Gupta was in the file room. It was a Tuesday. He said, “That’s it. I’m done making copies. I’m never going to make another copy again in my life, Gupta.” He called everyone Gupta. But himself especially. Gupta was A number 1 Gupta, and the rest followed, as when he wanted an omelet and set out in his loafers, treading the sidewalks of town for a good breakfast shop, and there weren’t any breakfast shops but only car dealerships and donut nooks and pizza delivery stations. It was that kind of town. But there was a supermercado, into which he ducked for eggs and peppers, but they didn’t have anything but white sticks of cheese, so he settled for that. Probably the best thing Gupta was good at — besides throwing horseshoes like he was ringing a tree — was settling for what immediately lay before him, as on his sixteenth birthday when it was an open road, and his seventeenth, a girl named Mabel with orange-Crush curls and on his thirtieth, a toilet that needed brushing out. Gupta almost never brushed anything but his hair, which he did because there wasn’t any alternative if he was going to leave the house, and Gupta left the house oftener than anyone. Gupta left the house just to leave the house. He would go to the park and take his shoes off, and try to stand straighter than any man, to stand so straight that all the cricks in his vertebrae ironed out. Gupta had a desk job, which despite his ergonomically-friendly chair, caused him such lamentable compression that when he got home he flung himself from the house again. “I am alive, goddamn it!” he would say to himself, “there must be a reason for it.” And he would walk the streets of town, which could have been any town, except that it was duller,  more faded-curtains at the edges, more doddering with old folks, who, God bless them, smell. Like cooked cabbage and old sweaters and beans because they can’t eat anything crisper than wilted lettuce, which they cook in bacon grease when the temperature drops below 90 degrees. “Ick,” Gupta would say when the wind wafted from his neighbors like a diner that sold Mr. Pibb and hamburger steaks. Gupta was an elitist. Quite by accident, or of his own accord, because his mother raised him to eat what was put before him, which he managed to do in life but not in meat.  Gupta had this theory, which he could tell was coming true, that if you watched what you took into yourself, the world came too. Like if you looked far enough into a honeycomb of okra, you could see Io, the third of Galileo’s four Jupiter moons, who, from the lava lake center of herself, glowed.

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Amy Wright is the author of two chapbooks, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and Farm. Her work also appears in a number of journals including American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and Ribot 6. She is the Prose Editor of Zone 3 magazine and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

One Collectible We'd Buy

Recently we’ve been wondering if writers ever participate in auctions. After all, discretionary funds are a rare thing in many writer’s lives, at least that’s been our experience. But it’s okay, we’re not big into auctions and/or collectibles anyway. Maybe this is rooted in our place in the disposable generation. That said, we do keep books (who can bear to throw away those blessed little darlings?). Props to you if you can, actually. It certainly makes moving easier. Alas, on to the day’s reading. Let’s start the bidding with Flaubert’s simple heart. It’s never too late to remember the inspiration and legacy of William James. Do you find Joyce accessible or does the complexity turn you off? Farm Lane Books reads Dan Holloway, while The Asylum reviews Jon McGregor’s Even The Dogs. Raise your paddles if you’re ready to wager. — Andrew Geer