My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe Page B

subscription fulfillment, fund-raising, a permissions department, etc., all of which George doles out to the staff (who are generally as unqualified for such jobs as you would think) on top of their editorial duties. It’s do-it-yourself publishing, and a lot of the time, given the late-boarding-school atmosphere of the magazine, it doesn’t get done.
    Lately, some worrying signs have begun to appear. The
Review
has always had an untidy, overcrowded office that more resembled the headquarters of a high school yearbook than a real-world magazine. Six editors share a converted studio apartment so tiny that as they sit there reading manuscripts all day, they can practically communicate without talking. (“Is that your stomach growling or mine?”) In recent months, however, the slush has begun to reach unprecedented heights, overwhelming all efforts at control. It’s like a mutant lab creature run amok, or an invasive weed colonizing ahapless little pond. Poetry alone—my God, the world produces a lot of poems—is so backlogged that we don’t even read what comes in for an entire year, and the piles just keep rising and rising. Among staffers, the inability to make headway is breeding despair.
    Meanwhile, this dysfunction is being broadcast to the world via bloated, error-ridden issues that the editors themselves are reluctant to read in their entirety. Even the
Review
‘s famously well-attended cocktail parties in George’s apartment have gone slack.
    So George is absolutely right to worry: the situation at the
Review
feels ripe for a crisis. The issue is whether he worries enough.

LUCY
    MY HANDS CAME BACK .
    After a few weeks behind the register, my hands have returned to being the reasonably obedient appendages they used to be. Money no longer causes them to spaz out and seize up, and one reason is that I’ve accepted that I’m never going to be able to keep them clean, and when someone fishes deep inside their pocket for some cash, as if they were rearranging furniture inside their groin, then hands me a bill so damp it might as well have been underwater, I no longer flinch. Money is money.
    Tonight while on duty I meet Chucho, our wheezy, purple-faced landlord.
    “I live in this building thirty years,” he says. “Bought it with a lottery ticket back in”—he inhales deeply—“seventy-three.”
    “For how much?”
    “Forty thousand.”
    “Forty thousand dollars? Wow! That’s a lot of money. For a lottery ticket, I mean.”
    “Guess how much the building’s worth now.”
    “I dunno. A million?” Chucho has already established himself as a landlord who plays hardball—we’re freezing right now partly because he refuses to spend money on heat—so I try to pick a low number. I don’t want him to think that I think the building is nice.
    “Seven.”
    “Seven
million?”
    “Yeah. Easy. No problem. Someone offered me that last week.”
    “Wow. Seven million is a heck of a lot of money.”
For a building falling sideways
. I’m not sure I believe Chucho. I could see the location alone justifying one or two million, but with floors as soft as boiled lettuce? It’s a delusion. Even more disturbing, however, is the question, Is he shopping his building?
    “You know, my wife got shot where you’re standing.”
    “What?!”
    “Blam!” he says, pointing a finger at my stomach. “Blam! Blam! I used to own this store.”
    “Yes, I heard that.”
    He nods and breathes in noisily, evidently lost in memory.
    “I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”
    “Sorry for what? My wife? She lives in Virginia now.”
    “Oh.”
    “My brother got shot here too, except he was outside.” Another deep breath. “And he didn’t make it.”
    Silence.
    “So are you gonna gimme a lottery ticket or what?”
    I give him a Lotto ticket for free and he goes upstairs.
    The lottery machine, a clunky blue cash register–like contraption that as it spits out scraps of paper makes noise like a screwdriver