New Forum | Summer 2021 Editors' Issue

Returns (cont.)
Bradley William Holder
pages of a three-ring binder. Mastiff sees her glance at his notebook, which he has at this
point placed on the counter in front of him. Through the plexiglass partition that divides the
two of them from the one of her, she says, “Be just one second.”
Curtains. “Hey, miss,” he says, gently tapping the notebook with an index finger. “We
have the case number right here. You don’t have to call.”
“I know,” she says, a little testy. “Management just prefers it when we do.”
“Alright, no problem.”
In the back office, loss prevention is checking the cameras. “I know these pendejos,” he
says. “They do this, move from store to store, returning water heaters on the pretense of
being plumbers and shit. Who knows where they get them?”
“They steal them, I’m sure,” the manager says. “Okay. Let’s call the cops.”
Curtains. Curtains between them. Mastiff gets something like a premonition, on him
like a shiver. Curt. He feels for the keys in his right pocket. He puts his hand on his
brother’s shoulder. “Yo,” he says, glancing at the line behind them. Curtains. “Stay here. I’ll
be right back.”
“Yeh, aight.”
Dirk moves not quickly but with intention, locking guilty eyes with the onlookers who
will soon replace him. He comes to the automatic doors, noticeably faster—“Excuse me, sir.
This isn’t an exit.”—but only once he’s out of sight. The doors decisively shut behind him
—“I know, sorry.”—like the billowy curtains of a stage production. His keys are out, and
he’s playfully, or perhaps nervously, swinging them around his middle finger—like a cat’s
toy, like a pistol. The parking lot is still, the summer’s sunlight covered with a blue-grey
mist. The wind coming in from the shore, too far to see but close enough to feel, touches his
skin; and he looks at it—still moving, panicking only to the extent that he’s acting, acting
only to the extent that he’s moving. “No choice,” he says to himself, throwing the keys in
the bushes nearby. “Not one.”
The employee at the door, her pride wounded by this customer’s seeming lack of regard
for the rules, watches him walk toward Magnolia Blvd. “What a asshole,” she says.
C-curtains.
Bradley William Holder is an English and philosophy double major and Southern California native.
This summer—after graduation—he hopes to read lots of German idealism, work earnestly in some
coastal city for a pitiful wage, and, when so moved, compose weirdly honest, stylistically
experimental coming-of-age fiction with characters all loosely based on himself. He possesses
vague notions of one day pursuing higher education.
NEW FORUM - 26 - SUMMER 2021