Lee K. Abbott is the author of seven collections of short fiction, most recently All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories (W. W. Norton, 2006). His work has appeared ten times previously in The Georgia Review and in nearly one hundred other periodicals, including the Atlantic, Harper’s, Epoch, Southern Review, and Boulevard. His work has also been featured in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories, Best of the West, and the Pushcart Prize. Twice a winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Abbott is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance,” the first of Abbott’s eight stories to appear in GR (Fall 1983), was included in our fortieth-anniversary retrospective (Spring 1986).