Good Day Mockingbird № 2 — The Secondhand Stall

Issue № 2 The Secondhand Stall

At a secondhand market stall, a woman in gloves and a pillbox hat skeptically inspects the price tag tied to the leg of a giant mockingbird perched on the table, while the elderly stall keeper spreads her hands; on the table, a stack of records, small red cowboy boots, a toy rocket, and a ceramic dog.

A record hall in the November cold, a Saturday market table, a girl picking out a little ship past the crockery and the coats. Everything for sale here was somebody else’s first — that’s the whole inventory system.

From the Editor’s Desk

There’s a man at my Sunday market who sells old tools, and he’ll tell you, unprompted, that he has never once sold a hammer. He sells the shine on the handle. A new hammer is all potential and no proof, he says; the shine on an old one is thirty years of somebody’s mornings, worn in at exactly the height of their grip, and when you take it home your hand slides into a stranger’s habit and the work goes easier, because two of you are holding it now. He charges extra for the shine. I’ve never heard anybody argue.

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In this issue

A woman flips through crates of records in a vast, cluttered secondhand hall of brick and timber, the walls hung with old photographs, warm lamps overhead and cold window light behind.

Eingabe

A record fair in a hall that used to be a brewery, a thirty-five-euro record, and the carbon that falls out of the sleeve — asking, in 1982, for the one thing the whole hall knows how to price.

by Paul Titangos

Read the story → 7 min

A pair of well-worn red kids' cowboy boots with cream lightning-bolt stitching, toes out on a dark wooden table, a faded floral curtain soft behind them.

The Red Boots

Five names in ballpoint down a left boot shaft, three dollars a chapter. Lena Fisk came to the Saturday market to give things away, not to find them.

by Claire Jacobs

Read the story → 9 min

Seen from above in tilt-shift miniature, eleven small secondhand spaceships stand in a row on round landing pads along a dirt track beside a market of striped stalls; at the near end a chalky gray ship shines its light on a little girl in a pink dress, who waves, while the seller sits at a folding table back among the stalls.

III

How Long Will You Be

Eleven little ships on their pads at the far end of the market, past the crockery and the coats. The small gray one turns its light to follow you, and it only wants to know one thing.

by Pete Kaminski

Read the story → 9 min