Sports Night
“This year’s theme is the decade when their moms were pretty.”
Sports Night practices in the lobby. I watch them from the hall. They practice next to trophies from real sports. They practice, and detention lets out, and they are still practicing. Sports Night has no sports, only dance moves that require a thousand after-schools of practice. It’s a lot of practice for one night, a lot of crying. Someone’s always getting paper towels for them to cry in. I never see them be done practicing. I have to go back down the hall. I’m on Newspaper. We get out later than detention, Sports Night, Abstinence, and every real sport.
A
Argus
The Argus
i shopped till i dropped at lindsay’s bat! Her bat mitzvah theme was shopping. Guests were assigned to sit at tables labeled Bloomingdale’s, the mall, the Gap. Everyone got a little credit card with their name on it. I wasn’t invited, but I remember teachers confiscating the Lindsay cards at school, in case they paid for things in a junior high black market.
The Argus
The story is taken from The Bed Moved, published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.

Rebecca Schiff is the author of the short story collection The Bed Moved, a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and a Sami Rohr Prize. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, Catapult, Fence, Guernica, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Washington Square, Lenny Letter, and in The Best Small Fictions 2017. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Rebecca Schiff
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Rebecca Schiff
More in this series
Our Sleeping Lungs Opened to the Cold
What was it about us that disturbed the clients so thoroughly?
Music, Night
One didn’t come all this way in the careful study of the instrument to play it safe.
Become of Me
Do not fear your moments of sorrow, your deep frustration, the force of your being. I have made you strong enough to want and not receive.