A Very Short Story

"A Very Short Story" is a brief, bitter piece from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), drawn in part from his own wartime experience in Italy. A wounded soldier and the nurse who cares for him, Luz, fall in love during his convalescence and plan to marry after he sails home to secure a job and a future for them both.

Separation does its work. In a handful of terse paragraphs that span months and continents, Hemingway traces how the promise erodes, and closes on a note of casual disillusion. The story is a model of his early economy — plain, unsentimental, and quietly devastating in what it declines to spell out.