From the final issue of Freeman’s, which was published this month by Grove Press. 

My father worked as an inventory manager at a company that imported erasers and small toy cars from China. One day, when a snowstorm closed the schools, he took me to his office and showed me the filing cabinets where he stored the sum of his working days: dozens and dozens of beige ledgers, each one a nest of figures tracing the journey of smiling rubber squids and miniature Ferraris from somewhere in Guangdong. I asked if I could have a race car. He…