“Like Life” was first published and collected in Like Life (1990).

It is currently most readily available in Like Life (Vintage).

Do I “like” “Like Life,” the title story of Lorrie Moore's second collection? The story, by the way, has a lot to do with liking and loving and what we do or don't like and/or love. It's a bleak and frightening tale that is also bracing and funny and immensely smart. “Like” seems a tame word for my reaction to it. I relish it, am in awe of it; I never tire of rereading it.

Moore's stories often deal with extremity. “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” one of her most famous, limns the horror of being a parent with a dangerously ill child. “You're Ugly, Too,” which appeared in John Updike's anthology Best American Short Stories of the Century, suggests that being a single woman in search of a minimally acceptable partner is a situation hardly less dire. But “Like Life” gets at something more broadly existential: the irreducible terror at the heart of human existence, the way we are never completely safe, housed, and loved. The story makes me feel the way I used to when, as a child, I believed that a skeleton lived in the bathroom shower; that my parents, late to relieve the babysitter, had died and would never return. Perhaps I go to it as an inoculation, a way of experiencing a small and localized amount of terror so that I can tolerate it in the rest of my life.

Written in the 1980s, “Like Life” takes place in a futuristic New York City of the 1990s, where pollutants have rendered the water undrinkable and citizens, especially young men, are dying of unnamed illnesses (the AIDS crisis is clearly an allusion here). There is also a serial killer on the loose, and to top it off it is February, when “a thaw gave the city the weepy ooze of a wound.” The physical city repeatedly appears as toxic and repulsive: “fetid,” “wet,” and “decaying.” A sunset is “a black eye yellowing.” Mamie, a 35-year-old children's book author and illustrator, recently had a mole on her back removed and fears being the next victim of the plague.