Small Bottles

This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers.

Nothing is what it used to be for our salesman narrator: not his family, not his commissions, not even the commuter jets that carry him from client to client. Having lost his top-of-the-heap status in his profession, he reflects on his new reality with a darkly comic perspective that resonates deeply with each of us who has desperately needed a new direction in life.

Set in two tragically familiar contemporary arenas—the airport, and the motel just down the highway—this story by New Orleans writer Theo Schell-Lambert drops the reader into a modern landscape that is at once more bleak—and more hopeful—than we often admit.