1. "The sap of the stick-bare trees was just stirring after what looked like a fierce fire of a winter."

Ideally, the short story is to be looked at more than read. Its sentences should dip and preen like the vainest gulls, or approximate a master's immaculate brushwork. Plotty short stories of the non-pulpy kind tend to be overdetermined pileups of hemming and hawing, if not himming and her-ring. If the realism doesn't have…