Short stories by Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally best-selling novel Remember Me Like This, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the winner of the 2015 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize. The book has been translated around the world and is being made into a major motion picture. Bret is also the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent (London) and The Irish Times, and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
Listing 4 stories.
A financially struggling father tries to smuggle thousands of dollars' worth of Dairy Queen kids' meals toys across a Texas border in order to afford medical treatment for his unconscious daughter, but both the deal and his daughter's rescue go awry.
A father driving his son's girlfriend home at night takes a deliberately wrong turn and stops on a back road, where he demands she stop seeing his son. To counter his ultimatum, the girl threatens to accuse the father of sexual assault before leaving the car and running home through the night.
A freshman at a Texas high school has a crush on the beautiful and mysterious girl next door. When her little brother is hospitalized with a life-threatening injury, and he's tasked with feeding her family's dog each night, he learns a startling secret.
The happy life that a young mother and her husband have established in Texas is disrupted when bright red flyers appear in their neighborhood revealing her husband to be a sex offender.