conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about George, War, Prizewinning with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'I Want To Show You More'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I Want To Show You More
  Chapter six: think of it this way—sin speaks a language that means nothing to you, but God speaks your mother tongue.
  Chapter seven: offer yourselves to sin and it's your last free act; offer yourselves to God and the freedom never quits.
  The women start to sing. It's a praise chorus I've never heard, slow and repetitive. I'm blessed, blessed, blessed, they sing.
  I close my eyes. I imagine the faces of my children, my husband. I pray for repentance, wait for it to fall over me like a benediction.
  It's late, past ten. Jade, Mimi, and I are in the kitchen. The other women are moving the tables back, laying out dessert plates. Mimi is sitting on the counter beside the oven, wearing quilted mitts, waiting for the pumpkin pies to finish warming.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The man in the wheelchair motions toward the phone. I lift the receiver and dial Eummenia's extension.
  Two black men are sitting on one of the couches, smoking. The old man in the wheelchair rolls himself over to them. They look past him, blowing out smoke. On the other couch, which is pushed into a corner, a white girl is nursing a baby. She's young, a teenager. Her hair is two-tone, light on top, black underneath. She's wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms; her arms are tattooed with shapes that look like jagged mountain ranges.
  Eummenia shows me a video clip of Tanisha Starr. She's dancing the way a one-year-old dances—ducking her knees, arms bent out to the sides like wings. Eummenia plays the clip over and over: twenty-three seconds, tiny girl on a tiny screen. She's wearing just a diaper; a garbled rap song plays in the background.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I lift the receiver and dial Eummenia's extension.
  Two black men are sitting on one of the couches, smoking. The old man in the wheelchair rolls himself over to them. They look past him, blowing out smoke. On the other couch, which is pushed into a corner, a white girl is nursing a baby. She's young, a teenager. Her hair is two-tone, light on top, black underneath. She's wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms; her arms are tattooed with shapes that look like jagged mountain ranges.
  Eummenia shows me a video clip of Tanisha Starr. She's dancing the way a one-year-old dances—ducking her knees, arms bent out to the sides like wings. Eummenia plays the clip over and over: twenty-three seconds, tiny girl on a tiny screen. She's wearing just a diaper; a garbled rap song plays in the background.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Thank you to the editors who, in one way or another, ushered these stories into the world: Robert Fogarty, Michael Griffith, Ronald Spatz, John Irwin, Mary Flinn, Michelle Wildgen, Sven Birkerts, Bill Pierce, William Giraldi, Jill Meyers, Wells Tower, Cara Blue Adams, Margot Livesey, Nick Flynn, Ladette Randolph, Catherine Chung, Meakin Armstrong, and David Lynn.
  For their friendship, support and eyes on my work, thanks to Megan Mayhew Bergman, Tom Bissell, Elizabeth Crane, Mary Vassar Hitchings, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Gayle Ligon, Dayna Lorentz, Nicola Mason, and Cal Morgan. Special thanks to Tim Liu.
  For their love and support, thanks to my children, McKenna, Keaton, Hallie-Blair, and Hudson, and to my parents, John and Dani Utz. And to Scott: first reader, best reader, best friend of twenty-four years—you are my Home.
  Note: The phrase "a wicked, unlovely, purely useful thing" in "Decomposition" is a variation of Will Barrett's description of the telescope case in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman. Earnshaw's sermons in "Demolition" draw from the last chapter of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. The Hebrew phrase in "Holy Ground" is from the Song of Solomon (by way of Joyce's Ulysses), and translates, "I am black yet comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem."
  Finally, I would like to acknowledge Sherwood Anderson, Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, Gordon Lish, David Means, Steven Millhauser, Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, Grace Paley, Mary Robinson, Christine Schutt, and Eudora Welty: Masters of the story form, all.