Fiction
Vivas and kisses and embraces and tiny glasses filled with port wine that glistened like blood in the December sunshine and my uncle Rafael home too soon from college proposing a toast to the up-coming woman. This is what everyone is calling me today, Mulher-futura. I’m turning twelve.
My Dear Porter,
I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.
It was summer and the father and son were riding the Via to work. He was a janitor, and the boy, who was called Rodrigo, needed straightening out. A week prior, past two a.m., he had slipped away from the family’s apartment and gathered before Southside Junior High with two classmates —malos with welfare mothers and fathers on Bexar County lockdown. The boys had just finished the eighth grade and thought it slick to play a prank.
All the mall cops remember when the Santa Train still ran above shoppers’ heads at Harlem Irving Plaza Mall. At the top of every hour, all twelve months of the year, the bulbous animatronic figure straddled a locomotive with his parade of elves chugging behind him on the tracks, which ran the perimeter of the mall just over the storefronts.
On the morning of the day Mr. Fillmore blew up, the women were already in line. In front of the Cabildo in Jackson Square where he normally set himself up, he’d become as much a daily fixture as the statue of the seventh president.
Melanie hid in the corner so she couldn’t be seen through the little window in the front door. She crossed her fingers. Don’t knock, don’t knock, she mouthed. Her son Isaac grinned.
We hunted the rats because we were so poor.
Years later, and I can still see them bolting out from that dumpster at the end of the alley, dozens of rats, squealing and scurrying. They’re on fire. Roman and I are watching from the fire escape four stories up, these burning rats darting all over the place and yelping.
I’m on the floor of my son’s room again. It’s midnight and I’m cross-legged, leaning over a pile of one-by-one yellow and red bricks, stacking them into a column the correct height to support the weight of the second floor in this Minecraft LEGO scene.
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Fiction
Vivas and kisses and embraces and tiny glasses filled with port wine that glistened like blood in the December sunshine and my uncle Rafael home too soon from college proposing a toast to the up-coming woman. This is what everyone is calling me today, Mulher-futura. I’m turning twelve.
My Dear Porter,
I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.
It was summer and the father and son were riding the Via to work. He was a janitor, and the boy, who was called Rodrigo, needed straightening out. A week prior, past two a.m., he had slipped away from the family’s apartment and gathered before Southside Junior High with two classmates —malos with welfare mothers and fathers on Bexar County lockdown. The boys had just finished the eighth grade and thought it slick to play a prank.
All the mall cops remember when the Santa Train still ran above shoppers’ heads at Harlem Irving Plaza Mall. At the top of every hour, all twelve months of the year, the bulbous animatronic figure straddled a locomotive with his parade of elves chugging behind him on the tracks, which ran the perimeter of the mall just over the storefronts.
On the morning of the day Mr. Fillmore blew up, the women were already in line. In front of the Cabildo in Jackson Square where he normally set himself up, he’d become as much a daily fixture as the statue of the seventh president.
Melanie hid in the corner so she couldn’t be seen through the little window in the front door. She crossed her fingers. Don’t knock, don’t knock, she mouthed. Her son Isaac grinned.
We hunted the rats because we were so poor.
Years later, and I can still see them bolting out from that dumpster at the end of the alley, dozens of rats, squealing and scurrying. They’re on fire. Roman and I are watching from the fire escape four stories up, these burning rats darting all over the place and yelping.
I’m on the floor of my son’s room again. It’s midnight and I’m cross-legged, leaning over a pile of one-by-one yellow and red bricks, stacking them into a column the correct height to support the weight of the second floor in this Minecraft LEGO scene.
Fiction
Vivas and kisses and embraces and tiny glasses filled with port wine that glistened like blood in the December sunshine and my uncle Rafael home too soon from college proposing a toast to the up-coming woman. This is what everyone is calling me today, Mulher-futura. I’m turning twelve.
My Dear Porter,
I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.
It was summer and the father and son were riding the Via to work. He was a janitor, and the boy, who was called Rodrigo, needed straightening out. A week prior, past two a.m., he had slipped away from the family’s apartment and gathered before Southside Junior High with two classmates —malos with welfare mothers and fathers on Bexar County lockdown. The boys had just finished the eighth grade and thought it slick to play a prank.
All the mall cops remember when the Santa Train still ran above shoppers’ heads at Harlem Irving Plaza Mall. At the top of every hour, all twelve months of the year, the bulbous animatronic figure straddled a locomotive with his parade of elves chugging behind him on the tracks, which ran the perimeter of the mall just over the storefronts.
On the morning of the day Mr. Fillmore blew up, the women were already in line. In front of the Cabildo in Jackson Square where he normally set himself up, he’d become as much a daily fixture as the statue of the seventh president.
Melanie hid in the corner so she couldn’t be seen through the little window in the front door. She crossed her fingers. Don’t knock, don’t knock, she mouthed. Her son Isaac grinned.
We hunted the rats because we were so poor.
Years later, and I can still see them bolting out from that dumpster at the end of the alley, dozens of rats, squealing and scurrying. They’re on fire. Roman and I are watching from the fire escape four stories up, these burning rats darting all over the place and yelping.
I’m on the floor of my son’s room again. It’s midnight and I’m cross-legged, leaning over a pile of one-by-one yellow and red bricks, stacking them into a column the correct height to support the weight of the second floor in this Minecraft LEGO scene.
