Inside Prominent Mall, retail employees gird for battle. Over by the fleeces, one employee stands ready for the carnage, armed with an eight-foot pole. He’s the store’s top seller.
The gate rises. The mob enters.
In “Friday Black,” the title story in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s new short story collection, the busiest shopping day of the year will have a body count. Happens every year. (This week, Esquire published the story online here.)
In the first story, “The Finkelstein 5,” a young man constantly adjusts his internal blackness dial as he confirms, then loses, a job interview, while America reckons with the trial of a white man who killed five black children with a chainsaw. Self-defense, the white man says, and he’s acquitted.
And in “Zimmer Land,” a black man works as an actor in a theme park where a paunchy white man confronts him on a fake residential street, asks him what he thinks he’s doing in this neighborhood, and pulls out a gun. Afterward the actor cleans off the fake blood and gets ready for the next customer. PLEASE READ
