Short Story: Wait for Me by Katey Schultz

In “Wait for Me,” a finalist for the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in fiction, Katey Schultz gives us a sensitive narrator, hurt by a rupture in his family, and a bullying neighbor girl, whose own pain is harder to see. The importance of family, and the ways in which people we think we know sometimes act in startling ways are at the center of the story.  Schultz writes about the inspiration for “Wait for Me” and its long genesis in her craft essay “When I Pulled Over on the Side of the Road.”

WAIT FOR ME

by Katey Schultz

Every day, I stepped off the school bus on Flat Run Road, and every day, on the other side of the fence, Judy Puckett sat astride a four-wheeler, gunning the engine. “Sarvis Morton, you’re dumber than a dummy!” she’d shout, then tear into the pasture, over the hill and through the coal chute. We lived in Pentress, seventeen miles from Morgantown, and even with the sock factory and a post office with Wi-Fi, Pentress was easy to miss. But Judy never missed the sad exhale of the school bus, or me, abandoned along the roadside after it wheeled away.

Read the full short story on Missouri Review