Female Trouble

"Female Trouble" by Antonya Nelson


       McBride found himself at the Pima Country psychiatric hospital in the middle of the day. "Don't visit me here," Daisy told him. She slid her palms over her frizzy  white hair as if to keep it from flying off like dandelion fluff. "It embarrasses me, these crazy people make me ashamed."
      "I thought you wanted to see me. I thought that was the point. Why else are you in Tucson?" Daisy, McBride's girlfriend of the year before, had been discovered on the highway near the Triple T truck stop carrying a portable typewriter, trying to hitch a ride. Native New Yorker, she'd never learned to drive; maybe that was why McBride had assumed she would stay in Salt Lake City, where he'd left her. He certainly preferred to think of that chapter as a closed one, a place he had chosen against.


   I choose this story because I wanted to see what possible kind of "Female Troubles" this could be about. Starting to read the story I was drawn in right away from the opening. In the first paragraph there is already a conflict and an interesting one at that. While reading I was dying to go on to know why Daisy was put in a psychiatric hospital.


Antonya Nelson has a bunch of short stories read this to find out more.