Electric Literature recommends Adrian Van Young’s potent short story “The Sub-Leaser” this week, an inspired choice! Here’s a teaser:
‘AND SO I RETURNED FROM A SERIES OF ERRANDS to find my apartment unalterably changed. Which change, I should say, was in fact several changes that had, in collusion, effected the one by dint of a sly and concerted campaign against the state of my rooms preceding my absence. Rooms, and not room, to be clear on one thing; namely, that I, their primary tenant, was only fiscally and moreover physically liable for the sustained occupation of one, my room, while the other, which lay around a bend and down a splintered wooden hallway from my own, the north room, I had leased for undetermined months to a certain third party little known to me then. But more of him, the sub-leaser, the stranger, to come.
It is the matter of the change that I wish to embark on.’
Keep reading here, and buy a copy of his prizewinning collection The Man Who Noticed Everything here.
