“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”

How can you have thoughts without words? The man turned back to his coffee and drank. It was cold. Breakfast was done. Time to move on.

I resolved to stay close to my mother.

She described their world at last in a language that they recognized as true.

It’s a thing about being a man. To be so stingy, to deny even a sip of yourself. To deny and deny and deny until one day it all comes out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose. 

When you weren’t sure if a guy was gay, you asked if he was Canadian. The straight ones always look puzzled, and told you they were American.

We knew language better than anybody, how you could crack it out of fortune cookies or loop it into a rhythm or rip it to shreds and make money off the confetti. 

What do the dead owe the living?

A finalist for the 2022 Boston Review Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.

“In the East, it is the cow that animalizes the man. Hence, the native occupies this intermediate space between man and beast, which we term ‘savage.’”