translated by Angela Ball When dolphins follow the boats, they dress in pink to soften the hate in men’s gazes. “How can they hate us if we make love like they do?” Many say that at night the dolphins grow pubic hair and go out stealing women. The children think that the dolphins are gringos…
In our battle against the Beatles, it was my uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue. We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila, to a crowd of over one hundred thousand people. Their visit was quick;…
When they returned home that evening, the cat was outside. She hissed and bolted from the porch at their approach, not the least bit interested in going inside, where they had left her. The play they had seen had been by e. e. cummings, enacted entirely upon a stage floor slanted surreally towards the audience….
translated by Angela Ball The people of this town are allowed to have as many masks as they can buy. Our parents work, and we have fun playing blind man’s bluff and cowboys. The closets are full of masks, but on Halloween the chief of police prohibits disguises. That night the masks have to talk…
In August, the summer after her ninth-grade year, the girl-pudgy, moonfaced, with dull brown hair and new breasts-met the man who became her first husband. Before that, she’d been seeing a tall boy she danced with at junior high graduation, starting with a concentric-circle wheel-dance the chaperons employed to pull the boys and girls from…
On Good Friday, the day she suggested the Easter parade, Linda Hartley was following advice she had given a reader from Petaluma, Texas, in one of her recent columns. “We should all wear bonnets,” she said to the three men sitting next to her at the bar, “and walk up and down this block.” She…
While I was at the Albuquerque airport bar-pueblo turquoise and sandstone-waiting to meet my girlfriend, a woman offered to buy me a drink. She was better than good-looking. We each ordered a frozen margarita, did a salud, and I walked her politely to her gate, and she kissed my lips as she went to the…
In the past, readers and critics expected serious novelists to catch the spirit of the new in their fiction, to absorb the particular experiences of living and thinking in a specific time and place. The form and language of fiction evolved to fit changing times and tastes-sometimes briskly, sometimes slowly-to reflect or critique transformations in…
Words, together we’ll have the wedding feast, I’ll spread the canopy, bring the glass for you to crush. You’ll arrive early, time and light in your pocket, dark boxes in the car, each with the name of an object. Alone this way, no guests expected—jars, bottles, vials with things like knife, cloud, and blood. Leave…
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