Richard Bausch is the author of numerous novels, including Playhouse, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He has also published many story collections, including Something Is Out There and The Fate of Others (Knopf, 2025), which features six stories from Narrative, including the title story. He won the Rea Award for the Short Story, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. A devoted teacher, Bausch is a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Photograph by Jebb Harris.


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SECOND PLACE WINNER

Reverend Thornhill’s Wife

A Story

by Richard Bausch

Keeping strictly to the early-morning ritual, Diana Thornhill prepared coffee, boiled one egg, and lightly buttered two slices of toast for her husband, then put cereal on for the girls, and went and dressed for the day while they ate. When they were finished, she washed the dishes and put them carefully away. In the usual rush, she saw the twins off to school, putting Lauren’s hair up for her, and nagging Kelly about brushing her teeth thoroughly to get the food particles that had lodged in her braces. All as usual. So much the exact pattern of her mornings. The ordinariness of it made her happy, and it surprised her. It also increased her sense of unreality.

From the doorway, she watched them climb on the bus, hauling their book bags. They waved to her from the windows, as they always did. She waved back, and the motion of her own small hand crossing the plane of her vision seemed to swipe the ordinary feeling away.

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