The Living Dead.(Short Story)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket, when this van pulled up, which was strange. On an average day, a total of fifteen cars might pass the house, but no one ever stops. And this was late, three o'clock in the morning. The couple across the street are asleep by nine, and, from what I can tell, the people next door turn in an hour or so later. There are no street lamps in our village in Normandy, so when it's dark it's really dark. And when it's quiet you can hear everything.

''Did I tell you about the burglar who got stuck in the chimney?" That was the big story last summer. One time, it happened in the village at the bottom of the hill, the pretty one, bisected by a river, and another time it took place fifteen miles in the opposite direction. I heard the story from four people, and each time it happened in a different place.

"So this burglar," people said. "He tried the doors and windows, and when those wouldn't open he climbed up onto the roof."

It was always a summer house, a cottage owned by English people whose names no one seemed to remember. The couple left in early September and returned nine months later to find a shoe in their fireplace. "Is this yours?" the wife asked her husband.

The two had just arrived. There were beds to be made and closets to air out, so, between one thing and another, the shoe was forgotten. It was early June, chilly, and as night fell the husband decided to light a fire.

At this point in the story, the tellers were beside themselves, their eyes aglow, as if reflecting the light of a campfire. "Do you honestly expect me to believe this?" I'd say. "I mean, really."

At the beginning of the summer, the local paper devoted three columns to a Camembert-eating contest. Competitors were pictured, hands behind their backs, their faces buried in sticky cheese. This on the front page. In an area so hard up for news, I think a death by starvation might command the headlines for, oh, about six years.

"But wait," I'm told. "There's more!"

As the room filled with smoke, the husband stuck a broom up the chimney. Something was blocking the flue, and he poked at it again and again, dislodging the now skeletal burglar, who fell feet first into the flames.

There was always a pause here, a break between the story and the practical questions that would ultimately destroy it. "So who was this burglar?" I'd ask. "Did they identify his body?"

He was a gypsy, a drifter, and, on two occasions, an Arab. No one remembered exactly where he was from, "but it's true," they...

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