What role might storytelling play both as a component of the English curriculum and as a way of re-envisioning what we do as English teachers? The following story asks questions about storytelling in the English classroom, its fit with current theory and practice, and its role in a contemporary world. Live Bodies is a fiction. None of the characters is based on a real person, and none of the events took place in the way described in the story, with one exception: all but the first two paragraphs of Oscar's first email are the exact words addressed to me more than a decade ago by one of my English students, as are the words of the second email.