Part One features short fiction written since Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction and Missing Stories: An Anthology of Hardly 20/20 Flash! Fiction.
Part Two includes two sections: the first comprises book reviews and essays from 2020 and 2021 and the second includes two papers from the 1990s and several essays overlooked or otherwise omitted during compilation of the Collected Essays on Political Economy and Wartime Civil Liberties, 2002-2008.
The fictional and the real are combined in this collection intentionally, partly because the book would be too small with just one or the other but also to suggest the permeability of boundaries between fictional and non-fictional perspectives.
From the book:
C-Shift Change (May 2021)
The lunchroom is overstuffed with blue shirts (baby blue button-up style with the company logo on the pocket) and T-shirts (mostly faded dark blue) on bodies of all ages, colours, and genders. The former are one step closer to the 'B' shift, the afternoon shift. The latter are probationary meaning that they have 90 nights before they have to find another job.
Groups sit on the beige plastic chairs set around small square tables, also plastic, designed for four but able to accommodate eight ... with the corners. Some tables are anxiously subdued, others comfortably boisterous There's no music in here, just the hum of the Coke and sandwich vending machines and the whooshing sound of the HVAC system, which are mostly drowned out by human voices. That will change in about 15 minutes and for the next 8 hours, give or take.
In the middle of the room sits Ram, the old guy, Grandpa, who could have started living off old-age benefits years ago. He wears a clean white T-shirt to work every day, even though he should have earned a blue shirt by now, but his probationary period has been extended multiple times. He takes it as its given, doesn't complain but doesn't kowtow. He limps as he walks. His round but muscular midsection doesn't help his mobility. His brown work-scarred forearms covered in white hair are as thick and powerful as any in the plant. Asked how he stays so healthy, he answers matter-of-factly, "Very, very good doctors. Son and daughter, and four grandchildren." No one takes him literally, but that's what he means.
On one side of Ram is the temp, the 20-something from the dying steel town 40 minutes away. He comes from a family of United Empire Loyalists. He's fond of saying that though nobody knows, or cares, what he's talking about—1776 and 1812 being unfamiliar markers for most of his co-workers. And on the other side of Ram, is Mai, Vietnamese but from Japan. She often puts in her earbuds and listens to English pronunciation lessons during lunch break. Once that fact was discovered, it spread and has produced no end of jokes and laughter from the male voices in the lunchroom. Mac takes the fourth side of the table. He's a bookish, stand-offish sort, and during breaks he chain-smokes a foul-smelling unbranded cigarette that creates a comfortable space in the 'smokers' pen.'
On the corners of the table are three. The fourth is empty. Between Mac and Ram is Osman, a fastidious Blue Shirt with carefully pressed navy blue pants from Mark's Work Wearhouse and the company blue shirt, always a long-sleeved style that stays buttoned at the wrists throughout the night. Oleg, another Blue Shirt on the 'C' shift, is on the opposite corner from Osman. He only talks about computers, though once he mentioned he'd been in the wars (which ones, nobody knows). He spends his breaks on his mobile researching refurbished servers for the database farm he maintains in his one-bedroom apartment. What he stores on these databases he never says. "Somebody's gonna lose their job," snaps Kathleen, the night supervisor, pointing to the empty chair as she works her way through the room brushing up against her preferred who respond admiringly. Edsel, on the third corner seat, wearing a T-shirt, like Ram (though not white) and Mac and David John (the UEL) mutter something after Kathleen passes. Mac nods. Though not as old as Ram, Edsel moves about like someone who is as old as Ram. His breath, bloodshot eyes, and splotchy-reddish-gray face give away what he had for breakfast, the meal daytimers call dinner. He's quiet but his eyes and manner betray an intense dislike of authority. He used to work construction year round in the north but quit after the accident. A steel beam had slipped and fallen six stories onto the supervisor's trailer during lunch break.
All around the lunchroom, there is a sudden silence as if some sound had commanded, interrupting conversations, breaking off interior monologues and stopping the anxious drumming of fingers. There had been no sound, but what follows is the scooching and clattering of chairs being pushed up to the tables. All stand watching the second hand of the large round clock posted above the lunchroom entrance make its last sweep. At 12, the bell rings, and out goes the night shift and in comes the afternoon shift. The Blue Shirts pass through the lunchroom to the showers. The few day-by-day temps rush out the door to catch the last bus. Soon afterwards, the Blue Shirts trickle out and amble to their cars or pickups. The fragrance of freshly-lit joints wafts through the parking lot of long shadows. Rival rock 'n' roll legends struggle to be heard over the revving engines. Once the stereos and high-torque motors are out of earshot, the great machines in the neighbouring factories lull the industrial park to sleep with their rhythmic white noise, only twice, at 2:30 and 4:45, pierced by the engineer's whistle and then the protracted clickety-clack of a locomotive and its train of empty, rattling boxcars.