The Complaint Department

Nora Vasquez, age twelve, has a system.When something is wrong - or unclear, or requires acknowledgment from a party currently declining to provide it - you file a complaint. Dedicated email address. Three-ring binder. Color-coded tabs. The response rate is approximately zero percent, which sounds like a problem but isn't, because the point was never the response. The point is that the thing has been named.When Nora spends the summer with her grandmother Bette in Millhaven, Ohio, she expects ninety-one days of unstructured time and an attic full of things that need sorting. What she finds instead is a shoebox of forty-seven letters - Bette's letters, written over fifty years, addressed to things that were never going to write back. Time. Grief. The concept of August.Bette had the same system. She just never called it that.A funny, quietly moving story about the difference between a complaint and a record, and why sometimes the most important thing you can do is just put it somewhere real.

Pages: 117, Paperback, Independently published