Good Day Mockingbird — A weekly zine of AI fiction

Issue № 10 The Porter

A mid-century gouache pulp poster in teal, mustard, tomato and cream, THE PORTER in big cream display letters across the top, and beneath it a grey mockingbird the size of a mule striding through a sunlit bazaar with a towering load of baskets, bales and a pack of toilet paper strapped to its back, while merchants at their stalls gape and point, one holding up a thin steel tube, and a wooden ladder leans against a doorway at the right.

Three people who carry what isn’t theirs. In an old covered market, a porter who has walked under the word destur, make way, for thirty-nine years votes with his guild against the freight elevator and then carries it up the stairs himself. In Honolulu, at the Pier 38 fish auction, the man whose steel tube decides what every fish is worth draws a bad core from his cousin’s best bigeye and has to decide where the center of a fish is. And in San Diego, in April 2020, a laid-off server pushes a stranger’s cart through the oldest warehouse store in town for a forty-eight-dollar tip, finds one pack of toilet paper left on the pallet, and carries forty-one items up a driveway to a woman who can take the tip back.

From the Editor’s Desk

Every move I have ever made, the same friend showed up with the truck. He never asked what was in the boxes. He knew anyway, by the weight and the sound: this one is books, this one is the good dishes, this one is the thing you should have thrown out two apartments ago. He carried all of it down three flights and up three more and never once put anything of his own in the truck, because he didn’t own anything in it. That was the deal. At the end of the day he’d eat the pizza and leave, and the next time I unpacked, every box was where he’d set it down, which was always the right room.

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In this issue

A phone photograph in flat fluorescent light at the back wall of a warehouse store, an almost empty blue-edged wooden pallet on grey concrete with one shrink-wrapped pack of toilet paper left on it, a white paper sign taped to the pallet's front reading LIMIT 1 in black marker, and the shadow of a forklift mast falling across the cinder-block wall from the left.

Out of Stock

San Diego, a Thursday in April 2020. A laid-off server shops other people’s lists through the oldest warehouse store in town for whatever the tip line says, and this morning the tip line says forty-eight dollars. At the back wall there is one pack of toilet paper left on the pallet. The order wants it, and so does she. Then forty-one items, three trips up a driveway on Mount Soledad, and a woman behind a screen door who put the forty-eight on so somebody would come at ten.

by Pete Kaminski

Read the story → 9 min

A painted, near-photographic dawn scene inside the open-sided auction hall at Pier 38, wet concrete reflecting the lights, an elderly Japanese buyer in a knit cap and dark coat with a flashlight in his breast pocket and a buyer's book under his arm, turning to look at a younger man in a grey hoodie and rubber bibs with a gloved hand on a fish tote, behind them a man in white overalls hosing the floor, longliners at the pier, and Diamond Head under an orange sky.

Core

Honolulu, Pier 38, one morning, one a.m. to seven. Rodel’s job is the inside of the fish, a steel tube the width of a pencil pushed toward the backbone that brings up a finger of flesh a buyer can read. His cousin’s boat comes in a little after three with a bank loan on it and a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound bigeye that is beautiful from the outside. Three inches down, the tube drops through a soft place. And the center of a fish that size is a big place.

by Paul Titangos

Read the story → 8 min

A cinematic color photograph in a stone covered market, arched galleries rising on both sides into haze and a crowd dim in the background, an older porter in a dark cap and worn jacket, grey-bearded, bent forward with a carrying pole over his shoulder and a huge canvas-wrapped drum lashed behind him, and a young man in dark clothes braced under the load at the rear, both climbing toward the light.

III

Destur

A covered market, a han of four floors with no two stairs cut the same, and a porter who has walked under the word destur, make way, for thirty-nine years and owns nothing in the bazaar but his saddle. Then a freight elevator arrives in nine crates, the guild votes ninety to nothing not to touch them, and Rüstem does the arithmetic on his ceiling. The stairs take a man one step at a time, starting at the knees, and his sister’s boy is nineteen and already stiff on wet mornings.

by Claire Jacobs

Read the story → 9 min