Many stories are submitted, only a few can be chosen. It's happy, then, that a few more can be quoted. Here are some things that Stanford's editors liked.
I see Rob fiddling with something. I raise an eyebrow, harkening back to my sixth-grade summer when Rob and I tried to make our own secret language using only our eyebrows. Rob sees me watching him.
“It's a pebble,” he explains. “Jessie gave it to me. She found it on the beach on our first date. She said she couldn't tell if it was the foundation of a castle or the last step of a boulder, but she wanted me to have it.”
—“Foundation of a Castle, Last Step of a Boulder” by Nicholas Chan, '04
“In-Flight Entertainment” gives a name to several scenarios of romance—in a Prague concert hall, on a ranch in Australia, in an African church—that seem unrelated until a final scene:
You sip your ginger ale or bloody Mary or whatever it is you're having. Your glass leaves a wet circle of an imprint on the cocktail napkin, the peanuts scattered from their foil packet. . . . You shift in your seat, turning to your side because it's more comfortable that way. . . . And you dream of your own love story.
—Sonja V. Srinivasan, '95
Ra's favorite story about Lida, the anecdote that she told to substantiate her mental illness, was that she had cut off the legs of the furniture in their childhood home. The lamp tables, the big dining room table, the sideboard—an heirloom from the Czech royalty that had escaped the revolution. Her mother was trying to sell it. The metal Egyptian coffee table had a wooden back, so it was susceptible. The sawdust had been thoroughly vacuumed, but everything was several inches shorter when her father came home from his business trip.
—“Sniff” by Maggie Harrison, '91
The only thing left not advertising or bills was the alumni magazine. She had never joined the Alumni Association, hadn't been to a reunion, couldn't have sent them more than 50 bucks in all the years since graduation, and yet, no matter where she lived, they always found her. She had a theory that if the FBI contracted out to college alumni associations, no one would ever go missing.
—“In a Yellow Wood” by Sheila Scobba Banning, '83, MA '84
“Excuse me. My signal just faded. Don't you have a tower around here that'll pick up my cell?”
Her badge says her name is Callie. She says, “Yep, it's up there on the roof of that hotel across the street. We also got wi-fi if you've got a laptop.”
“Then why did my cell go dead when I came in here?”
“Because I didn't know you were coming.”
—“Honest to Google” by Robert Carlile, MS '53, Engr. '56
The alabaster nude the old man studied and his daughter ignored was a Henry Moore. . . . They had visited every sculpture garden within a 500-mile radius. He had to give it to those artist guys, the way they whittled down a blob of stone or hung a giant triangle and called it art. He came not so much to see their stuff, but for the open feeling that went along with the slab of hillside the things were usually situated on. She went along to let her brain cool, and to be near him.
“This Moore character is my kinda guy,” the old man said. “I like the way he just says, 'This here's a woman to the best of my ability, and he doesn't try to be all perfect about it. Just says, 'Shazzam, here's the m'am.'''
—“Regarding the Teddy Situation” by Pamela Johnson, '82
“Don't put skim milk in coffee, for heaven's sake,” she scolded the first week I was there. “It needs something that will actually give it some competition.”
—“Baba's Pickles” by Emily Dressel-Sola, '02
Bogomil groaned. “It's gone, forever, my manuscript is deleted. Five years of work annotating the famous Furze-Danielsky debate, and it's lost.” Jim instinctively asked, “Did you look in the trash?” As Bogo looked into the waste basket by his desk, Jim's hands settled on the encrusted keyboard, covered with brioche crumbs, dandruff flakes, and ashes from contraband cigarettes. When Jim pulled up the lost document, Bogomil's face was transformed with joy.
—“Bogo” by Elena S. Danielson, MA '70, PhD '75
