May 23, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Jessi Jesewska Stevens, “Honeymoon”
This sly short from one of my favorite collections last year—Jessi Jesewska Stevens’ Ghost Pains—has a simple enough set-up. We follow one half of a couple on her Tuscan honeymoon, and watch as the bride’s chipper internal monologue starts to vacillate between wistfulness and exasperation. Stevens’ voice is the hook here. Our narrator is erudite, fussy, charming, and impressively articulate about her own (sometimes contradictory) desires. Every-so-slyly, her asides start to capture the paradoxes inherent to permanent partnership, tourism, and ceremonial rites of passage. The room with the view may be beautiful. The honeymoon and the man wonderful. (On paper, at least.) But sometimes you yearn for the familiar alone.
If you groove with Elaine Dundy, Barbara Trapido, or Marlow Granados, I think you’ll like this one.
The story begins:
For our honeymoon we went to Tuscany. This got a big sigh from me. I love my job, this city, my life. At home, in our apartment, the kitchen tiles are a deep maroon, a chessboard for girls. I was sitting on them, like a squat little knight, unwrapping a casserole dish, when my husband wheeled a suitcase into the room. One of the most difficult things about being married, I find, is that those thoughts you choose not to say out loud don’t register at all. No one reads your mind. He gently snapped two fingers near my face.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).