Minimum Payment Due

Stories and Essays

De: Robert Sandy

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In the eponymous Minimum Payment Due, Robert Lemon is eighteen years old when he gets his first credit card at freshman orientation. In the United States, millions of college freshmen walk into gymnasiums and dining halls, containing freshly waxed floors and their entire lives ahead of them, and will be encouraged to join the same club. There's a table. And a free pen. And a new $500 credit limit. But what are true costs when accumulated across a lifetime?

In twenty-one stories and five essays, this collection maps the debts people carry — financial, but also the debts of grief, obligation, love, and blame that come due whether or not anyone can pay them. A woman is raised on her mother's ferocious faith and her father's certainty that the blessing always lands on someone else. Two men escape a nursing home on a plan drawn on the back of a placemat. A family sits in the second row as an 180-year sentence is read aloud. An alien machine crosses the dark out of loneliness. A journalist tells, eight years too late, the story of an election stolen in plain sight.

Ranging from intimate realism to speculative fiction of real ambition, Minimum Payment Due is held together by a fierce moral attention to the machinery that measures people as units and discards them — and to the small, unremarkable choices that turn out to have been a whole life. These are not happy endings but chosen ones — heavier, and holding more weight.