Words on a Page

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration claimed that tax breaks for corporations and the nation’s highest earners would spur economic growth and allow wealth to ‘ trickle-down ’ to those on the lower end of the economic scale. It was a lie, of course. Money doesn’t trickle down. It pools at the feet of the already wealthy. Reaganomics only led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a faster rate than before. For anyone who graduated from high school, went to university, got married, and generally came of age in the United States in the 1980s, Cris Mazza’s short story collection  Trickle-Down Timeline  brings that decade into sharp focus again.  ‘For ten or twenty years after leaving home,’ the narrator of ‘What If’   tells us, ‘there’s little nostalgia about where you came from.’ As young adults, loose upon the wider world, the hometowns we moved away from – some of us as soon as we possibly could – held little attraction. The same can be said of the ’80s. We were