A Special Gift from the Archive

A story by Tom Drury.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Selection from a portfolio by Claudia Keep, which appears in issue no. 246. This December 24, we're unlocking a special gift from our archive: a story by Tom Drury from our Winter 2022 issue, "Where Does This Live?," which chronicles the unusual lives of a group of middle-class Americans in a snowy small town. The characters drink at bars, watch old movies, and break into abandoned school buildings, and by illustrating their tenderness for each other throughout, Drury cultivates a particularly intimate atmosphere. We at the Review felt it made the perfect unexpected holiday story. PROSE Where Does This Live? Tom Drury As the sun went down, Richard van Fossen took his book of saints and headed for work at the auto-parts warehouse up in the city of Lepage, and Sylvia and John paid their bill and left the Roseville Hotel. The streetlamps were on and a cottontail hopped this way and that on the snowy street. It didn't seem to have any special destination in mind. John wondered, not for the first time, how rabbits had lasted so long as a species, with no more survival skills than they appeared to have. "Let's go for a walk," said Sylvia. "It's too cold." "Makes me feel alive." "The cold does." "Yes, because it wants me dead. Or not me in particular. All of us." "I don't know that it wants anything per se," said John. "It's just weather." They walked down the middle of the street, heading for the old junior high on the west end of town. The wind was in their faces and Sylvia's hair flew back from a lime-green stocking hat. John brought his gloves to his mouth and breathed into them. A questionable strategy, because it left moisture on his face that would freeze. He kept thinking he should get a scarf, but his former girlfriend Mary Mars had once knitted him a long gray-and-purple scarf, and he'd lost it at a party, so scarves were painful for him to think about. From issue no. 242 (Winter 2022) Copyright © 2023 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.