Porter’s very first published story tells of an 18-year-old pregnant girl whose husband is having an affair with a 15-year-old beekeeper (also named Maria). While her husband and beekeeper run off to fight in the Mexican Revolution, she gives birth but four days later the baby dies. After a year, the couple returns and the beekeeper is now pregnant. Shortly after she gives birth to a baby boy, the beekeeper is stabbed to death by Maria Concepcion who runs off with the infant. The rest of the village comes to her protection when the police investigate and the story winds up with her reconciled with her husband.
Virgin Violeta
In another Hispanic love triangle, 15-year old Violeta has a crush on Carlos, cousin and poet. Carlos, however, is infatuated with Violeta’s older sister, Blanca. Nevertheless, an encounter alone puts Violeta’s desire to the test when Carlos puts the moves on her. Violeta, consumed with a guilt and a fear she cannot quite understand, is transformed and her attraction to Carlos turns to acid.
The Martyr
Satire inspired by muralist Diego Rivera about a submissive painter whose love is unrequited. When the object of his affections finally takes off with one of his artistic rivals, he winds up eating himself to death.
Rope
An exercise in symbolism in which a husband is sent to the market to buy coffee for his wife, but returns with a piece of rope. A story of tension slowly building toward the edge of hysteria by the disagreement between the two which incrementally divulges as an expansive metaphor for their marriage as a symbol of what binds them together while also coming between them.
He
A relentlessly depressing tale of the Whipple family and the mother’s almost insane obsession with upholding her image in a low-rent southern community in which the family increasingly moves toward firmly entrenching itself as “poor white trash.” The title character is the mother’s favorite of their children and the bane of the family’s existence: a mentally undeveloped mute whom neighbors believe the family would be better off without.
Theft
An interior stream-of-consciousness trek through a young woman’s recent past involving a letter from a former lover, a lost purse and the attempt to get it back. This leads to further refection upon an attempt to get back the $50 back from a man named Bill refuses to honor his debt. This leads her to let the matter go which becomes a motif for letting her life.
That Tree
Another story of a Bohemian who is submissive to women. The narrator projects and desires an image of utter Bohemian rejection of bourgeois values only to wind up marrying a woman he expects will bring him all the stability of middle values while still allowing him to retain his free-spirited image. The hope of being able to open up the door to the cage he feels trapped in has the ironic revelation of showing he was an ironic poseur all along.
The Jilting of Granny Wetherall
Porter’s most-anthologized story resembles in form the story of “Theft” but in this case is told by an old woman near death. Time passes back and forth between past and present and Granny Wetherall the bitterness of being jilted at the altar consumes the title character. Only as death arrives does she release the bitterness and realize her humiliation was a blessing in disguise.
Flowering Judas
The very opposite—formulaically speaking—of “Theft” and “The Jilting of Granny Wetheral” in that the main character, Laura, seems to exist in a dreamworld that is eternally in the present. She has past to inform her present and no future that her present seems likely to impact. The narrative also has a hallucinatory tone in which a boastful hero of the Mexican revolution—appropriately named Braggacio—is intent on impressing the young woman but whose response is almost catatonic. Two other men are likewise rejected when showing their ardor and the story concludes with an actual dream in which one of the men pursuing her presents her with the fruit of the Judas tree.
The Cracked Looking Glass
A woman trapped in an unsatisfying marriage with an older man looks into the cracked mirror and sees ugliness instead of the beautiful woman she knows herself to be. She travels to Boston in a desperate attempt to seek an escape from this miserable disconnection through fantasies, but is thwarted and emotionally devastated to the point of accepting that nothing is really what it appears to be; everything is a deception reflection of reality. The mirrors stays as it was.
Hacienda
A Communist Russian film studio has descended on a Mexican plantation and a young American writer has been invited especially to observe the shooting. The story is conveyed in an oblique manner through the discourse of several different participant which reveal the central event to be an accidental shooting of a young Mexican girl by her own brother. The boy’s arrest causes a delay in the film production. At the heart of its theme is not so much the shooting itself as the economic power struggle to get the film back on schedule through what should be the simple process of bribing the right person.
