Flash Friday: At the Best Buy on Reserve

Andrew Martin takes us to an American superstore for our latest flash fiction offering in collaboration with Tin House magazine

By Andrew Martin for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network

At the Best Buy on Reserve, I saw my future self in line to buy an Xbox. He had twenty years and fifty pounds on me, and he’d lost his hair. But he was me; I recognized myself, like you can recognize your red Outback in a parking lot full of them. I don’t play video games, hadn’t since middle school, except for the brief period when it was socially acceptable for parties to devolve into rounds of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, the way they now do into YouTube sessions. Why, in my late forties (or thereabouts), had I regressed?

Of course, the purchase could have been for his kid, or kids. But somehow, I didn’t think so. My future self radiated excitement, turning the box over in his hands, reading the fine print. In his shopping cart there were three or four game cases with ominous-looking covers. Battle games, killing games. And well, all right, the strongest clue to this being a personal purchase was his – my – outfit: an oversized (pretty bitchin’) Ride the Lightning t-shirt, shorts that went far past the knees, shiny basketball sneakers. This was not the wardrobe of a man bringing a gift home to his children. My future self would be in a dark room with these purchases in an hour, and he would abandon them only to urinate and pay the pizza man until he had to shower for work on Monday morning. Work doing what? Where did this prophetic vision of myself find employment? It seemed that I’d given up on the teaching and writing life I imagined for myself.

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