Why I Don't Read (Short) Fiction: Tin House

Title:

The Ambush

Author:

Donna Tartt

First Line:

"Before I met Tim- who, in spite of everything I'm about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years- my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother's house that I had to be nice to him."

Las Line:

"And I was only eight, and Mrs. Cameron would be home from the hospital in a couple of days with seventeen stitches in her arm, but still- I knew it even then- I was as close at that moment to the real war as I was ever going to get."

I skimmed this story and it's about kids playing war.  I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet something happens that's an "ambush" to the speaker and the reader.

Subscribe to Tin House (for the poetry [seriously, this issue contains such awesome lines as, "limbo was my body and mud.  and long and shiny/ and briny what i polished with my tongue marmo hard and pallina" by Olena Kalytiak Davis, as well as words by Dean Young])