Cleveland Earl Stancil ran the grocery on Bethel Street for forty-one years, and nobody in Comfort, Georgia could stand him. In November 1994, with her daddy laid up from a stroke, Odessa Pruitt has to write an obituary by herself for the first time. Then his nephew asks her for four words nobody believes: He will be missed. Then Odessa finds the composition books nobody handed her, and a debt of thirty-one dollars carried fifty-four times. A free Odessa Pruitt short story: the first obituary she ever wrote, and the rule she has lived by since.

"He Will Be Missed"

by Ida Shoulders