I intended to move on to another author but opening up the Carver anthology last night made me want to re-read one of the stories that sticks in my mind, “Nobody Said Anything“. 
I’m going to focus on the ending since it’s one of my favorites and exemplifies what I love about a well-written short story.
The narrator is a young man who decides to feign sickness in order to stay home from school. He packs up a few sandwiches, his fishing rod, and a few of his mother cigarettes and heads out to a nearby creek. He manages to land a two-foot fish with the help of another boy he encounters along the creek. The boys haggle bit about who will get to take their trophy fish home and show it to their families. In the end, they agree to split their prize in half with the narrator taking home the more prized half of the fish with the head.
The story begins and ends in the midst of vocal arguments between his mother and father. As the narrator returns home, he finds his family seated for dinner and he prepares to triumphantly enter the kitchen to show off his catch. His mother screams, “Oh, oh, my God! What is it? A snake? Please, please take it out before I throw up.” His father screams at him to “Take the goddam thing out of here!”
The story ends with, “I lifted him out. I held him. I held the half of him.” The middle pages of the story are taken up with a detailed recounting of the narrator’s battle to land the fish, chasing it through the creek, and literally throwing him up onto the shore. The suspense builds as he captures the fish and briefly argues about which part of the fish to take home and he excitedly returns home. Each time I read this, I think of the excitement of catching a fish (admittedly, it has been a while but the memory doesn’t fade) and see the grin on his face. It all comes to such an abrupt and clashing end, in a way that it can only happen in a short piece of fiction. If a novel ended so abruptly, I think I’d be pissed off but with this story, it’s the payoff for the mere 15 minutes of reading.
Failed Poetry 