New Homes

This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers.

One day, she made the split-second decision to leave Los Angeles. So she packed her apartment into her car, charged a four-hundred-dollar real estate seminar to her credit card, and drove to New Orleans.

At the first day of the training, the group of aspiring agents brainstorms the meaning of "home," role-plays ways to talk confidently about the levees, and tours remodeled homes in the Upper Ninth Ward.

Afterward, the young woman spends an alcohol-fueled evening wandering the French Quarter with a man she met that day. Property values in the city will go up, he tells her, indicated by the fact that they themselves have moved there.

What he doesn't know is that, for her, this is the first of many departures, the beginning of a lifetime of arrivals and escapes.

New Homes is the story of one woman's distressing discovery about the nature of home and what it means to be lost.