Raymond Carver

“Errand” (“Tres rosas amarillas”) is a short story by Raymond Carver, published in The New Yorker on June 1, 1987, and later included in the book Where I’m Calling From (1988). With a sober and deeply emotional prose, Carver reconstructs the final stretch of Anton Chekhov’s life, from a dinner in Moscow to his death at a German spa, consumed by tuberculosis. Unfolding with delicate attention to every gesture and detail, the story becomes a lucid and profoundly human meditation on dignity in the face of death. Paradoxically, it was also Carver’s own farewell, as he would die shortly after its publication.

MY friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, … Read more