Summer of ‘76
When I pulled into the driveway of Harper’s, I parked right by the service bays. Lola’s aging black Ford sedan was parked in front of the gas pumps, untended. I saw Lola standing inside the doorway of the station, the rattling fan whirring away above her head, not moving much air from what I could see. She appeared, to me, to be as untended as her car.
Bob and Billy Harper were sitting on an old car seat they’d ripped out of an unwanted Chrysler. It’d been in front of the station for as long as I could remember, and it was covered in cigarette burns. They weren’t five feet from Lola but they acted as if they didn’t see her or her car, right in front of them, plain as day.
[…]
My mind was racing as I got out of my car, searching for a reason for what I was seeing. Other than the only possible one.
From “Spirit of ‘76,” a short story by Phyllis Alexander (Boston Review, Jan/Feb 2012)
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Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, independent and nonprofit. We cover lots of ground—politics, poetry, film, fiction, book reviews, and criticism. But a few premises tie it all together: that democracy depends on public discussion; that sometimes understanding means going deep; that vast inequalities are unjust; that human imagination breaks free from neat political categories; and that powerful images are worth piles of words.
