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Three Days
Free online fiction from The New Yorker
Also available as a podcast Audiobook. (Search for David Gilbert Reads Samantha Hunt).
"t’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks along the highway from the bus depot up to her family’s house. She avoids the roadway by walking just outside the guardrail in the long, dry grass that’s been matted down by road salt and rain, strewn with trash and the surprisingly bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice imagines that every car and truck passing holds someone she once knew in high school. Inside their cars they are shaking their heads and asking, “Is that Beatrice? What the hell is she doing with a bloated raccoon carcass?”"
Also available as a podcast Audiobook. (Search for David Gilbert Reads Samantha Hunt).
"t’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks along the highway from the bus depot up to her family’s house. She avoids the roadway by walking just outside the guardrail in the long, dry grass that’s been matted down by road salt and rain, strewn with trash and the surprisingly bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice imagines that every car and truck passing holds someone she once knew in high school. Inside their cars they are shaking their heads and asking, “Is that Beatrice? What the hell is she doing with a bloated raccoon carcass?”"
- GenresShort Stories
36 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2006
46 people want to read
About the author
Samantha Hunt
21 books830 followersSamantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory.
Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 25, 2024
It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book as well as those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters which contain reflections on racially derogatory actions & beliefs, the death of an animal, grief, terminal illness, & others.
The appropriate response to walking the streets of a familiar town, one that sheltered the growth of a person from childhood into the digits of double & large soled shoes of old, does not exist. For Beatrice, returning on Thanksgiving weekend to the farm where she grew up brings nothing but a set of three (3) questions, sectioned into three blank spaces where she thought her answers lay. A brief moment of reprieve is granted to her when she realizes that life—as the one she knew, the one she lives, & the one making its way to her—intertwines to form her reality, no matter where or who she is.
This story was chosen at random as « Scott » & myself continue our weekly short story jaunts through days filled with reading much heavier topics than a bizarre pit in a parking lot & a famously named horse who drowned in its bodice. I suppose this is why I appreciated this story so much. That is to say that Hunt’s style of writing is one that I adore very greatly though, I acknowledge & recognize that it is certainly one that might leave many readers with feelings of unfulfillment.
The author presents chapters of life in such as way as to reveal only a sliver in what is certainly a wooden cabin-style house; so much is withheld without necessarily leaving the reader feeling cheated or in the dark yet, one knows that nothing is truly given to us, just as nothing was ever truly given in truth, to Beatrice.
As we maneuver through this short jaunt of a three (3) day weekend, we note how dissected Beatrice feels in comparison to everything & everyone around her; familiar faces are shadowed by secrets they reveal to have kept from her because they know her more than she knows them; blanketed over snowy grass & green flakes Beatrice is someone who is trying to be herself however much that ideal person is someone yet unknown to her.
The imagery that Hunt produces in such a short family history is stark, demented, & tragic. One wants to understand how Beatrice remains such a lost figure in her own life whilst being presented with opportunities to glimpse that, though her circumstances certainly abled her to become the person that she is in adulthood, they are not the sole reason for which she is so amputated from her lived experiences. This can be gleaned in her flashbacks when she walked through the property with her father; imagining him to be a man she loved romantically via the dismembered hand that held hers.
It’s rather fascinating in a ghoulish manner how deeply Beatrice longed for her life to be anything other than what it was. I do not think this to be an unnatural practice in principle. Surely, many people have disconnected from their experiences to pretend the desired outcome of their fate. Yet, Beatrice’s entire life span has been a concept formatted to fit her hopes & dreams—those unachievable due to her stance on the imaginary. If she had come home being different, maybe things might have been different.
What would have happened if she had become her brother; a person settled in his own makeshift home, one that is amongst the changing tides of a society that doesn’t understand him & can be reflected in the discarded items left behind years prior by a woman who once loved him. Would Beatrice be better or worse off living in the real world? Would her horse have wandered, as she often does herself, into a hole in the ground where it could not come out? What part of Beatrice might ever change to be the person she dreams herself to become?
In all, I really enjoyed this story. I liked how little was written about the experiences of the family as a whole yet how immensely these silenced seconds mattered in the timeline; forming a story that rang true for all the burned hopes in a life desecrated by the imaginary.
If you would like to read this story, please visit this •LINK•.
The appropriate response to walking the streets of a familiar town, one that sheltered the growth of a person from childhood into the digits of double & large soled shoes of old, does not exist. For Beatrice, returning on Thanksgiving weekend to the farm where she grew up brings nothing but a set of three (3) questions, sectioned into three blank spaces where she thought her answers lay. A brief moment of reprieve is granted to her when she realizes that life—as the one she knew, the one she lives, & the one making its way to her—intertwines to form her reality, no matter where or who she is.
This story was chosen at random as « Scott » & myself continue our weekly short story jaunts through days filled with reading much heavier topics than a bizarre pit in a parking lot & a famously named horse who drowned in its bodice. I suppose this is why I appreciated this story so much. That is to say that Hunt’s style of writing is one that I adore very greatly though, I acknowledge & recognize that it is certainly one that might leave many readers with feelings of unfulfillment.
The author presents chapters of life in such as way as to reveal only a sliver in what is certainly a wooden cabin-style house; so much is withheld without necessarily leaving the reader feeling cheated or in the dark yet, one knows that nothing is truly given to us, just as nothing was ever truly given in truth, to Beatrice.
As we maneuver through this short jaunt of a three (3) day weekend, we note how dissected Beatrice feels in comparison to everything & everyone around her; familiar faces are shadowed by secrets they reveal to have kept from her because they know her more than she knows them; blanketed over snowy grass & green flakes Beatrice is someone who is trying to be herself however much that ideal person is someone yet unknown to her.
The imagery that Hunt produces in such a short family history is stark, demented, & tragic. One wants to understand how Beatrice remains such a lost figure in her own life whilst being presented with opportunities to glimpse that, though her circumstances certainly abled her to become the person that she is in adulthood, they are not the sole reason for which she is so amputated from her lived experiences. This can be gleaned in her flashbacks when she walked through the property with her father; imagining him to be a man she loved romantically via the dismembered hand that held hers.
It’s rather fascinating in a ghoulish manner how deeply Beatrice longed for her life to be anything other than what it was. I do not think this to be an unnatural practice in principle. Surely, many people have disconnected from their experiences to pretend the desired outcome of their fate. Yet, Beatrice’s entire life span has been a concept formatted to fit her hopes & dreams—those unachievable due to her stance on the imaginary. If she had come home being different, maybe things might have been different.
What would have happened if she had become her brother; a person settled in his own makeshift home, one that is amongst the changing tides of a society that doesn’t understand him & can be reflected in the discarded items left behind years prior by a woman who once loved him. Would Beatrice be better or worse off living in the real world? Would her horse have wandered, as she often does herself, into a hole in the ground where it could not come out? What part of Beatrice might ever change to be the person she dreams herself to become?
In all, I really enjoyed this story. I liked how little was written about the experiences of the family as a whole yet how immensely these silenced seconds mattered in the timeline; forming a story that rang true for all the burned hopes in a life desecrated by the imaginary.
If you would like to read this story, please visit this •LINK•.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 23, 2024
this was an interesting look at beatrice’s experience back in her hometown. as the story goes on, her feelings of grief amplify and she’s faced with what ifs and feelings of emptiness- is leaving your hometown really an escape?? or does leaving the town just turn it into a bad memory that you find yourself revisiting all the time?? crazy lol
November 2, 2025
A woman named Beatrice goes to visit her brother Clem and her mother during the Thanksgiving holidays in Pennsylvania. Thanksgiving is different for this year as we are told that her father has died from lung cancer. Beatrice looks back on her father’s death and questions whether or not withdrawing life support from her father who had been dying of lung cancer had been the correct decision. It is clear that Beatrice is at an aimless phase in her life. She gets bored and brings the family horse to the local Walmart. The horse falls through the ice over a frozen pond and drowns before Beatrice and Clem’s eyes as neither one of them have the strength or tools necessary to rescue the large horse after it falls through the ice covering covering the pond after walking across it and cannot walk back across the ice. This is a very depressing story to read if you like animals. I am not a horse person by any means but the description of the drowning horse was. Very difficult to get through via podcast format as I read this via the New Yorker fiction podcast.
September 10, 2020
Excellent story heard on the New Yorker podcast, also available online from New Yorker. Apparently also called Cortes the Killer instead of Three Days. Interesting story about a girl and her family after her father has passed away and the family farm has been lost.
January 4, 2021
Descobri ouvindo o podcast da revista New Yorker e gostaria de ler mais contos da autora.
October 3, 2021
I quite liked it, although I can never decide whether I like books written in the present tense!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews