A novel · Fall 2026
One dime buys four seconds with her.
A Baltimore warehouse worker finds that a dime on the ground can put him back in his dead mother’s kitchen. The visits cost him minutes, then hours, then the living people trying to see him while there is still time.
For readers of Jesmyn Ward, James McBride, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Moses Smith
Her kitchen · Ten of six
Sincere Mitchell is twenty-five, six-foot-four, and the best hand on the floor of a Baltimore medical-supply warehouse, where he clocks in at five-thirty and fixes machines nobody asked him to fix. He has been the quiet one his whole life. His mother worked nights at Hopkins for fourteen years, sang Sam Cooke off-key, kept a mason jar of dimes on the counter, and told him that a dime on the ground means somebody is watching over you. She died at forty-six. In eighteen years she never once asked him a real question about himself.
Seven years later he bends down for a dime on a sidewalk, and the light swings around, and he is standing in her kitchen with the whiting frying and her voice in the next room.
One dime buys four seconds. Two dimes buy a whole supper. Sincere starts spending, and the doors stop being only hers — a lake with a father who doesn’t need him to talk, a stoop with a brother the world never made, rooms full of people who look at him and ask him things and wait for the answer. Everything he was ever starved for is on the other side of a coin. And every hour he spends over there is an hour stolen from the living people who are, imperfectly and wordlessly, already loving him.
The work
The first arrives in Fall 2026. The other two follow. They are the same question asked three ways: what is the life you are living while you are busy grieving another one.
Fall 2026
One dime buys four seconds with her.
A Baltimore warehouse worker discovers that a dime on the ground can put him back in his dead mother’s kitchen. The visits cost him minutes, then hours, then the living people trying to see him while there’s still time.
Literary Fiction · Magical Realism
2027
A man is handed the lives he didn’t live, and finds out what they cost.
Speculative Literary Fiction
2027
A history teacher is shown the lives he could have lived, and learns that the loss he should have been counting was the ordinary days he stopped paying attention to.
Contemporary Speculative Literary Fiction
They all trying to get back to somebody.
The author
He writes about working people, the families that made them, and the one impossible thing that shows up in an ordinary life. Quiet men. What grief costs, and what it asks for.
More about the workBefore it is out
The first chapters of The Weight of a Coin: the warehouse floor at five-thirty, the dime on the sidewalk, and what Sincere does when the light swings around. After that you will hear from me when there is a book to tell you about. Not often.
You can leave any time.