“Pet Milk” was first published in the August 13, 1984, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in The Coast of Chicago (1990). It is currently most readily available in The Coast of Chicago (Picador).

This six-page masterpiece of a story is, more than anything, a story about memory, so it's appropriate that I recall with perfect precision where I was the first time I read it, when it was published in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. It was April, and I was on the verge of graduating from my college outside Chicago, ready/not-ready to head out into the world clutching my hard-fought English/Creative Writing B.A. I had recently bought a subscription to The New Yorker, writing a check for what was a serious sum of money out of my student budget. Subscribing to The New Yorker felt like an impossibly adult thing to do, and I marveled that somehow I had managed to turn into an adult, sort of, and how maybe this might be what becoming an adult was, finding a magazine nestled in your apartment's mailbox. April was spent worrying about my boyfriend, wondering if he was going to stick with me after graduation, though I knew he wouldn't because, well, he had told me he wouldn't. Maybe we could hold on through the summer, but after that, well. Well. This situation felt impossibly both like an adult's problem, yet also extraordinarily childlike, as I waited for him to change his mind.

I remember the nubby slipcover of the couch where I curled up to read my new magazine, the yellowish light slanting off my roommate's lamp, the heavily patterned rug that no one ever vacuumed, the window that looked out onto a wall of red brick. I remember reading the two pages of “Pet Milk” and reaching the bottom of the second page and sighing, staring out the window, unaware of the rows of brick, and sighing again, then transferring my stare to the author's name: Stuart Dybek (at this time, the author's byline appeared at the end of the story). I carefully ripped out the pages, which are now buried in a box in the back of a closet. The experience of reading this story at this exact time and place in my life is that vivid and specific.