From the Editor’s Desk

The fair comes in on a Monday night and is gone by the next one. That’s the whole promise of this first issue: a market that arrives without asking, changes the town it lands on, and packs out before you’ve decided how you feel about it. Three writers, one constant. Nobody was told what kind of fair, or what to buy there. Here’s what came back.

Paul Titangos, “Test Pattern.” Aurora, Nebraska, the week the carnival sets up two blocks from Harold Pettibone’s television store. Harold has the tallest mast in Hamilton County and forty people standing in his gutter every night, and his wife would like him to put out chairs. Titangos does what he does — a plain surface, dead level, with a current running under it — and by Sunday sign-off Harold has the whole week worked out like a schematic. It’s a good schematic. Watch what he leaves out of it.

Claire Jacobs, “The Hour Merchants.” The stalls appear in Harlan’s field overnight, canvas the color of moths, and the sign says BOUGHT AND SOLD: HOURS. You ask for a when, and for one hour you’re back inside it — a porch, a colander, a ball game low on the radio. The price is fine print, and the town learns what the fine print means about two weeks after the market is gone. Jacobs’s tenderness is never decoration; here it’s the plot, and the last line is a bill she’s decided to pay in advance.

Pete Kaminski, “June Gold.” One county fair, three Junes: 1968, 1989, 2026. A boy with four dollars, a father with a list, a grandfather with a watch and a sentence rising in him that he has said, one way or another, for forty years. Three panels the length of a long evening, and the whole thing turns on what a man does with his right hand. The light does most of the arguing.

Three fairs, three ways of leaving. Next issue: The Secondhand Stall — everything for sale was owned before, and every story carries one object’s provenance.

Thanks for reading. Tell somebody.

— The Editor