May 27, 2025, 9:30am
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:
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Breece D’J Pancake’s “Time and Again”
Breece D’J Pancake is kind of like the Shoeless Joe Jackson of American short story writers: a legend to some, unknown to many, and blessed/cursed with a brief time upon this earth and a small body of work that points at the makings of literary greatness (never quite realized). Pancake published only six short stories in his lifetime (he died at the age of 26, in 1979), which form the spine of a posthumous collection, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. Most of his writing focused on the down and out lives of his fellow rural West Virginians, in a register ranging from the Denis Johnson of Jesus’ Son* to something entirely unique (“Holler gothic” perhaps?)
“Time and Again” is one of Pancake’s most obviously gothic stories, and is perhaps also his most gimmicky… but whoo boy is it a good time. Basically, a man drives a snow plow up a mountain and picks up a hitchhiker—and that’s all I’ll say about that.
(*Pancake is to Denis Johnson as Lucia Berlin is to Raymond Carver).
The story begins:
Mr. Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died. When Mr. Weeks doesn’t call, I write everybody I know about my boy. Some of my letters always come back, and the folks who write back say nobody knows where he got off to. I can’t help but think he might come home at night when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light burn and go on out the door.
The cold air is the same, and the snow pellets my cap, sifts under my collar. I hear my hogs come grunting from their shed, thinking I have come to feed them. I ought to feed them better than that awful slop, but I can’t until I know my boy is safe. I told him not to go and look, that the hogs just squeal because I never kill them. They always squeal when they are happy, but he went and looked. Then he ran off someplace.