Napkin

Because his wife did not like heights, he found himself on the stepladder once a year, reaching an arm into the cabinet where all the obscure and pointless objects in the kitchen were kept. In the rectangle of darkness were the things that for some reason could not be thrown out: the banana slicer, the

In 2007, Esquire mailed 250 cocktail napkins to writers across the country with this request: Fill the blank space with fiction. We received nearly 100 napkin stories and published them all as part of the Napkin Project. The project had been on the shelf—in our archive, to be exact—for the past 16 years, until July