fiction.
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(Spring 2022) Volume 51, Issue 2
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My neighbor sang most often in the mornings before I fully woke up and at night after I crawled into bed and was drifting to sleep. I assumed his bedroom was beside mine because the duplex was symmetrical, as if the architect had folded her drafting sheet in half to press wet blue ink from one side onto the other. It was a wooden building and I, having lived all my life in buildings made of stone, was surprised at this sound that traveled so freely between units. Although he sang like clockwork, I never heard him speak. Not a semblance of movement manifest from beyond the wall. His singing didn't bother me, and I grew to enjoy it, like a lullaby or the song of a morning bird awake at dawn.
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(Spring 2022) Volume 42, Issue 1
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My brother returned home from his final stay with our grandparents in San Antonio only long enough to help my dad tear down the wooden play structure in our backyard. We were suffering through a Northern California heatwave (the third of the summer), so they waited until evening when the sun wouldn't blister their skin, and then they worked carefully, dismantling each board intact. With them, my dad planned to build the raised garden beds my mom had been pestering him about for nearly a decade. She had instigated a no-AC-after-five-pm rule to save on electricity and because I preferred enduring near-heatstroke outdoors rather than in, I sat on the porch and watched their progress. Despite the setting sun and the shadows that fell across our parched and dying lawn, the heat was still stifling. I was slow with it, lazy, could barely lift my head. It was for this reason, I believe, this unbearable and suffocating heat, that my brother, sweating through the fabric, removed his shirt and revealed a tattoo that none of us knew he had. It was a large, black-lined eagle, intricately detailed, wings stretched across the width of his back. It moved as he moved, animated by his shoulder blades, and in that moment seemed very much alive, watching me, its feathers ruffled by wind.
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(Fall 2020) Volume 33, Number 1
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For a month I kept waking up each night in the midst of a dream where I was pregnant and had been for too long. So long, in fact, that within me was a full-sized man. He had long hair and a beard and wore a scratchy tweed suit that scraped the inside of my womb. Although the plot of the dream varied, I was surprised at the continuity of the pregnancy, that each night, my belly progressively swelled, my understanding of what I was to give birth to deepened and my panic at the thought increased. How could I possibly eject a grown man from inside me? Out of which passage would he make his escape?
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My mother told me the following story a few weeks before she died. At the time, we didn’t know her death was lurking so close. I am surprised now, looking back, that I could not feel it like an inevitable sun waiting just beyond a dark horizon.
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The next morning, she eats a hard boiled egg like she usually does on Sundays: shakes the salt so it falls like a white dust on the egg’s rubbery surface, pops half into her mouth, chews. This morning it feels chalky against her teeth and her gums. Her mouth is dry and in one disorienting moment when she tries to swallow, she’s afraid she’s going to choke.
Her friends ask about her night and she tells them - about the sex they had on his desk and on the floor and how she’s pretty sure she left a sock in his room. She does not tell them about the moment when it started and he was so heavy and pressing, about the rug burn on the small of her back and how the skin on her knees blushes pink. She does not tell them about the way she feels a certain weight in the ends of her fingers now, about how when she walks, her legs feel like they cannot carry her the way they used to, that her chest is filled with a heaviness she can’t seem to shake.
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The neighborhood was without power again. They sat outside on the patio around the little blank TV, Grandmère and Isis and Mirielle and Phillipe. After three months, Isis was used to this, to the uncertain electricity and the scarce water. Tonight, like most of the nights she’d been here, the sky was not black, but instead lavendered by smoke and dust. Across the yard, Olivier, the gatekeeper, sat in a plastic chair near his room, a windowless outbuilding whose fourth wall was part of the high stone fence. He listened to music on his cellphone, a sort of tinny racket, held it up near his ear, moved his head back and forth.
Mirielle sat on the ground near Grandmère’s feet. Grandmère bent to braid her hair, her fingers deft, quick. Phillipe held up a flashlight so that she could see. Isis sat, listened, her hands quiet, resting on her camera in her lap. Earlier, they’d wanted her take their picture – they’d posed, Mirielle and Phillipe with their arms around each other, near the fence, near the front door, near the TV, out on the street in front of the house. They’d tired of it quickly, went inside, brought their dinner out to the patio to watch TV but then the power had gone out and left the house dark and gaping, the TV empty and the sky big and painted.
nonfiction.
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* Selected as a Notable Essay of 2021 in the Best American Essays series
**Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
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The fires in my hometown burn in October of 2017. My sister is alive then. She tells me later how she smelled smoke in the middle of the night, thought her apartment was burning. She’s living in Oakland when they break out, almost fifty miles away, but the smoke is thick, potent, travels fast. She calls my aunt in Sonoma, wakes her up, asks her if she’s okay. That’s around 3 a.m. For the next few days, we keep track of things via text. I think we talk on the phone, but I can’t remember now. (A normal instance—a phone call—forgotten.) I’m in Chicago, working at a restaurant. My parents are in France to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. I watch the burn path on a rudimentary website on the internet. The winds are bad. The brush is dry—how many inches of rain in the past year? Three fires erupt on the same night, race through the hills towards my town, swallow houses, buildings, wild animals fleeing on their way. They are called the Atlas, the Tubbs, and the Nuns. They aren’t the only fires burning—there are others in Southern California too. On the internet map, flames lick a spine up the state.
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(Summer 2019)
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I.
I’ve been thinking of madness and of grief, of the first few weeks after my sister died when the two merged to bend and blur my reality. My grief and my madness were my taiga, like the taiga of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome (translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Levine and Aviva Kana), a cold, wild land that first drowned and then gripped me – abruptly I was within it and I had never not been. In the months later, I have clawed myself out of its brambles and its vines, stumbled somehow back to known land and now, as Garza’s unnamed narrator does, remember this taiga from a distance as a dream, as if during those weeks the veil between reality and irreality broke open and tangled me somewhere in its midst.
II.
In The Taiga Syndrome, Garza fractures time, disrupting it into a non-linear progression that blends the life of the mind with reality, meditating on the experience of memory in the present and acknowledging that “nothing happens as it is written.” The narrator, a detective chasing two lovers who have fled to the taiga—a vast, untouched expanse beyond the border of “civilization”– is enticed by the woman of this pair who has left a trail of correspondences like a trail of breadcrumbs, seemingly wanting to be found. Garza confronts the old fairytales of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel & Gretl, breaking them open to reveal their sinister insides and then subverting them into insidious threads that tangle into the narrative: a wolf licks its paws outside the cabin where the lovers’ stayed, the lovers are remembered and described by the townspeople on the border of the taiga as “the little girl and boy”, the man who has tasked the narrator with this case has white teeth and a thick Adams apple – is he indeed the wolf?
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-excerpt-
The day we went to see the baby, it rained. One of those rains that dumps and then is done, leaves you soaked but not shivering. The family lived on the same road as Celia and worked a plot of land that now, in the spring, burst up in stocks of corn. The father of the baby sat on the porch and waved us in despite our dripping clothes and mud-caked shoes. I cannot remember now where we were coming from or whether we’d planned the visit, but I do know that it was evening and Celia had her camera and inside the little house, two boys sat on stools eating rice and fish with their fingers. The baby was small and warm and she slept while I held her. The TV was on. The boys ate. Celia took pictures.
A few days later, I was in a taxi alone, just me and the driver. It was hot and my thighs sweated and stuck to the seat. We drove through the city and I watched out my window when Celia called and told me that the baby, Liza, had died.