A New Story From Kimbilio Fellow Brandon Taylor in THE YALE REVIEW
Colonial Conditions
THE ELECTION WAS ON TUESDAY, but first, the Halloween bonfire.
When Carson and Roma arrived, Roma discreetly removed her mask and said that she had to find the host, who had spent most of the late summer and fall cycling across the Mountain West. Carson knew this because the host had documented the trip with a string of photos manipulated to look like Polaroids and posted to social media. He was long-haired and from Rhode Island, and he wrote long, flabby essays about having played football in high school and how his father was kind of a mean drunk.
Stranded as he was by Roma, Carson gave some real thought to leaving. Then he dropped down into a battered chair and squinted through the smoke from the petering fire across the yard at the other guests, who stood breathing into each other’s faces without masks on. These were not his people. One woman wore a red plastic dress with a high slit and a cutout over a silicon breastplate, as well as a long fur coat constructed out of Christmas tinsel. She looked like a drag queen. There was a man in a skinny suit with a skinny tie and platinum hair who looked like an FBI agent or someone from a mid-2000s music video. And then a man in a loosely deconstructed cowboy outfit. Carson felt insecure because he had come in jeans. He wore a flannel under a navy-blue chore coat. It seemed a little ridiculous to be the only one wearing a mask, so he pulled the mask down under his chin. Besides, he tended to assume a kind of honor system even though he had been told that such an assumption betrayed an overreliance on rugged American individualism.
Just then, a man pulled his own chair over the lawn, digging ruts in the grass. He was a sommelier, he said, and he lived in Des Moines. He’d had plans to open a cocktail bar in Iowa City that ended up getting scuttled after the shutdown, so he moved laterally into wine distro.
“Didn’t change my registration though,” he said. “Totally slipped my mind.”
“I see what you mean.” From the way the sommelier sat back on the lawn chair and crossed his legs, Carson sensed that he was a socialist. Carson was not a socialist, but he was interested in having sex, so he nodded along when the sommelier talked about tax code reform and the moral urgency of health care for all.
Read the rest of the story at THE YALE REVIEW: https://yalereview.org/article/colonial-conditions
