"A Very Short Story" is a short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 written by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

. It was first published in as a vignette, or chapter, in the 1924 Paris edition titled in our time, and later rewritten and added as a story to Hemingway's first American short story collection In Our Time

In Our Time (book)

In Our Time is the first collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway published by Boni & Liveright in New York in 1925, after a smaller edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924...

, published by Boni & Liveright

Boni & Liveright

Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice...

 in 1925.

In the story, a World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 soldier and a nurse named "Luz" fall in love as she tends to him over the course of three months in the hospital. They decide to marry, but when the soldier returns home to the United States, he receives a letter from Luz with the news that she has fallen in love with an officer. Later she writes that she hasn't married, but the soldier ignores her. The soldier contracts "the clap

Gonorrhea

Gonorrhea is a common sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The usual symptoms in men are burning with urination and penile discharge. Women, on the other hand, are asymptomatic half the time or have vaginal discharge and pelvic pain...

" from a sexual encounter shortly afterward.

Hemingway's based the story on his World War I love affair with a nurse he met in Milan while recuperating in the hospital from leg injuries sustained at the Italian front.