Fiction | November 04, 2025

New Skin for the Old Ceremony  

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. He wasn’t supposed to be balanced on the bumper of a U-Haul, clinging to its rusted handles, praying that the head of marketing would drive faster lest they be overtaken, beat, probably stabbed and robbed by a group of teenagers chasing them through a shantytown outside of Lusaka.  

He was supposed to be like his father: a path-charter, a self-starter, a titan. He was supposed to be shepherded into Harvard or Stanford or Wharton as a standout, as someone who realized after one year and four months—not even a year and a half—of working at a consulting firm in the city that he did not want to wake up one day and be some VP of some team within some corporation, working ninety-hour weeks, clipping through the hamster wheel of it all.  

Instead, he moved to Africa to sell milk. Somehow, he—of Marin County, of two parents with Ivy League degrees, of his nationally-ranked high school tennis team, of the Future Business Leaders of America Society at the University of Michigan—somehow, he moved to Zambia to sell milk. Actually, on this particular afternoon, he was giving the milk away. For six hours he passed cartons out of the back of the truck to women and children in hopes that the next time the women went to the store, they would choose his company’s product over whatever competitor’s was available. Their milk was ten cents more expensive. But the carton was glossier and the liquid was whiter and it signaled that you were the kind of person whose employment was gainful enough to forgo the dingy plastic bottles with the yellow-crusted rims for the bright blue label picturing a cartoon milk carton giving a thumbs-up. 

In architecture, it was called a “duck,” a building replicating the product offered inside. The girl in New York had taught him that. But he wasn’t supposed to be thinking of the girl in New York. No, no, definitely not. He was supposed to be thinking about how a Tuesday afternoon had morphed into evening when the local radio station they partnered with to promote the milk giveaway showed up two hours late. But it wasn’t this mystical somehow. It was like destiny. It was like how everything that was supposed to happen when it was scheduled, agreed upon, and paid for in his ten long days in Lusaka had not happened at the time it was scheduled, agreed upon, and paid for.  

And now he and the head of marketing were going to be brutally murdered for it. The girl in New York would tell him he was racist for thinking that. Actually, she wouldn’t tell him. She would prompt him: “Don’t you think that line of thinking is bordering on, if not outright, problematic?” But he wasn’t supposed to be thinking of the girl in New York. He was supposed to be clinging on for dear life.  

He turned his body, searching for the boys, and a cloud of red dust ballooned into his face. He coughed and shook his head. 

“Drive fucking faster!” he yelled around the side of the U-Haul.