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NPR's Bob Mondello reads an excerpt of one of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. He reads Beyond the Fence by Matthew Campbell of Salem, Mass. You can read the full story below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

The love of his life had been married for five years before he met her, and dead for five days before he'd found out. Clandestine lovers weren't notified in the event of a tragedy. The police and medical examiners had waited days before releasing the names of those killed in the concert fire to the public.

The paper had published profiles of the victims, and that's where, halfway through his usual breakfast of a slice of toast and a banana, the news had found him.

The funeral had been yesterday, but, of course, he hadn't gone. How could he look at her husband, and her children, and explain away the grief that had become as much a part of his face as his nose?

Instead, he'd come to say goodbye on the same grass she'd died on. He wasn't alone. Shrines ringed the police barricade. Flowers, pictures and candles were woven into the temporary steel fence, the flotsam of a tide of communal sorrow.

As he looked now at the lawn, it was hard to imagine how anyone could have been crushed in such a wide open space, but the fire on stage had been fierce and thousands of people had packed the event.

It had been a country concert, of course.

"You know what you get if you play country music backwards?" he'd asked.

It had been a day as beautiful as today, with sunlight streaming across their bodies as they lay on a hotel bed and listened to an old song she'd just put on. Cash? George Jones? He'd have to look it up. Funny how he wanted to remember everything now, even that.

"That's such an old joke," she'd said.

He'd finished it anyway. "You get your wife back, your house back, your dog back ..."

She'd pushed him softly, "Stop it, you're making fun of me."

"Seriously, why do you like this stuff?" he'd said.

"Because it tells a story," she'd said. "Each song has its own life, they create their own reality."

"Yeah, but it's a depressing reality," he'd said. "Life's messy," she'd said and kissed him.

As he stood in front of one of the shrines, he saw something glint in the grass, just beyond the fence. He carefully stepped over the guttered candles and reached his fingers through the mesh of wire and pictures to dig after the glint that was smashed into the grass. It was an earring, gold with small stones, long and dangling.

He'd never seen it before.

She'd have liked it.

They'd never given each other anything, every trace of their relationship had to be hidden: text messages deleted, evenings accounted for with plausible alibis, clothes washed to remove cloying traces of foreign scents. His only picture of her was the one that had accompanied her profile in the paper. The only footprints left by the passing of their love were in his mind, and he could already feel their edges eroding.

Without his really deciding on it, the earring became hers. He could see her wearing it, smiling at him across a table or from the other side of a rental car. He'd given it to her, and now he'd found it again.

This one small thing would bear evidence to their love, to its existence. Like her country songs, he'd create his own reality.

"Life's messy," he thought, as he turned away.

Interview Highlights

On when he first watched The Quiet Man

"Gosh, I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I grew up way out in the country in Illinois, and it was very exciting in the early '80s when we got a VCR. We were not a wealthy family, we never did get cable, but we did own five video cassettes and The Quiet Man was one of them. It was my dad's favorite, and it quickly became mine. It's very nostalgic for me."

On what makes the movie different than your typical romance

"It's a rather tempestuous love story, you know, there are fists flying as equally as kisses being planted."

On how the film and John Wayne influenced him

"I was a very big fan of John Wayne as a kid, and my dad and I would watch a lot of movies on Sundays — on WGN, on television — and even though I ended up having a little more of a sense of humor than the Duke, I like to think that I sort of maintain a rugged edifice in the service of authoritarian types."

I was standing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, where there's a full-sized Egyptian temple, called Dendur. It's housed under a glass roof ...

But here at the Met, looking for names, I suddenly saw something that made me stop short. "Oh," I thought. "This is very bad luck."

There, sitting right next to a carved Egyptian figure, an obviously important official — straight in his line of sight — was a graffito from someone named "L. Brad—" (couldn't read the rest of it) who added "of NY US." The date was 1821. The "2" doesn't look like a "2," but it is.

The man was so beautiful. He appeared to be stepping out of the ad on the side of the bus, his hair illuminated in sun. Amelia saw the little slip of paper burst from his pocket when he pulled out his keys. It flipped in the air once, twice before it caught against the cement stairs right in front of her. She quickly shut her mailbox with the very tiny key that made her feel oversized and fumbling.

Carefully, so as not to rustle it, she pushed open the heavy metal door of the apartment complex and snatched up the piece of paper between two pale fingers. She looked down the street in the direction that he had gone, but the faces, the heads, the clothing — it was already all wrong.

The paper read:

Milk
Bread
Pomelo

"This is what he needs," she said to herself, softly. She ran her thumb over the last word, smudging the pencil a little.

Pomelo? She lifted her head and said the word slowly, her mouth moving as a fish blowing bubbles, "Pomelo? Pomelo?"

She hurriedly walked three, four blocks and entered the grocery store with its frozen, scent-less air.

She stood in the entryway, the automatic doors saying whoosh, whoosh as people funneled in around her.

"Can I help you?" asked someone in an apron. She could not tell if it was a man or a woman.

"Pomelo?" she said, but it came deflated and not how she practiced.

"Pomelos. Over there," the person said, and pointed at a bin of luminous green fruit, so large and round. A bin of discarded planets, lost without their moons. Amelia needed both hands to pick one up and this made her smile. She placed it back on the pile very gently. Then she turned around and left.

In later years, during the moments of greatest darkness, she would clutch the battered list to her chest and whisper soothing words to herself, "Pomelos are real. I am real. Pomelos are real. I am real."