Below are four pieces of short fiction by Sarah Freligh, including:

• The First Man on the Planet : 1951
• Another Thing: 1960
• What They Take

Around three in the morning, Vince realizes he’s out of smokes. He bums a couple from a Negro guy in the waiting room who gives him a look when he asks for a third. Bo’s up the road be open all night, the man says.

Outside, it’s snowing. Vince tips his head back and tastes the flakes, wondering again how something so cold can burn. His throat aches from twenty hours of cigarettes and no sleep.

The highway is empty. He presses the accelerator and watches the speedometer sweep from left to right. Snow carpets the roads, muffling the sound of his tires. Nights like this, he wishes he could keep going, drive into forever.

When he gets back to the hospital, the waiting room is empty. He smokes three cigarettes and is lighting a fourth when the doctor comes into the waiting room to congratulate him. It’s a girl. Marie is okay. There’s a seashell of blood across the doctor’s green smock, a day’s growth of whiskers on his chin. Go home, Dad, the doctor says. Get some sleep.

In the parking lot, the car won’t start. Seems he forgot to turn off the headlights and now the battery is dead. He gets out of the car and buttons his overcoat, jams his hands in the pockets. He’s four miles from home. His skin is vibrating, crackling like static. He imagines he could touch the tip of a cigarette and light it with his finger. He whistles as he walks, filling the air with little darts of steam.

Susan. He says it out loud, louder. Susan, Susie, Suzie-Q.

His are the only footprints in the snow. The first man on the planet.

That year the heat started after Memorial Day and didn't quit until Halloween. There was no rain to speak of. The corn shriveled up and slumped in the fields like old men who had run out of hope. The woman living over Al's Market who claimed to be part Iroquois read the sky at night and told us all it was our last summer on earth.

My mother laughed at that and said the world couldn't end without a party. The first Saturday in August, my father strung Japanese lanterns between the trees in our back yard and lined up bottles of liquor and mix on the card table. My mother rolled her hair and put on lipstick and stockings and a dress with a skirt that showed her thighs when she danced. I wore a dress printed in little green leaves and walked around collecting dirty glasses on a cork-covered tray. The women pinched my cheek and told me how big I'd gotten, like they hadn't seen me for years instead of a month or two.

The party got louder. The women left lipstick mouths on the rims of plastic glasses. The men took off their jackets and rolled the sleeves of their shirts. I hid inside the willow tree at the back of the yard and ate the melting ice from two glasses of scotch. I heard a sound like the rustle of grass before a storm, but it was only my mother's skirts as she moved closer to our neighbor, Mr. Cullen.

“Marie,” he said, like there was something he had to say to her. There was the liquid clear sound of kissing and he didn't say another thing.

Late in the night, I watched as my father led my mother onto the dance floor. She fit her body into his and smiled up at his eyes, her teeth bright against her dark lipstick. Their feet moved together in dangerous perfect time. When they turned, I could see my mother's hand spread against my father's back, her nails like red holes in the white of his shirt.

Susan takes a jar of buttons, a half-finished quilt, a box full of remnants, and a cardboard box of silk thread.

Denise takes the enamel ware, a toaster with a raveling cord, a blender with a heavy glass decanter because, she says, the new ones don’t seem to last as long; monogrammed napkins, their mother’s good silver, and a handful of glass stir sticks she finds tucked in a drawer between the small tin of turmeric, never used, and a box of stale spaghetti.

Jody takes a book on train travel, a lamp, a flannel bathrobe with leather patches sewn over the thinning elbows, a brown suitcase, a half-empty jar of her mother’s face cream, and the Christmas card photograph of the five of them together for the first and only time.

The rest they give away.