By: Andy Marin

He feels like a fool as people walk by him and into the subway station.

He bites his lip and swallows. He would light a cigarette but he doesn’t want to put off passersby who find smoking gross, or hazardous, or whatever. He eyes a group of young people approaching. As a cohort, they are generally more progressive, so maybe they would support the party.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Can we please get your signatures so that our candidate may run for mayor?”

They giggle and pass by him.

He needs a break.

There’s a Starbucks to his right, but he can’t be seen in there, since they allegedly support the genocide in Gaza, and the party doesn’t approve of that.

A young woman wearing a green windbreaker walks by. She sports multiple small rings up and down both of her ears. He asks her the same question he’s asked a hundred times today.

“What party is this?” she asks.

“It’s called FEEL, the Front for Electoral Energy and Liberty.”

She looks at him with a hint of unfamiliarity in her eyes. “I don’t really know about that,” she says, and walks into the subway station.

The candidate needs a hundred thousand signatures to run. He has gotten maybe five.

He isn’t even sure if he likes the candidate anymore. I mean, she has sensible policies. She wants to keep the city as green as possible, and to increase taxes on the top one percent richest citizens. He isn’t sure if it would be within her power to do that if she won, but it sounds pretty good to him.

This is stupid. He joined the party to meet women. He hasn’t met any. The clipboard feels cold against his palms. He scratches his neck and considers that he needs a shave.

A few minutes later it starts to rain.

###

Andy Marin is a European writer and psychiatrist. His fiction, essays, and poetry focus on voice-driven contemporary narratives exploring urban life, media culture, and personal dislocation. His interests include Beat literature, literary history, and the way minor or archival works transform our understanding of major authors. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Down in the Dirt and Beatdom.