Pushcart 2026 L: Jane Delury, “Goodbye, Raymond Carver” from Ploughshares #160

Sujit Das: A Boy on the Way Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rear-view mirror—into all there was. When the boy flew out of nowhere on his bike and looped into the street, Nick yanked the wheel to the left, slammed his boot into the brake, and blasted the horn. The boy kept riding down the hill, but the truck filled the rearview mirror and then came a relentless crunch. Nick pulled over, squeezing the wheel to calm himself down, as the truck parked behind him. No one was dead. No one was injured. Nothing catastrophic had happened. The terrible thing hadn’t happened. The boy had been small, maybe ten or eight or seven, with a mop of curls that bounced as he pedaled. On first read, I thought, wow, I hate this story, it’s boring, it’s stupid. And that’s…