"Rest Stop” in The Normal School online

Since I can remember, I’ve spent summers at my grandmother’s house on the coast. It’s a long drive, but this year will be the last time I make it. Mimi died in the spring. I was so upset, I even told my students about her. I was as surprised as they to find myself recounting how Mimi came to the US as a war bride. Really, I knew almost nothing about it; she never talked about that time. →

"Happy Year" in Little Fiction

My mom’s flower shop is on the busy corner of Lincoln Avenue and Calle Jacinto Ignacio Mañon, in Santo Domingo. It’s on the first floor of a blocky, white high-rise, and the parking lot smells of fresh paint and hot asphalt. Inside the shop, it’s so cold from the air conditioning that everyone wears sweaters, and it smells like Windex and wet leaves. It’s the summer of 1995, I’m thirteen, and working here is my first job. →

“Double Dare” in Cosmonauts Avenue

One Saturday morning in June, Eduardo’s parents dropped him off at our house to spend the day while all the adults went fishing. We played in the pool for an hour, until Eduardo hurt himself trying to flip into the water, something Manny and I did with practiced ease. His enormous head cracked against the edge of the stone pool deck with a dull sound, and a moment later his blood bloomed red in the water, unfurling lazily, a tentacled thing. →

“Medulla Fortunata” in Day One

On his last day of work, Jeff bought the entire shift dinner from the Steak and Lube. He had it delivered to the plant: steaming Styrofoam containers of sticky, red wings, brown-bagged fries, and big burgers with the works. Charlie wished not to make too much of Jeff’s departure or of this celebration, as if pretending it was an ordinary day might somehow stop his boss from gloating over the Powerball jackpot he’d just won. Charlie wondered if he would find the next shift supervisor more tolerable than Jeff. →

“Toño Morongo” in the Black Warrior Review 43.1

When our father went missing, my sisters and I did not say he was dead. He was missing and that was all we would say. We could not be made to believe anything else. Our mother did not believe he could be alive after all the time he had been gone. Our uncle brought us a report of a man matching his description, gunned down in the first days of the revolution, but he had not seen it for himself and had not seen the body, so we ignored him. The adults had a funeral for Papi, then the nine days of mass. We, his daughters, prayed for him, but not for his soul. We prayed for his living body. (Print only) →

Accompanying essay here.