States of Grace Stories Summary: An Unflinching Flash Fiction Collection
TL;DR: What This Collection Holds
- More than fifty flash fiction pieces and essays written between roughly 1996 and early 2025.
- Moves from childhood memories and domestic violence to speculative dystopias and metafictional reflections.
- Frequent subjects include fragile father-son bonds, blue-collar struggle, and the collision of violence with daily life.
- Closing essays frame writing as a way to make a chaotic world feel ordered.
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States of Grace Summary: The Collection’s Arc
Spoiler warning: This section describes the overall shape of the collection and individual endings.
States of Grace: Stories collects more than fifty flash fiction pieces and essays written between roughly 1996 and early 2025.
The book opens with the introductory essay “917 Words Before We Begin,” which explains Stephen Graham Jones’s attraction to very short fiction as a way to capture memory and daily pressure.
Early stories center on childhood, domestic life, and father-son relationships.
Later sections move into speculative territory, including alien invasions, post-apocalyptic rituals, and surreal towns.
The closing pieces become more personal and metafictional, ending with essays about why Jones writes and how animals shaped his youth.
Story-by-Story Summaries
Spoiler warning: Each story summary includes its outcome.
Early Domestic Memories and Family Wounds
In the Beginning: A man and woman sit in a Dodge Rambler at the end of an old airstrip while cattle nose the windows. The scene blends creation imagery with a rural, intimate moment.
Lunch: A narrator trades jokes with a cafeteria worker on Mondays until she reveals she must send her son to live with his grandmother because her house has no heat. He eventually eats elsewhere to avoid the weight of these small domestic crises.
Modern Love: Seven numbered vignettes follow a former heroin-using teacher, a father with an oxygen tank, and a mother hiding letters. The pieces treat love as a buried, fragile thing.
The Complete Absence of Cats Is Another Definition for Silence: After a tornado, a fourteen-year-old narrator shares a silent moment with his father amid surreal wreckage, including a station wagon planted upside down. His father ignores the cigarette the narrator hid during the storm.
Another Night, Another Death: A narrator accidentally inhales candle smoke and becomes convinced the wax will harden in his lungs and kill him in his sleep. The story follows his obsessive fear over a minor accident.
The Piano Thief: A man steals pianos piece by piece over a month, posing as a blind tuner to learn security layouts. He sometimes sleeps inside the hollowed instrument while residents remain unaware.
The Real Batman Story: The Batman myth becomes the dying delusion of a boy who falls into a cave and shatters his body. He imagines a life of vengeance while a butler searches above.
The Talk: In a hot tub, a father named Dan tries to ignore neighbors having sex while his fifteen-year-old daughter laughs. A duct-taped window lets every sound escape.
Neither Heads nor Tails: A father loses his left nipple in a bow-hunting accident, and the family dog eats it. The narrator later studies the scar tissue on beach trips.
The Lepidopterists: Ian cuts an X into his arm and inserts a bullet to frame his abusive father for shooting him. The father is removed from the home even after the lie is exposed.
Hansom Is: A carriage driver paints eyes on his horse’s blinders, starting a competition of surreal carriage decorations. The narrator shaves his head and paints a face on the back before letting go of the reins.
Fabergé: A mother finds her son’s hidden pornographic magazine and notices a dog-eared page featuring a girl holding a small plane. The image reminds the narrator of his father’s death in a plane crash.
The Two-Wolf Life: A grandfather warns his grandson about two wolves inside him but treats it as a medical problem. He advises not to feed the wolves because they will eventually need to do their business.
Thirsty: A narrator stands at his kitchen sink nightly for thirty minutes to watch a neighbor in her bra. He mimes getting water to preserve a silent, voyeuristic ritual.
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Surreal Towns and Dystopian Satires
My Hometown: A security guard carries a white balloon through the zoo at night. Townsfolk believe the balloon is his breath and that the zoo walls may expand to contain the entire city.
The Porniest Porn in Porntown: In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a grainy shower video is treated as ultimate obscenity. Pilgrims cheer when a Rationer stabs the woman for wasting water.
Hatchery: Martin accidentally shoots his friend Grandy while aiming at a fish in a barrel. His father makes him wash the blood off the fish, cook it, and eat it as a lesson.
The Sadness of Two People Meeting in a Bar: Two strangers imagine a doomed future involving murder and amnesia. They decide to run into the parking lot and start the story anyway.
How to Know You’re a Killer: A numbered list defines a killer by memorizing clothing patterns, never looking away from a scarred officer, and waiting hours in a car. The story portrays a detached predator’s mindset.
The Wages: An Argument: Divided into thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the story follows a man at three ages, from watching llamas to killing a kitten to waking from a false memory of murder.
Where We Live: In a community built on gravemounds, children find dead fingernails that hatch beetles. The dead eventually rise from murky water with black gnats replacing their nail beds.
Seafood: Rick spends eight years reviewing warnings before his four-year-old son was taken by a shark. He blames himself and refuses to visit the empty grave.
Cops & Robbers: A homicide detective realizes his wife is a serial killer but respects her manners. Their twenty-five-year marriage becomes a polite hunter-and-prey dance.
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Love, Hospitals, and Marital Frictions
Matinée: A Love Affair: Two lovers hide in movie theaters all winter, growing corn in the projection booth. They feel hollowed out when forced back into daylight.
The Broaching: A couple discusses what would happen if one were in a coma and the other’s needs. The hypothetical talk turns into an accusation about a past trip.
The Decomposition of a Conversation: A narrator remembers his father jumping into pools with a lit cigarette and taking a Polaroid of his mother during blood poisoning. The father says parents pass digestive enzymes to children.
Time: Gray pulls over to confront a tow truck driver who followed his passenger after seeing her change shirts. The woman smiles as the tension escalates.
Doors & Passageways: A child tries to hold open a closet door while a father slams it on a mother. The narrator says that moment lasts for the rest of their life.
’Tis the Season: Every December, an alcoholic father strings cheap Christmas lights until the fuses blow. The narrator realizes the lights trace the price tags from his lost bottles.
Autobiography: A father moves from a botched robbery to killing injured horses at crash sites. The narrator recalls rabbits trapped in cotton trailers and sees no redemption.
Bulletproof: An eleven-year-old watches his brother get shot sixteen times. He later steps into his dead brother’s clothes and finds peace in the idea that the final walk saved him.
Spear Father: A father insists on buying a spear for self-defense and hunting in a potential apocalypse. His daughter argues with him about practicality and legality.
Employment History: A narrator lists bizarre jobs from alligator wrestling to giving suppositories to wild animals. The story mixes blue-collar realism with surreal boasts.
Abducted: An elderly man misses the erections he got when UFOs buzzed his house. He asks a doctor to arrange a close encounter to reignite his wife’s passion.
Day 522: A police officer bluntly says he will not perform movie-style heroics to recover a stolen TV. The couple sits in the empty living room waiting for an apology.
Things I’m Not So Sure About Right Now: A man at a restaurant questions whether the waiter washed his hands and imagines apron-related fantasies. He concludes he would rather not know.
Reunion: Carol Anne treads water after being lost at sea and meets her high school nemesis Lacy on an inflatable. Even with a shark fin nearby, Lacy remains polite and focused on tan lines.
Post-Apocalyptic Lives and Body Horror
Leftovers: A survivor rips rearview mirrors off cars and collects non-essential clutter. They use a disposable camera to photograph ruins and hope the images outlast death.
The Hypocrite: A father holds his son in a garage corner with his forearm under the boy’s chin. The moment is filled with silent disappointment and enclosure.
Dirty Sanchez: A woman decides to leave her boyfriend after he eats cereal with bloody shaving tissue on his face. She imagines a life without his repulsive habits.
Kiss the Chef: At a party, Trace licks chips before dipping them and accidentally dips his genitals in hot sauce. His wife mistakes the change in the sauce for extra creaminess.
A Footnote on Tickling: Alien researchers conclude that human reproduction and economy run on tickling. They begin tickling each other and declare civilization ending.
Nights Like These: An orgy follows the narrator to a PTO meeting, a grocery store, and a church. It ends with a participant tracing a heart on a steamed van window.
Backsplash: A man visits his childhood home and recalls murdering a girl named Janet in the kitchen. He cleaned the scene and blamed cranberry juice.
The Boy Who Cried About Wolves: Written as a fake movie review, this piece critiques werewolf films that prioritize transformation money shots over story. It calls those sequences pornographic.
The Bridge: Celia visits a bridge where people pay to bungee jump and induce amnesia for insurance money. She locks eyes with her husband Donald, who is waiting to jump.
Martin Scores Again: Martin finds intimacy in his lover’s unwashed, waterproof band-aid and calls it public sex. She gives him only polite tenseness.
When I’m Alone I Count Myself: Jon follows rigid counting rules and avoids looping patterns to keep the world from crumbling. He believes his name is missing an H needed for multiples.
Foreign Currency: Interstellar invaders flood a planet with counterfeit currency that is actually living infants. The population’s parental instinct leads to economic collapse.
Easy Money: Two men take a sound-recording job that requires a wooden bat hitting a human skull. They murder a woman to create the effect and are haunted by her eyes.
Code: A man visits his dying father in a room of medical cords. A nurse gives him instructions for accidentally killing his father through small mistakes like unplugging a coffee maker.
The Joneses: A suburban neighborhood escalates an exotic pet arms race with mountain lions and black mambas. It ends in a block-wide fire after property destruction.
Meta-Horror, Melodrama, and Family Fables
Truth Is a Bearded Lady: A woman claims her husband has two hearts and that carnival people nearly kidnapped him as a child. She feels special because he gave her the bigger heart.
Animals I’ve Known: A golden retriever mounts a goose, and the egg hatches a dog. The story reflects on instinct and shame through magical realism.
The Family That Reads Together: Siblings turn all six thousand books in their father’s study around so the spines face the wall. The father begins living in the walls and scratching at the other side.
Sunsets Unlimited: A cowboy does stomach crunches by a saguaro, and another rider stops to join him. They bond through labored exercise instead of fighting.
My Fingers Are Calloused from Hanging Off Cliffs: A woman buries her pregnant evil twin and races to establish an alibi. The story parodies soap opera amnesia, brainwashing, and missing files.
These Amber Waves of Grain: A father stays drunk around his son as a deliberate negative example. The son grows up sober and serious like his grandfather.
So This Is What It’s Like: Evelyn finds her husband Terry trapped on a trampoline, unable to stop jumping. She takes off her shoes and jumps with him rather than wait for the fall.
Appetite: An uncle holds his nephew back with two fingers while waiting for a radio ad to end. After the ad, the nephew no longer wants to eat at the hamburger stand.
Solemn Burger: Nick watches a young woman remove her bra in line at a burger joint and walk outside to a boy on the playground. He waits, holding his breath, for her to return.
The Umbrella Tree: After her brother JT’s second funeral, Hildy finds another brother, Michael, unable to move past his grief. They go to the Umbrella Tree together.
States of Grace: A traveler runs away with an X-ray tech after a gas station robbery and later crashes into an eighteen-wheeler. In the aftercrash, the narrator feels the windshield fall away without sound.
The Prisoner at Thirty-Six: Janelle begins living as a character in her own television show after a moment of synchronicity. She holds her wine glass the way she saw on TV.
The Sheep You Shear Will Turn Out to Have Been Koala Bears All Along, or, How to Write a Novel: This numbered list of twelve surreal plot points includes a man worried his chicken will hatch his likeness and a woman who opens beer bottles with her knee. It serves as a metafictional novel structure.
Closing Flash, Essays, and Grace
The Girl Who Kept Killing People When They Came to Her House: The entire story is one sentence: “Finally they stopped coming over.” It ends the fictional section with dark efficiency.
Green Pants: A father drives his injured son to the hospital but removes his pants in the parking lot to make a joke. They enter the emergency room with the father in Sunday boxers.
Why I Write: Stephen Graham Jones lists reasons for writing, including revenge, making the world make sense, and the belief that lying is the best thing ever. He says one life is not long enough.
Bestiary: A Biography: The final essay recounts the author’s youth in a land shaped by animals and the creatures he killed and buried. It ends with a mother bear and the unbroken circle of storytelling.
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What Threads Run Through the Stories
- Childhood trauma and memory: Many stories return to youth in Texas and Colorado, pairing memory with violence or surreal detail.
- Father-son relationships: Fathers appear wounded, secretive, or physically marked in moments of silence or injury.
- Violence and everyday life: Domestic accidents, animal attacks, self-harm, and murder appear alongside ordinary settings.
- Social class and blue-collar struggle: Poverty, heat, hospital visits, and manual labor shape characters’ choices.
- Pop culture and genre deconstruction: Superhero myths, werewolf films, soap operas, and flash fiction conventions are rewritten or parodied.
- Storytelling as survival: Essays and metafictional lists describe writing as a way to impose order on chaotic experience.
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Recurring Figures in States of Grace: Stories
The Narrator/Author Archetype: A recurring voice reflecting on a youth in Texas and Colorado, often focused on memory and flash fiction.
The Father: A central figure shown variously as wounded, secretive, or physically marked in domestic and hospital scenes.
The Mother: A resilient but secret-keeping figure who appears in domestic spaces and moments of illness.
Ian: A young boy who uses a utility knife and a bullet to frame his father for domestic violence.
Donald and Celia: A married couple who meet in a line to bungee jump and induce amnesia for insurance money.
The X-Ray Tech: A woman who falls in love with a man who has birdshot embedded in his hand.
Trace and Melanie: A couple hosting a party where Trace accidentally burns himself with hot sauce.
The Storks/Interstellar Invaders: Alien figures who use counterfeit infants to destabilize the economy of a planet.
Books Similar to States of Grace: Stories
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones — shares themes of trauma, social environment, and horror.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones — another collection focused on dark, speculative fiction.
The Ones Who Got Away by Stephen Graham Jones — explores surviving trauma and the pull of the past.
Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis — a seminal flash fiction collection that influenced Jones.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury — episodic, lyrical, and surreal approach to genre fiction.
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel — minimalist short-short fiction with emotionally resonant prose.
Questions About States of Grace: Stories
What is States of Grace about?
States of Grace: Stories is a flash fiction collection by Stephen Graham Jones that moves between childhood memories, domestic violence, and speculative dystopias. It gathers more than fifty short pieces and essays written from the mid-1990s through early 2025.
How many stories are in States of Grace: Stories?
The expanded collection contains more than fifty short pieces and essays, with story-by-story guides usually listing 69 entries including two essays. The exact count may vary by edition.
How does States of Grace end?
The collection ends with the one-sentence story “The Girl Who Kept Killing People When They Came to Her House” and the essays “Why I Write” and “Bestiary: A Biography.” The final image connects storytelling to animals, memory, and the need to ward off death.
