A short story that comes dressed as a short story. It is quite long, actually, but look at the opening few lines:

“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door”.

The story doesn’t graduate to anything more specific, and the first few times I read it I thought it was concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself. Who is this person, where are they, and why? What happens to the character is not really the point; the story is about their journey and the absence of a destination.

I’m pretty sure I’m missing some larger comment on dispossession, particularly because of one violent piece of dialogue around the middle. It happens and then moves on as if it didn’t. This bears careful re-reading.

First published in The Paris Review 241, Fall 2022, and available to subscribers to read here. I am told this is actually an excerpt from Binyam’s novel Hangman, published in 2023 by One