publisher

Border to Border

Maxim lost his crown. He was eating in Small World’s employee cafeteria, already feeling thrown off by big, pink-necked Miss Beebee, who existed, as far as Maxim could tell, solely to throw him off. At the buffet line, she dumped a spatula-ful of Irish lasagna into his bowl, tapped the spatula twice on the side, and said, You’re beautiful, too. She read his name tag. It’s a beautiful world, Maxim from Estonia, filled with beautiful people.

More sauce, please, he said.

Me and you, we got the kind of beauty that don’t expire. She dumped grayish sauce into his bowl. "Interior beauty. Bone beauty. Psychological beauty. Know what I mean?"

No, he told her. My English, it’s not nearly that good yet.

At a table next to some Chinese acrobats in silk costumes, he ate Miss Beebee’s latest attempt to gastronomically unite two cultures: cabbage and noodles and red sauce and fatty shreds of mutton—

He bit down on something hard, like a pebble. He tried to work it to the front of his mouth to spit it into a napkin— when into the cafeteria walked Paula. Tall, lovely, impervious American Paula. Paula with hair so soft-looking Maxim wanted to snip some to wear as a mustache. She worked in the Global Superpowers Pavilion with the other cheerful propagandists. Her job was to ask people filing out of the Operation: Emancipation! musical, Do you have any questions about freedom?

She moved through the cafeteria with the rehearsed poise of a gymnast on a

Reviews for Border to Border

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of nine short stories -- “pedigreed” stories you might say, since eight of them were previously published in literary journals like McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Harvard Review, and two of those were selected for volumes of The Best American Short Stories series.They're quietly funny, mostly accessible but sometimes confounding, and often melancholy but in a comforting way that says we get through difficult times. I enjoyed the originality in premise or voice in most of the stories, especially the title story about a young writer, his writing mentor, and his father who in retirement "began writing trueish stories about fathers and sons"; and another that opens when an architecture student, on board a plane awaiting takeoff to Italy, receives a text that the terminally ill father he just visited has died ... the tension builds beautifully as he hesitates, deciding whether to go back or go on.I gave up on one (curiously, the only unpublished) story and skimmed another. But I’ll look for more by Kevin Moffett.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)