I’ve come back to Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” so many times. He uses third person objective point of view to create a chill in a scene that could otherwise be exuberant and exotic. A train station, central Spain, a hot afternoon, people talking about their lives together, an unspoken baby on the way – and that is a problem.

My short story “Saturday Morning” visits a scene where two people have their own lives, don’t know each other, and will never see each other again. Nonetheless, they have a moment of warmth over an event that is nominally sad, a mortality. It’s a kind of safe space where they can say things to each other they wouldn’t say to people they know. Third person objective serves this unfamiliarity.

Jodi Paik’s The Room (Intima, Fall 2016) takes a different approach. She writes a lush sensory experience of a boy sick in a hospital room. The room is visually spare, so she evokes our other senses. People do things for him, and he does some things for himself too, but he never says anything. Paik denies him a wedge of agency, to express his wishes. And people are always coming or going, in the street, or into and out of the room, while the boy remains still, mostly. The story is written in a distant third person. It fences us off as observers, underpins a melancholy tone and creates dissonance against its rich descriptions.

Each of these stories highlights life’s impermanence, and death’s too as our memories mollify that hard stop over time and nourish our affection for those whose bodies have left us.

Patrick Connolly has been a neurosurgeon for over 20 years, 15 of them in Philadelphia. He has published about 50 scientific articles, a portfolio of op-ed columns in the Philadelphia Inquirer and attended Iceland Writers Retreat twice. Medicine comes from story and story comes from conflict. Fiction allows him to explore these fundamental tensions. “Saturday Morning” is his first published story.