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“It is the only way to end poverty,” says El Presidente. I look at the land below us and yearn for green and blue, instead of this ash gray, dust brown. A hazy sun. My eyes burn. I have not been home for going on two hundred days. This morning, I looked in the mirror…

translation by Owen Good     It’s there. It’s gone. Both. Almost always.   I didn’t go out for four days; I was inside the entire time. I stocked up on wine. At the time, I never considered that I shouldn’t, that I should do something to combat this; I forget resolutions I’d previously made…

They depart in the early morning hours in a rainstorm, and as they drive north the sheets of falling water turn to windblown snow. The client leads in an SUV with a couple of his employees; Jake follows in his own SUV, Reggie beside him. Despite the weather, the client presses the speed limit, 75…

He was late to pick me up at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, my daddy. Back then, in 1998, before the escalation of terror scares, parents were pretty comfortable letting their kids fly by themselves under the care of the airline—at least, my mother was! I was a shivering blub by the time he arrived….

I was born some time in 1972, in a country I’ve never seen and to parents I’ve never known. When I was a few months old, I was left in the care of a stranger who will always remain a shadowy figure of inexplicable love in my imagination. At some point, this stranger handed me…

What you need to understand is this: Skeeter was really very fat. It would be impossible to tell this story without mentioning that fact. She would mention it herself once in a while, although in the past this would usually be in the midst of an altercation with her husband, who was not fat. “You’ve…

The first thing my mother taught me to say in English: I live on the Main Drain Road. 76894. My mother is in the pistachios. My father is in the almonds. My mother says I was four. She says I went to Señora Espinoza for daycare and I watched a lot of telenovelas, and I…