According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Marie-Helene Bertino, “Viola in Midwinter”
I’m an enormous fan of Marie-Helene Bertino’s entire collected works—Beautyland was far and away my favorite novel of 2024, 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas is my go-to holiday read and hand-sell—and her brand-new collection Exit Zero is everything she does distilled into twelve brilliant stories. How best to describe her work? It’s funny, it’s often a little (or a lot) strange, it’s deeply heartfelt and curious about human existence—and so of course she has a brilliant take on vampires. I loved this story from the moment it appeared in the Bennington Review, and I’ve kept thinking about it since. Viola grapples, as so many of our great vampire main characters do, with her (im)mortality: what does it mean to keep living? To outrun death? Can you outrun death? Or is death the ultimate inevitability, for even the longest-living immortal?
Also, it’s set in my backyard and I’m a sucker (pun verrrrry much intended) for a story of supernatural goings-on in the Catskills. I hope—and I don’t say this often—that Marie writes more about Viola. After all, a vampire has a lot of life to go into…
The story begins:
The Margaretville Shop & Save stays open twenty-four hours as a service to hunters, hospital employees, sex workers, and other creatures who work at night. Viola in pre-dawn debates poppers and Pharaoh snakes in the fireworks aisle. In the checkout line, hunters discuss a bobcat one saw on his drive into town. A mama, probably, looking for food before the real snow arrives and locks the county in place. Seeing her, their talk zips closed. Viola knows they call her Dark Lady, which she sometimes enjoys. The cashier rings up her purchases (poppers, a small axe, mint tea for sleep), still talking to the men collected under the announcement board though they’ve gone silent. They watch her pay and leave, her puffed black coat trailing like a cold remark. Viola feels a numbness in her forehead framed in pain, a cricketing in the temple. She is always on the verge of a headache: the Shop & Save is always open: she is always forty-nine.
Read it here.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).