Harold Quinn · Milwaukee, Wisconsin · For the people who still live in that building. You do not have to read it in order.
The building had four floors and a courtyard on the ground. When it rained, every voice slid down the iron rail. My grandmother sealed the pickle crock and said damp would steal the salt. I was just tall enough to reach the rim. I put a finger in; she tapped it with a chopstick and did not raise her voice.
My father's radio sat on the sill. At nine there was a serial. When the batteries died he opened the back and touched the carbon with his tongue and said we could have another half episode. I remember the water in the courtyard more than the plot. It fell slowly.
At nineteen I was taken on at a print shop on the south side. The foreman said learn the paper first: coated, offset, newsprint. Use your hands. Do not read the wrapper. At noon we set lunch pails on the press. Ink and fried eggplant shared the air and somehow agreed.
I collated a run with the pages backward. The whole knife of books had to be opened down the spine. He did not shout. He sat me at the stitcher and told me to feel every ridge. What the hand keeps, he said, outlasts the badge.
The year my mother died I found a letter started in the drawer. It opened with my childhood name and then went blank. I slipped it under the last leaf of this manuscript. If you are family, you already know not to ask whether I finished it.
— Harold Quinn, 2024
This file stays at one address. It is not for sale and I do not intend to write the last page.