The Short Form
“The Harvest”
Amy Hempel
Excerpt
One one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask him how he felt, he would say, “924-3130.” Or he would say, “757-1366.” We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.
There was sometimes, on the other side of the me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as—the word they used was harvest—as soon as a kidney was havested.
The boy's mother prayed for drunk drivers.
I prayed for men who were not discriminating.
Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?
We read it in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Originally published in The Quarterly: Spring 1987.
