Issue #71 of One Story is an excellent story–Good Luck, written by Kate Walbert. At it’s core this is a love story, or a falling out of romantic love and into some other form of love story. Basically, it is a story of independence–Bill’s from the physical cage of his POW existence and Evelyn’s from living all their married life in her husband’s intellectual shadow.

Here is what Walbert has to say about the incredible final paragraph:

Since it was the paragraph that initially opened the story—the image of the two on deck watching the glacier—I knew it contained all the clues to the narrative. I also knew I had to get right the sound and look of that glacier, the suddenness with which everything is changed, the enormity of the feeling, which I can quite vividly recall, of somehow standing at the bottom of the world, or almost. I do feel it’s done now, or at least for the story as it stands today.

And as one who has read and loved this story, I can say without equivocation that I could not imagine a more perfect ending than the one that is there.