Carnival
Every year, they arrived overnight—hulking beasts of steel, purring in anticipation under the harvest moon. Their shoulders jutted over the trees.
My Life Atomic
I wasn’t expected to live long. Born in the shadow of a great war, it was casually assumed I would perish in the next.
Adrift
The sky had slipped from bold in its blueness to a softer pastel, its pink-tinged glow reflected in the limpid sea. The local fishermen were busy at the far end ...
Living is Easy
I didn’t even hear him come in. Just walked into the kitchen and found him sitting splay-legged at the table, cleaning his nails with a tiger claw threaded onto a ...
The Gentleman, 1966
She didn’t like the way he was staring: that bald, red-nosed old ‘gentleman’ in the tweed waistcoat. Respectable as you like, but for the hawkish look on his face. It ...
A Time of Desire
Orla started seeing Dan in secret. Hotel afternoons. Dan the man, was well off. Orla, not so much poor as unpractised in the pleasure of spending money, luxuriated.
Red Letter Day
Amelia lies back against the cool cotton, splaying hands like white spindles.
The Son of Lee Van Cleef
I wanted to tell her all of this, but when I tried to speak I had no answer for the gorilla. Instead I let my mind wander until I settled ...
Like a String
Leo wished he could tell his son how sometimes a thing like love can hurt too much, how it is like a string that vibrates, creating sound.
The Witness
The pitiful creature has been caught in a net of his own design. See how he struggles and gets more tangled up. It’s too much for my delicate sensibilities: so ...
Breath
“It shouldn’t be exposed like this,” she’d whisper. “We’re supposed to be ignorant. It works best that way.”
Neighborly Class
It is a little stunted, and the kernels are not always plumped out like fresh pillows, but it does well enough as bulk cattle feed, pellet chicken feed.
The Staircase
Now disheveled like an old beauty in her tattered dressing gown. Gravel disorderly mixed with dirt, gnawed hedges.
Buitre
We also watched scorpions making their determined way on the sand or across the road, and in the evening, we walked with our heads bent towards the ground, so we ...
All Us, Children
On the day we met, you wore an oversized poncho with dungarees and yellow, rubber boots.
The Devil’s Backbone
He had warned us. This wouldn’t be your travel agent’s Mexico, no rent-a-moped-and-go-out-for-margaritas vacation.
Battle of the Abuelas
She did not know how to drive. That is what her sons said after the fact, but this did not stop her from driving the priest’s jeep through the flimsy ...
The Blame Game
When my mother burned the bife acebolado, she blamed it on the magical prankster Saci.
Cenote
The air-conditioned shuttle jerked through traffic on overbuilt thoroughfares into a safe, pathetically normal tourist Mecca.
Penelope Thinks She Remembers Her Father
I wasn’t scared as I felt the world tipping, carrying me tightly at its side. I heard the splash, the cool water wrapping itself around me, and then the muffled ...