The door to the high school principal’s office stood open, so I nipped in to get a quick opinion on my son’s desire for a summer job. He was not yet sixteen, and possibilities didn’t seem to extend beyond fast food, which he didn’t want to do. “You have to hate your first job and get fired from it.” the principal opined in his ever-congenial way. Neil Diamond album covers lined a couple of shelves of the small office, Neil’s grave visages suggesting he agreed with this thought. “It’s an important teenage rite of passage.” The principal smiled knowingly, and with that, pulled a pin that unspooled a thirty-five-year-old memory I’d never shared with anyone.
The snack bar at the large supermarket near my home, wedged between the front of the store and the meat department, occupied an equally slim sliver of my life, between high school and college.…
He was always something of an odd man, Leonard was. Even as a child he was what folks would call different. It was said that after he came back from the war his oddness was more extreme, his behavior a little more unexplainable. Not that he was a bad man. People liked him; they just thought him a bit odd. When you looked at him, even before he spoke or moved, you saw a tall, gangly man with ears that stuck out from his head farther than it seemed possible, like Dumbo’s, but on a human face. When he talked, he leaned into you and completely violated your personal space, and if you backed away a bit his face with those big ears would follow you and stay just inches from you as he spoke.…
Kathy’s had this key on her ring for twenty years now. It hasn’t unlocked anything in a very long time. Very occasionally, she will cull the set, when it gets too heavy, too jangly, or makes an ugly bulge in her clutch bag or her pocket. Picking through, she’ll remove the key from her bike lock, the one that didn’t keep her bike from being stolen. Another time she’ll sacrifice to the trash her parent’s house key, since they fled Buffalo, New York, for the horrors of south Florida. Other openers take their places. One for the padlock on her storage space in the basement of building. Another for the mailbox in the lobby. The lock for the new bike. Her rotating cast of facilitators.
This particular key once unlocked a door to a young woman’s dorm room. …
Andy Young‘s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2024. (You can order it here.) She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. – Alanie Lacy
Alanie Lacy: You have a book coming out in October 2024, Museum of the Soon to Depart, could you talk a little bit about what this book is and how the idea came to be?…
lightning strikes splits me open ozone sharp and pungent filling the skies before thunder can do its tepid heralding my favorite view out a window is a grey expanse ripped open by electric lavender knives but i had never imagined the atoms their trembling after vibrating with exothermic pangs begging to turn back but this is all there is the mean bifurcation of a trunk and janus with head turned not looking into the past but gaze palsied rooted to the present burning foliage or to future growth yes even from the charred remains tiny rootlets spring upwards feeding and reveling with no sense of decorum at all this is what happens when the tree falls in the wood with no one there to bear witness no one to weep just mundanity crawling along like an infant
She spies a young blond man with small ferret-like hands raking as she approaches the last trailer in the lot. The great fire is closing in, its smoke rising high just beyond the hill, and she is almost done with her shift.
“What are you doing?” she inquires, clipboard pressed to her orange vest as if for protection.
“I want my own fire,” says the young man with tiny eyes set close, just as a toothless woman in galoshes, a shift and red bandana emerges from the trailer. “Bader, gimme that thing. You ain’t doin’ what I think you’re doin’. Take your play matches. Go on while I get ready. I ain’t gonna holler after you, boy.” Bader drops the rake, grabs the large box from his mother like a prize.…
It was said he was good to her, bought her the house of her dreams, taught her how to buy clothes from runway shows in the city, took her to restaurants where meal prices never appeared on her menu. He opened doors for her, stood when she approached or left the table, spoke politely and endearingly to her in public, spoke even more lovingly to her in private.
It was said she enjoyed his old-fashioned chivalry, soaked it up the way a poppy soaked up the sun, delighted in the one-of-a-kind jewelry he had made for her on special occasions and not so special occasions—like her 33rd and a half birthday, and the completion of her fourth week of tennis lessons, and because the fifth of the month happened to fall on a Wednesday, which happened to be the same day she was born.…
