# Short Fiction — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Fiction by Voltairine de Cleyre.

- [Effie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/effie.md): Effie survives at the edge of starvation, married to a feckless man she calls the creeper, who borrows shillings and invites acquaintances to tea he cannot provide. When he proposes pawning the baby's only dress, she ref
- [Bernard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/bernard.md): Bernard is the youth who proposes a communal farm and presses his love on a woman who calls herself too old to learn and mend her mistakes. She tells him plainly that what he loves is her energy, her life, and that when 
- [Bella](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/bella.md): Bella remains after the man who measured the window and set the geranium on the sill plunged to the stone below — the kind, hard stone that was merciful. She sits in summer on the step, her seeing blindness fixed on what
- [David](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/david.md): David is the youth whose face and soul the older woman confesses she loves, and whose passion she receives with a mixture of gladness and dry foreknowledge. He bends to kiss her feet and is checked — too much like self-a
- [The Old Shoemaker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/the_old_shoemaker.md): The Old Shoemaker sits in his alley over a teacup when the Mighty One comes walking over the sun-beaten bricks, taking no note of the others, entering without asking. He shows no surprise, sets down the cup, and enters i
- [Mrs. Bossert](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/mrs_bossert.md): Mrs. Bossert sits sunken in a chair while the narrator watches the gray vacancy move inward toward the last dull red point of fire in her eyes, and hears her shudder with an inhuman whine: 'Alone.' Behind her gathers the
- [M.](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/m.md): A mysterious or initialed character appearing in the narrative.
- [Angiolillo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/angiolillo.md): Angiolillo moves through the story as a figure of historical weight and intimate tenderness, measuring the room one last time before he plunges to the kind, hard stone below. What survives him is the child, locked in a n
- [Albert](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/albert.md): A named character with limited but distinct appearances.
- [Nathaniel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/nathaniel.md): A named character with multiple proper mentions.
- [Mr. C.](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_55_se/characters/mr_c.md): An initialed character appearing in the narrative.

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