Opening Lines

“Win, win, win, win, win, win!!” was the incessant cry of our stepmother Sophie. It was the command that drove our household. She was a slight woman with a turned-up nose and a perky hairdo and the figure of a former Miss Alabama, which she was. She smoked Salems from dawn to dusk. We thought we could outlast her because of that, we thought that cancer would take her before she could claim our hearts. In this we were only partially correct.”

“The Real Mother's Song” leads us into family sorrow and struggle, in language that takes uncanny, compelling turns—as do the other stories in Out of Time, by Geoff Schmidt '86 (University of North Texas Press). The collection, which has been described as “a call and response to Hemingway's In Our Time,” won the 2011 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.

Reprinted from Out of Time © 2011 by Geoff Schmidt, courtesy of the University of North Texas Press, http://untpress.unt.edu.