Ed Falco On the Air

Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic short story about the mask we wear in public and the chaos of individual identity that lives confused and potentially dangerous beneath that mask.
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In Chicago, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, fires are burning, violence has broken out on the west side, and a young man who lives alone in a sixth-floor walkup is annoyed by a banging on his bedroom wall coming from the next door neighbor's apartment. When he goes to her (the neighbor's) apartment to complain, what began with a mysterious thumping on his bedroom wall evolves with an invitation that leads to a game, and then into something more intimate and unexpected, as all the while, beyond their building's walls and windows, fires burn and history's violence goes on unabated.
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A short story by Ed Falco, narrated by Anthony, a New Yorker crossing the country by van with his fiancée, Vivian, who has spent her life in the West and loves it with something like devotion. As they drive through Wyoming, Anthony finds himself unnerved by the vast, barren landscape. What begins as a romantic trip—one Vivian has imagined as a kind of extended honeymoon before the wedding—quickly gives way to friction. When a miscalculation leaves them far from their intended destination, they pull off the road into an empty stretch of desert, where the silence and isolation seem to heighten everything between them, including the strange and ever shifting boundaries of intimacy. 
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Kyle Minor's short story, “Glossolalia,” consists entirely of dialogue between a young man and woman negotiating the rifts between faith and desire. Part of Minor's collection, Praying Drunk, “Glossolalia” is about many things, including language, belief, and the difficulty of communication.
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A short story by Alyson Hagy. “Semper Paratus”—the Coast Guard motto, meaning “Always Ready”—follows Randall, the lone woman in a Coast Guard rescue crew stationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, nicknamed the graveyard of the Atlantic. The story unfolds in the aftermath of a disturbing rescue attempt, and like much of Hagy’s writing, it’s less interested in melodrama than in the complicated emotional residue left behind: guilt, endurance, rivalry, loneliness, and the strange intimacies forged under pressure. 
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