"Black people like to ski?"
An excerpt from new short horror story, "Selling Vermont"
Happy Monday! Paid subscriptions have been paused indefinitely while I continue to work on the draft of my novel. I finished about 1/3 during my Connecticut writing retreat. My goal is to finish a rough draft by the end of the year, more on that soon!
For those who’ve followed along since my apartment fire two months ago, I moved into a new apartment in Crown Heights this week. Excited to be living in Brooklyn again.
And now, some more exciting news: last night at The Chelsea Hotel, I celebrated the launch of literary magazine Volume 0’s latest issue. It features my first-ever published fiction piece, a short horror story, “Selling Vermont.”
Selling Vermont
“Black people like to ski?”
My boss, Bret DuMonde, asks me this on the deck of the La Mirage Ski Resort. He sips a hot toddy and wears a pair of matte silver MYKITA sunglasses, which he’s reminded me at least three times is a Berlin-based brand with a store on Crosby Street. Sarah Jessica Parker has several pairs, and she once complimented him on them in the store. I glance to my right, playing off my annoyance as if it’s from catching sunlight in my eyes. I’d bought a new pair of Ray-Bans for the weekend, but they accidentally broke in my years-old North Face jacket when the Delta stewardess forced me to stick it in an overhead bin. No bags, no jackets in the front row of a cabin during take-off always pisses me off. I lock eyes to commiserate with a gorgeous woman across the aisle in Comfort+, whom I know as a former actress in a string of Kevin Hart comedies, now mostly known for The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She smiles at me for a second as if she remembers me. “Kevin?” she mouths. I get that a lot. We look alike. But I’m not that fucking short. Realizing her mistake quickly, she grimaces and puts her headphones in. We don’t make eye contact the rest of the flight, and now I’m here at the La Mirage, being asked if black people ski by my boss.
“We do,” I say. “I come here every year with a group of college friends from Princeton.”
“Well, of course, black people from Princeton ski. I meant regular black people.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.” I’m 100% sure what he means.
Shook white folks have been the theme of the day. The taxi driver at the airport who immediately said “no credit cards” — I have plenty of cash bruh, you’re the one driving a taxi, not me—and refused to connect me to the aux via Bluetooth, so I blared Drake from my phone in the backseat and rapped along with every “nigga” extra hard to annoy. Miriam, the pressed blonde at the concierge desk, who double checked my ID twice to see if I was really the reservation under Clifton Wilson. Her attitude switched up quickly when DuMonde’s wife, Hannah, showed up at the same time and gave me a country club kiss on both cheeks. Miriam definitely knows the DuMondes; they own La Mirage, and when I insinuate that Miriam is having trouble finding the reservation, she whips out my room key real quick. Hannah wanders away when someone loud and drunk calls her name from across the lobby. I smirk and snatch my room key from Miriam.
I neglect to mention to my boss that the weekend my friends have chosen for their yearly trip is this very weekend, and I’m pulling a double duty of working and also turning up with my college besties. In my group chat, I referenced the episode of The Flintstones where Fred tries to be in two places at once: his bowling league and the drive-in with Wilma for their anniversary. No one got the reference, not even Ethan, the gay TV writer.
A song from The Weekend about doing lines of blow blares on the deck. She cut that ivory into skinny pieces, then she clean it with her face. I wonder how long I’m going to have to sit and listen to DuMonde talk to me like we’re friends before I can get back to my room and crush the five grams I bought from my Manhattan dealer, and get my weekend started. The blow in Manhattan is significantly better than the blow in Brooklyn. Rich white people still do blow in Manhattan restaurant bathrooms at parties. Brooklyn is where you get offered drugs with numbers in their names, prefaced by, “It’s big in Berlin right now.” White people are crazy. I’m not snorting any shit with a name that sounds like a password.
“I have an assignment for you,” DuMonde says.
My heart sinks. Work. I thought I was going to be on networking duty this weekend, smiling like a good DEI hire while DuMonde woos hotel guests. I let out a chummy laugh. “Is that assignment hitting the slopes?”
“No. We’ve hit a snag with the resort expansion. There’s a buyer in particular who won’t budge. The old motherfucker.”
La Mirage is big, but not big enough that DuMonde doesn’t want to keep expanding it. I know he’s been looking to add on to the resort to make Vermont an even bigger ski destination than it already is.
“I need you to convince him. He’s some old black guy, living out in a cabin on the outskirts of the property like he’s fucking Uncle Tom.” That’s not what that term means…
Purchase Volume 0 to keep reading.
Copyright © 2025 by Ira Madison III. Published by Volume 0, Visible Rails LLC. All rights reserved.
“Shook white folks have been the theme of the day. The taxi driver at the airport who immediately said “no credit cards” — I have plenty of cash bruh, you’re the one driving a taxi, not me” LOL!!! Love it and would like to read the rest!
So so good. Engrossed already!