“Leaving the Colonel” was first published in the Winter 1980 issue of New England Review. It was collected in Creek Walk and Other Stories (1996). It is currently most readily available in Creek Walk and Other Stories (Scribner).

I could read this story a thousand times and be delighted every time. Really, I can say this about almost any Molly Giles story, but “Leaving the Colonel” is, for me, nearly infinite in its layers of chilling humor, delight, and despair. I offer it to my fiction-writing students as a last-chance-to-change story, adding that I have it on good authority (the author herself) that I'm wrong in my interpretation—that, in fact, there is change here, irrevocable, the moment-after-which-nothingwill- ever-be-the-same. And that's one of the intrigues of the story: you look at it one way, it seems to be one thing. You look at it another, it is something else entirely. In fact, perhaps, the clean opposite to what you first thought.

The story is simple. A bright-tongued woman, unhappy, sloppy, rather continuously sipping bourbon from a teacup, engages in an internal monologue, or rather dialogue, with an imagined interlocutor, the interviewer. She describes for him for the umpteenth time how she is going to leave her husband, the colonel, and also enumerates the reasons she is not able to do it today: she has nothing to wear; she has blackberries to cook, jelly to make, messes to clean up, and of course her daily interview show—the interviewer will want to ask her some questions:

“You've been talking about leaving the colonel for twenty years,” the interviewer says.

“You think I can't leave him? I can leave him, my dear. I can leave him like that.” She snaps her fingers, sprays tap water from her hand onto his powder blue coat, takes another sip of her teacup bourbon.

“Nothing gets older,” the interviewer says, “than an old threat.”

And it is clearly an old threat. This is the relentless circular conversation the unnamed woman and her unnamed interviewer have been conducting for twenty years—though she is happy to realize that it cannot possibly be twenty years because the interviewer looks the same as the first day she met him: “He'd been thin and snippy then and he was thin and snippy still.