This paper aims at comparing two short stories, Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf” and Lorrie Moore’s “Real Estate”. Linked by numerous thematic echoes (intrusions, duplications, Christ figures, violent deaths) and multiple narrative strategies (blurring of limits, tragic patterns), these two texts create a link between defeat and gratitude, vulnerability and grace. They illustrate various motifs of permeability that account for a weakening of the protagonists along with a kind of formal porosity that is increased by the intertextual dynamics itself establishing a fruitful dialogue between the two stories.