When you're trapped in a Rust Belt town, time passes or it doesn't.
The people of Westinghouse, Ohio know this better than most. In
Delinquents
, their personal worlds expand and collapse in on themselves as they battle addictions, build scrap-metal rocket ships, and tether themselves to plans that will either get them out of dodge or blow up in their faces.
A former Deadhead seeks sobriety in his hometown, though his decades-old childhood trauma has been exhumed and now awaits him. A sometimes-recovering addict asks his younger sister to put him up as he repairs cars in their yard and she scrabbles to keep her own sanity. A woman intending to follow her boyfriend out of town wonders why a newcomer in Westinghouse has captured her latent interest.
Nick Rees Gardner's linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious, desperate, resilient, broken. For the characters contained in
, the crux is determining which they'll be when the music stops.