Nobody much wanted to talk about it, and especially nobody wanted to do anything about it, until the  niece of the mayor of a major North American city tripped over a beggar, and found herself suddenly homeless.
     The mayor hadn’t spoken to his niece in 13 years, not since she’d been caught giving a blowjob to a first-term councillor who voted against everything the mayor proposed, but she was his niece after all, and so he recalled how she’d photocopied and delivered flyers on his first successful political campaign back when she was just 11.
     Everyone, at least in a city of any size, knew somebody who’d become homeless the same way, but until the mayor’s niece, nobody talked about it. Possibly because it seemed absurd, possibly because we didn’t want to admit that we were all at risk. As long as we could pretend it was their fault for being homeless, it was okay, but the mayor, at that age where the mind sometimes starts to go, got all worked up about his younger sister’s daughter whom he’d never liked, but who was a cute kid, and hit puberty young and made a great adornment on political campaigns, until the incident with the councillor, obviously.

Bio:

ANDREW J. SIMPSON is the author of three story collections, including Hobgoblins of Little Minds (Anxiety Press, 2022). His work has appeared in the New Quarterly, the Feathertale Review, the Ottawa Citizen, and untethered, among other publications. From 2014 to 2019 he was the host of the reading series Words at the Wise. He rents in Toronto, and thus lives in perpetual fear of homelessness.