‘One Night In New Jersey’ by Chester Himes

One Night In New Jersey by Chester Himes, 1970

The magic trick:

A mere fragment of a story that sets the reader’s imagination alight, nonetheless

I don’t know the story behind this story. It ends so abruptly and leaves you wanting so much more, it’s easy to assume it was more a fragment than a finished story. But perhaps its brevity is by design. The author wanted you to be left wondering what happens next.

Either way, it’s a story remarkable for its ability to set your imagination alight.

One snowy night, a man finds a dead body on the side of the road. The tangent into backstory provides enough context for us to guess as to what has happened. What happens next, though, is left to guess.

And that’s quite a trick on Himes’s part.

The selection:

I knew immediately she’d been attacked and brutally beaten. Either she had been thrown from a car or it had happened there. I looked about for signs of a struggle but didn’t see any. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me that she was dead.

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