Pushcart 2026 L: Christie Hodgen, “Rich Strike” from Story #20

Fuck it, is the general feeling here, because we are minimum-wage employees in a doomed independent bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, because what we do is useless… fuck it because no less than four of us have MFAs to our name, which means we have been trained to produce the very things for sale all around us, but instead of feeling at home here, encouraged by the company of books and bookish people, we are unmoored, queasy with the notion that if we ever do produce a book, by some miracle, nothing will come of it; the stories we thought might change the world, stories about people we used to know back home in those failed industrial wastelands from whence we came, those down-market cities where all the world’s redheaded stepchildren came to live, lost souls and lonely hearts, alcoholics and drug addicts, losers, deadbeats, drifters, felons—these stories will be lost on a shelf amongst thousands of others, thin-spined and slapped shut; no one will buy them or read them or even notice…