“Fire Sale,” by Alyson Dutemple (Fiction ’19)

“Fire Sale,” by fiction alum Alyson Dutemple, recently appeared in Pithead Chapel. Read an excerpt below:

Fire Sale

We are a few months into my “honesty-only” policy when my son asks the question. “Why are bananas so cheap?”  We are in the supermarket.  He is taking notes for an elementary school project about balancing budgets, making informed family decisions.  Behind one pink ear, he has tucked a chewed pencil.  Evening is approaching and the last rays of sun pump their quiet heat through the window glass, illuminating persimmons, kumquats, other expensive exotics.  “Maybe it’s a fire sale,” I say.  Our shopping cart wobbles as I push it.   I tell him what I read about bananas dying out, about the fungal disease slowly decimating their numbers, as I steer three working wheels, and one broken one, out of the section marked “Produce.”

At the register, I hang back while my son tabulates his expenses in a notebook, places each item on the conveyer belt with care, without my assistance.  Though the cashier is uninterested in the particulars of his project, he tells her about them in great detail.  She rings up his selections with a red laser beam that recalls a television program I used to watch with my grandfather back when I was my son’s age.  Before we even knew phrases like “genetic predisposition.”  Before anyone understood all the different ways words like “heart” and “disease” could fit together.  Women in short dresses wielding astral powers, ray guns, dynamite calves.  My grandmother, in the other room, frying a chicken.

Read “Fire Sale” in its entirety here: https://pitheadchapel.com/fire-sale/