Three times a year, the National Public Radio show Weekends on All Things Considered holds a fiction contest in which listeners from across the country submit stories that can be read aloud in less than three minutes. 

When I had first moved to New York from Reno, I found an apartment on Mulberry Street and planned to make films with the camera I never returned to the art department at the University of Nevada, a Bolex Pro.

Before the dinner, my wife told me that her boss’s daughter was obsessed by dogs. Her parents were worried about it, more than worried. In fact, they had asked whether I might be able to help.

For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and started shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and ­wounded five ­other kids.

St. Patrick’s Day was sunny and unusually mild, men were in shirtsleeves and from the appearance of things work was ending at noon. The bars were full. Coming into one of them from out of the sunlight, Philip Bowman, his eyes blinded, could barely make out the faces along the bar but found a place to stand near the back where they were all shouting and calling to one ­another.

The pub was in the Richmond. It was nice and warm inside, and the walls were decorated with portraits of poets and rebels. He had been here a few times before with Nora, who described it as “a proper pub.”

Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water.

What is the point of minor artists? What justification, what possible excuse? The litter, the mountains of waste product churned out by so-called artists, self-called artists, who aren’t artists at all but defilers of the idea of art. Instead of artists they should call themselves besmirchers.

Every day at noon Mr. Wu walked through the back alley, past the stinking ravine and the firecracker salesman and the old temple now used as a kind of flophouse for the farmworkers who came in from the country to these outskirts to sell at the market.

I rose at eight, so that my parents wouldn’t think I was a bum, and sat at my little desk, really a folding snack table in the guest room, doing the crossword until they left for work, when I sometimes took a quick nap.