Fiction, Resistance, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Unlikely Stories is a web literary magazine that has been wrestling with sociopolitical issues since 1998. Their editors describe the mag as activist, transgressive, and unapologetically antifascist. I am pleased as punch, therefor, to have my long-short-story (publisher Jonathan Penton classifies it as a novella) of near-future political apocalypse appearing on the pages of this edition of Unlikely Stories Six.

The Last Two Chocolate Chip Cookies in Manhattan was written just before national guard troops began being rolled into American cities to provide military support for the federal government's deportation orders. The story envisions that Manhattan, an island grown more distant from the surrounding mainland due to intensive climate-change induced storms and flooding, pushes back, and in short order has found itself under federal military siege.

As the city is strangled, two unlikely folks meet -- ordinary, never-quite-lived-up-to-their-potential folks. One came from money, but ditched her financial path to stay in her comfort zone, selling home-baked chocolate chip cookies from a food truck. The other a would-be writer, freelancing for a marginal socialist newspaper.

Under pressure, ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and everyone can find a way to push back. Often, it does not take battlefield heroics. It just takes two people taking the time to have a conversation, to look, and to listen. Sometimes, all it takes is a story.

https://unlikelystories.org/content/the-last-two-chocolate-chip-cookies-in-manhattan