Sam Asher

“The last addict in the world is given one day a week to himself. He walks from 152nd to a community center on West 71st, arranges green plastic chairs in mostly a loop, fans cookies out onto a blue plastic plate, and hangs posters. Mostly then he hopes that someone else might show up, someone new, maybe, someone impossible from his past, preferably. It’s light outside when he starts, but a ream of fluorescent blue-lights are always on overhead. For most of the day his eyes are closed, while he remembers when the room was full of chatter, and laughter, and sobbing, and then he too sobs, and people gather outside in their thousands with their cameras, and by the time it’s dark he’s stacked the chairs in one corner of the room, and thrown the cookies away, and finished the coffee, and he takes the subway home with his hood up, whispering the names of all his dead friends.”