"Cathedral" is itself a short story written by Carver. It is about a man whose wife is old friends with a blind man. The story shows the husband/narrator's distaste for the blind man who is coming to visit him and his wife for a few days. At times it seems that the man is jealous of the blind man for being so close to his wife; at other times it seems that the husband is disgusted by the man's blindness. In the end they bond in a way through the comunication they share about what a cathedral looks like.

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, "Errand", in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.