Atlanta Makes a List of Things It's Lost
The luggage, first, of the woman arriving to interview for a security job the week after the end of the Olympics, her dream job, which she will not get because she'll have to buy a new suit due to the lost suitcase, and the suit will be the tiniest bit too small which will give a certain permission to the interviewer, a forty-something Macon boy who believes that security jobs are for men and whose interests in women can be summed up in phrases like the tiniest bit too small, and who makes an offensive comment which he cannot take back, to which the woman makes an unfortunate gesture. The interviewer's tact. The woman's dream. Their combined integrity, which Atlanta lost on the twenty-second floor of a high rise, but also in a child's split-lip in Sweet Auburn, and in the unspoken break policies of the Coca-Cola Factory, and in the distance between the New South and the Confederate Underground, and in any number of unrecorded incidents on a street called Peach Tree, because every street is called Peach Tree, and maybe Atlanta has lost its ingenuity, too.
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