A letter to Carolina
By A.T.Cross
Between his busy class schedule and his regular job waiting tables, Andy is working graveyard shift at a printing shop and still having troubles covering tuition. Already sleep deprived and afraid that the new busgirl is going to steal his job, he’s not thrilled to be training her. But when he discovers that she’s at least as smart as she is attractive, and only there to learn English, he finds himself falling for her. Trapped in the print shop all night, he sits down to write her a letter, only to realize that he is not alone. As the night drags on and the page count grows, Miel becomes a forced meditation on what happens when a C student seizes control of the factors of production.
Originally written as a final for a memoir class, Miel is exactly what it seems, simply a letter to a girl that I was forgetting. When I turned the final paper into the professor just a few weeks into the semester she asked “so now what are you going to do?” I told her that I was just going to keep reading books. It is, after all, what I am best at. I didn’t plan to publish it, but a dishwasher that worked for me saw me having a bad day and returned a past kindness by buying me his favorite coffee drink, a quadruple mocha. Still wide awake hours after we closed the kitchen, I managed to upload a few files and being overly caffeinated, I hit publish at four in the morning.
Andrew Tomacelli 