About this story
You play Clyde, holding the placard through your father's sermon on wealth without righteousness, with the largest hotel blazing across the avenue — doormen, motorcars, bellboys your own age in cleaner coats than yours. One of them mentions that the service door hires. Your sister admits she is thinking about it too.
Who you’ll meet
Esta Griffiths, the sixteen-year-old sister of the boy the reader plays, holding the collection basket at her family's street-corner hymn meeting while she looks at the hotel across the road, with her mother and father working the corner behind her.
How it opens
Kansas City traffic divided around your family as if the mission occupied a stone in the stream.
Your father's portable organ waited beneath a street lamp among folded stools and hymn sheets.
Asa GriffithsClyde, set the stand where people leaving the shops can hear us.
Elvira GriffithsThe corner was granted for this work, and we need not apologize for using it.
Esta GriffithsWe could begin before the theater crowd reaches the avenue.
Choose
I will set the stand, but not directly under the brightest lamp.
The shops are closing; another corner may gather listeners.