Fiction
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He was getting used to being alone by now. It was his birthday, and not a single person had gone to see him, or even given him a call. Not that he needed any of that, although now and again he would r... -
The highway is a straight line. Cristobal drives in silence. It’s January and we are travelling south. Cristóbal’s grandmother has a little house in San Ramón. The sun hasn’t set yet. My back hurts. C... -
They say that Amelia and María Luisa Requena stayed together right to the end. They died within a few minutes of each other, just the way they’d been born. This came as something of a surprise, given... -
Hi Mom, how are you? Hope you’re ok. There’s one hour’s difference between Puerto Rico and Panama so it’s nine o’clock in the evening here. We’ve just put the baby down in his cot, he cried a coup... -
Let’s imagine a literary country, a country that doesn’t exist, that would have to be invented out of thin air like Macondo was invented, or Yoknapatawpha County, or any of those other places people b... -
I am alone and my skin falls from me. My teeth dislodge themselves, one after the other. This traitorous disease—I do not know its name—has unfurled itself over my miserable existence for more than a... -
An archer wished to shoot the moon. Night after night, tirelessly, he sent his arrows flying toward the celestial body. The neighbors began to mock him. Unmoved, he continued firing his arrows. He nev... -
Leaning on the starboard rail, the sailor seemed to be waiting for someone. In his left hand he held a white paper wrapping, with grease stains in several places. In his other hand he held his pipe. A... -
Theirs was a tempestuous love. They had cried entire nights, because of one another. They had hugged and kissed, they had bitten and hit, they had laughed, they had deceived, they had forgiven, they h... -
—Oh, my dear daughter, what a miracle it is to see you again! -
Señora Justina stared, as if hypnotized, at the portrait of that dessert, with strawberries and merengue, which illustrated (in all its color) the recipe from the magazine. -
Miranda Castro was, in her day, one of the most sought-after models in the United States. Despite her Latino surname, she had the look of a Scandinavian girl with that blonde hair, shimmering like whe... -
Ed grabbed his shotgun and leaned out of the window. The road was deserted. The galloping, however, went on. -
“Ever since the moment that he, the younger brother, was dead, everything else should have died too.” That sentence ties many knots between two or three characters; the next death will be one of their... -
Gerardo Montejo awoke with an evil foreboding, an empty feeling in his stomach, but one which nonetheless must have had its origin in his soul, wherever it was hidden. -
We were in this bar, Sunday afternoon, sitting in a corner. The hour, hazy. I had been in the country for two and a half months. My friend Elis had put me up in her house, a two-room apartment on an i... -
In the shadows, at the hour when objects have yet to vanish in the darkness and their contours can barely be perceived, at the hour when creatures tend to look alike, she circles round the room going... -
The clowns arrived one Saturday, after our morning shower and just as visiting hours were about to begin. It was a cold weekend sometime in either January or February. It’s hard to tell in this place.... -
All my life I've been told I should be afraid of women like her. But now I need her for thousands of reasons. I need to know what she knows. Know the people she knows. Get inside her. I need to see wi... -
When he got home hours later, Felipe confirmed, with astonishment and dread, that his wife had actually left. According to their agreement, Julia had taken half of everything, plus what they had gotte... -
Niña Ali was strange, strange even in her generosity. For example, she wouldn’t give us expired food or old clothes. She gave us the good things. The same as she ate and wore. Of course, her clothes w... -
My wife’s final wishes were that I scatter her ashes in a shopping center. She always said so as if she were joking, and because of that, when she met her creator, I couldn’t convince my children to h... -
Rafael stands on the edge of a big stone wall, waving his arms up and down like a bird, flexing his knees and flapping as if he were about to take off in flight, as if he were going to throw himself o... -
She never imagined there’d be so many. She’s running late so she isn’t able to count them, but she’d say there’s at least fifteen. Even though it’s a Saturday night. And it’s ridiculously cold. Everyo... -
She opened her eyelids and in rushed all the shadows of the breaking day. They were voluminous stains—“Opacity is the spirit of objects,” her therapist said—that allowed her to make out some battered...
