From the Editor’s Desk

There is a laundromat off an interstate exit in the high desert that I have been to exactly once, at one in the morning, and I think about it more than places I have been to a hundred times. Everybody in it was between two other places. A couple in matching fleece who had driven straight from a wedding. A man with a duffel and a paperback who did not say where he was going and did not need to. Two kids in a band, if the T-shirts were honest, sleeping on the folding table in shifts. Nobody had chosen the company. The machines had chosen it, forty minutes at a time, and for forty minutes the only thing anyone had in common was the hum.

It was, I realized somewhere around the rinse cycle, a market. The change machine ate a twenty. Somebody sold somebody a dryer sheet for a quarter. The man with the duffel traded the paperback, finished, to the fleece couple for a bag of gas-station almonds, and then, because we were all still there and the dryers were slow, for a story about why he was on this road, which was not the story he’d have told at home. That is the thing about a stop. You are not who you are at either end of the trip. You are who you are in the middle, with strangers, and the strangers get a version nobody else does.

And speaking of stops on a route, and the version of yourself you leave there: this week’s three stories all happen where the road pauses. A metro platform in Lisbon where a retired bookkeeper keeps a free bench and a dog keeps its own schedule. A desert inn under a red cliff where a sandstorm shuts the west road and the keeper makes twenty strangers tell stories, and every story is somebody’s own. And a truck stop on the last regular night of a thirty-three-year route, where nobody says goodbye because the road doesn’t use the word. Read them where you are, which is probably between two other places. And when you’ve read them, pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: Before the Bell — the story happens in the setup hours and ends when the gates open. Come early; the market isn’t the market yet.)

— The Editor