Ben Black has an MFA from San Francisco State University and teaches English and creative writing in the Bay Area. His work has been published in the Southampton Review, New American Writing, Cream City Review, Harpur Palate, and the Los Angeles Review. His stories have been finalists for the Calvino Prize, the Vonnegut Prize, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the Fairy Tale Review Award in Prose. He is also an assistant fiction editor at AGNI.
Photo by Dan Meyers / Unsplash
A doctor on his village rounds confronts the same symptoms again and again, including uncontrollable laughter.
The first patient of the day is an old woman. Th…
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