(Editors’ note: This will be our last miCRo post until early January; the series will be on hiatus for the next five weeks. See you in 2023!)
Associate Editor Connor Yeck: When I read Scott Garson’s “Okay,” I find myself mouthing the words. Here is a story that doubles down with every line, layer, and image. Readers are brought into a landscape of economic tension where first impressions are just as good as currency, and identities can be molded in a few minutes’ time. Throughout it all, Garson curates a neverending sense of persistence—a new kind of intimate survival that reaches its fullness with the story’s final spoken words.
To hear Scott read his story, click below:
Okay
We were living in a tent in a campground while we looked for a place to rent. The market was tight: you had to testify if you hoped to secure a lease. In cobwebbed campground bathrooms, we engaged in transformation. Crisp shirts. A shining bracelet watch. Gold earrings. Two bright-future types stepped into the meetings with property agents, who gathered the forms and pressed their lips and said, Okay, in parting. Which could mean anything. Okay, we’ll call you. Okay, we probably won’t. The prudent move, following one of these meetings, would have been to return to our tent and save our cash. But we never did. We walked the length of the strip, sat and ordered drinks. Once—and here’s the moment I recalled when I started writing this—I took your hand and thought about putting my lips to the veins in your wrist, because they looked, and were, actually, exquisite. And I did that. And you looked at me, really looked, for some seconds. I felt like the city was breathing us in. You kept looking. You said, Okay.
Scott Garson‘s stories have recently come out in Threepenny Review, Passages North, The Journal, Ghost Parachute, Electric Literature, the Best Microfiction annual and others. He teaches at the University of Missouri.
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