“This Blessed House” from The Art and Craft of Fiction

Read Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House” from The Art and Craft of Fiction. Notice how the visual and narrative conflict in the story arises from an “incongruity”: a startling and sacred object within a suburban middle-class home.

Your prompt for first story comes from Pamela Painter’s book of writing exercises What If?:

“Something comes to your attention that is interesting precisely because you can’t figure it out. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Someone is breeding pigs in the backyard of a mansion. Who is it? Why is she doing it? Your inventing mind can find the motives and the meanings. An example from my own experience: Once when my phone was out of order, I went out very late at night to make a call from a public phone at a supermarket plaza. At something like two in the morning all the stores were closed but the plaza was not empty. There were three women there, one of them with a baby in a stroller. What were they doing there? It was several years before I figured out a possible answer, and that answer was a short story.”