There was a minor gap in time where we didn’t get any stories by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, but we’ve had one per year since, and this is his eighth or ninth in the magazine since they started publishing his work in 2010. I’ve tended to like his work.

Here is how “Minimum Payement” begins:

It was four o’clock in the afternoon and my phone was ringing, number unknown, which meant, of course, that it was one of the collection agencies. They had called me three days ago. They had called me three days before that. They were clearly not going to take no answer for an answer. The last time I’d made the mistake of picking up, the woman had sounded as if she was about twenty years old, calling from somewhere in the heartland, speaking with flat vowels and a maternal tone, firm but loving, never mind the age difference. “We would hate for it to come to that,” she said, which was code for legal proceedings. I wanted to tell her that the irony was that sooner or later someone was going to be calling her about the student loans she couldn’t pay back. Instead, I said, “No, Ma’am. Yes, Ma’am.” There was additional irony in the fact that the phone I was using had been bought on credit the week before—because I’m susceptible to sales—increasing the grand total of what I owed, distributed across two Visas, one Mastercard, and an American Express, not to mention Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. But that was the kind of irony that wasn’t funny. Meanwhile, compound interest was accruing daily.

What a stressful start to the week! Please feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts on the story.