Story Excerpts

Mrs. Hyde
by David Dean

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“How was this delivered, Owens?” asked Dr. Beckett Marchland, turning the envelope round in his hands for any sign of a postmark or return address.

“By a surly and unclean boy, sir,” Owens answered the slender younger man in whose bachelor home he was employed.

 

The Phlebotomist
by Joyce Carol Oates

Outside the medical clinic, a soft explosion of (blinding) light. The sky had been overcast when she’d entered the building two hours before, now she fumbled to put on dark glasses. Her eyes felt raw and moist as newly cracked eggs.

For a moment she was disoriented. As if she’d been inside the featureless beige brick building for an incalculable period of time. Had she left something behind in the waiting room? In the oncologist’s office? She rummaged in her handbag. Had she lost her keys? Her cell phone?

As so often in this past year she searched frantically in her handbag to reassure herself that she hadn’t misplaced keys, cell phone, wallet . . . No: She had not.