Nearly a decade after Ploughshares published it, Elizabeth Graver’s short story “The Mourning Door” remains shrouded in a slippery surrealism that’s at once impenetrable and, simultaneously, the source of the piece’s staying power. In it, Graver’s pregnant narrator discovers a tiny human hand in her bed. Then she finds a shoulder in the laundry. Next it’s a foot, five small toes and all, in the basement. Is the narrator giving birth, or having a miscarriage? Is she piecing a baby together, or watching one fall apart?
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