Yours by Mary Robinson

Till death do us part... but first, let’s carve pumpkins.

Yours by Mary Robison is probably one of my least favorite selections found in the anthology My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffery Eugenides. The author's minimalist style seems focused on delivering an emotional punch, but for me, ends up missing the mark. It relishes in ambiguity and what remains unsaid. I'm not opposed to this aestehtic approach but other authors like and Hemingway and Carver pull it off with much more nuance. 

The premise here is quite simple: a husband and wife are carving  pumpkins together on Halloween—a small, shared ritual that brings them joy. It’s sweet, it’s wholesome, and Robison sprinkles in key details about their relationship, including the significant age gap and struggles with chronic illness. However, the story’s brevity works against it. Rather than building emotional depth, it feels like a fleeting snapshot that is razor thin to carry the weight of its themes. Great short stories often contain a rich underlying subtext, but this one felt almost too slight, like it was all surface and not much else. Unless I'm missing something here? Maybe I needed more time with these characters, or maybe I just wasn’t the right target audience for this particular love story. At least the highly compressed narrative makes for a very quick read.