Two friends build little libraries for their neighborhood. “Yacht Rock” a short story now on Substack.
Blake’s tires snap and pop gravel when he pulls into the lot for El Mercado and its American and Mexican flags flying between mobile homes, rundown apartments, and the Whole Foods across the street. “Buenos noches,” he says to the family sitting in lawn chairs outside their minivan silver and pockmarked like the moon rising behind them. The children shy away and giggle. A stitched-together dog waggles over to Blake who pets it before perusing vegetables and fruits. He lifts baskets of beets, sweet potatoes, onions; the man rings him up. He pauses over a bushel of strawberries and inhales before the door to El Mercado opens and someone lugs a cooler of fish that reminds him of his father’s clothes and skin and the cut and gutted fish steaming off his boat after churning from sunset to sundown in the Atlantic.
William Auten — “Yacht Rock”
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