NEW FICTION

It started just outside a decrepit strip mall in Jackson, Tennessee. Back in the 1970s, my dad told me it was a great place to shop and eat. I can still see him listing off all the places that disappeared, one for each gnarled arthritic finger: a Walden’s Bookstore, a K-Mart, a shoe store, and at the center, Robert Morris Cafeteria. He went there every Friday, ordering either liver and onions or trout amandine.

It was also next to the People’s Protective Building—the name of a regional insurance company before they all got swallowed up. Dad raged about everything being swallowed up. He no longer wanted to live in a place where technocrats and kleptocrats pushed global over local and sold his memories back to him as Boomer nostalgia bait on Facebook. He resented his past being warped, the erosion of simple traditions, and the feeling of being forced to live in a world he no longer recognized.

He wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!