short fiction
ST. AUGUSTINE THE STARFIGHTER
-in Carve Magazine
“The horror of Tim Mercury’s carcass is interpreted as a failed mission by one of the ground crew (me). I ask why our astronauts always have to die. No one answers. Marco the sheepdog yaps and leaps at the smashed craft. He runs around the side of the barn and won’t be seen again until dinnertime. Had the wreck not crashed so close to his tail, he might have examined or even licked Tim’s dead eyes.”
SKY SEEKERS
–in El Porvenir Ya!
“Then again, she was like most people who weren’t there. A bot’s just a piece of pipe to her. Doesn’t matter if it’s a little pyramid like Mascota, or something he killed. It’s all empty machinery. Worn parts. Synth blood, a synth heart, just some liquid processor, information flowing back and forth through factory-made arteries. He’d seen that blood spill onto decks, freeze in the void in glistening chunks. He’d seen a bot beg just like anything else.”
THE BULLET
–in Southwestern American Literature (Center for the Study of the Southwest, Texas State University, Spring 2019 edition)
“He can hardly breathe in the humid basement. Doesn’t stop him from rocking out and bobbing his head to ska records with Delgado. These cats are old school. They spin vinyl from underground bands such as La Banda Skalatone, Mezcali, and She Went Bowling. They love all the ska they can get their hands on. I’m there too. I’ve just turned thirty. My Pops, Alfonzo’s older brother, had been found dead a few weeks ago from a heart attack in the cab of his big rig tanker truck clutching a glow-in-the-dark rosary. Alfonzo says the bullet story isn’t about Pops. That’s for another time, he tells me.”
A DANGEROUS WAND
–in The Latinx Archive: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers (Ohio State University Press)
“They thought the magician a malabarista like Trico, that Mr. Tiré had been chased out of the streets of Mexico City for his cheap tricks and for stealing from the purses of the ladies who stopped to watch him. The villagers claimed that a young man like Mr. Tiré, no matter how well dressed, likely stuffed stolen belongings in his bags and lizard cages. Perhaps the chuckwalla with its angry eyes and tongue always flicking toward the unseen was an accomplice, stuffing rings in its fat belly. Perhaps Mr. Tiré had been nearly caught and so ran far away across the Sea of Cortés just like the war deserter whose motorcycle now belonged to Grandfather. Whenever I heard this part of the story from gossips in the short time before I was allowed to meet Mr. Tiré, I imagined him a giant, like the strange two-armed trees here that when five hundred years old tower above the sand like gods, bending whimsically toward the clouds ready to cast their spells on this place.”
POLAROIDS FROM MOTHER RIVER
–in Southwestern American Literature (Center for the Study of the Southwest, Texas State University, Spring 2018 edition)
“‘You don’t make sense,’ Martha said with a half smile, grabbing stacks of paperboard, while Vince just kept squinting and flipping pages, grabbing stacks of paperboard too, hardly keeping to the box count. The funny thing was, as soon as most pages entered his brain, Martha could see that he was more lost than ever. Entire parables, even the tripped-out apocalyptic bear-claw-footed, seven-headed monster rising out of the ocean seemed to slip through the fabric of his consciousness. In fact, by mid shift, he stopped talking about God at all. He turned to complaining about his wife who was studying medicine at the local college.”
THE SECOND DEATH OF OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA
–in Afterlives of the Writers
“Anyway, one of the last things I remember before being reincarnated was falling. Not falling on a pile of fish guts or slipping on the layer of white powder covering part of the deck where we’d spilled, in our madness, several pounds of coke on the deck like some kind of fish batter for ourselves to wallow in and cook ourselves. No, I had been tossed off the ship with a bullet hole through my midsection.”
SESSIONS IN AUGMENTED REALITY
–third place entry in Somos en escrito, The Latino Literary Online Magazine’s First Annual Extra-Fiction Writing Contest (scroll to third entry)
Eleadora’s ghost accompanies Dorota to the tea garden in San Jose. They ride the train around the storybook maze. Dorota knows if she tries to touch her shimmering form Eleadora will leap off the train. Eleadora points out the strangers: “You see that old man. He has the flat face of a dog with no snout. You see that boy on the bridge staring at koi? His profile resembles a fish and his arms are short like fins.” She points out fairytales too. “This one’s a rabbit. That one’s an aardvark. She’s cake frosting. Let’s go eat cake.”
A DIFFERENT KIND OF BOILING POINT
-in Acentos Review
“Camila recalled seeing onions on the ground like the eyes of a great giant beneath the earth peeking at the empty shell of the valley. She wondered if the giant was judging her. The media would listen, though they would come at her with hard questions. She would lay in wait, knowing she was even greater than the giant. She was the crack in the earth where he lay, ready to shake loose the veil of the growers and swallow the earth they stood on.”
MIDDLE OF THE PASSAGE
-in The Island Review
“Grandma Sally’s round face was twisted in a grin. She smelled faintly of sea glass polished by the surf. ‘Makawa yava. Makawa liga,’ she said to Kesa. ‘Will bring bula.’ The old woman touched her fingers to Vijay’s chest. Then she turned back to Kesa. ‘Makawa ucu. Marau.’ She said the last word as if she was saying it to the sun, as if in the sky there gazed an eye above a mouth whose lips were hidden in the sea. Then she handed Kesa a brown paper bag.”
GASPAR
-in Pithead Chapel 4
“Most nights Gaspar would rather be out in the dark, ducking around houses, far from all the babies and mamas, smoking with his friends in the alley. Not tonight. He sat up watching a Monte Carlo driving past the house and was glad he wasn’t walking alongside it. Was the shooter in the car? He would have mouthed off to the driver. Probably would have died a real hero. The muffler vibrated his bed. Hydraulics popped and wheezed. The driver, the shape of smoke, had surer eyes than the flickering retina of summer’s Venus.”
THEM BONES
-in Barrelhouse
“We thought about what Michael said about change. We wondered who we were. Were we satisfied with who we’d become as writers? We admitted our surprise about Michael’s militant past . . .”