Elice often daydreams about smashing a plate of English breakfast onto a customer’s face. It happens at the busiest of times at the cafe when tourists are queueing outside for its famous brunch. The constant flow of people forces her into autopilot, in which she operates on half her brain. The other half does whatever
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Brazil: A Personal Glimpse into Bolsonaro’s Defeat
Tuesday, November 1st, 2022. Nearly forty-eight hours after the result of the Brazilian presidential elections announced Bolsonaro’s loss, he speaks for the first time. After his earlier threats that he wouldn’t go down easily in an attempt to disparage the Brazilian electoral system, small groups of his supporters have taken to roads. Small groups of
Leonardo
There were new points of pain now, the body speaking verses so decisive and dense, Claudia could no longer understand the sensation. It was not a knot in the belly or a blinding headache—no, it was aches occupying the edges of words and images, unrefined and unpronounceable. Some afternoons when the winds were not so
42, One For Each and Every One of You
A conglomeration of 25,000 people stood together early on a Sunday morning, working to process a complicated set of emotions which only they could really understand or feel. Any attempt to explain what was going through their minds at that precise moment would most definitely fall short. There was excitement, for sure, unlike any they
The Ice
We were born in darkness and hunger, and that was all we ever knew. My brother said we were like axes lodged in stone, impotent objects frozen in unknown space. Silence overwhelms us. Wind is a silent phantom, ice a silent beast. Sometimes it crackles with anxiety, sometimes it groans with hunger. Sometimes it terrifies me.
Militarization and Love
My grandmother says, Das Militär steckt in unserem Blut. My grandmother says, The military runs in our family. What is lost in translation is the word steckt. Hides, is stuck, is plugged. Somehow the military exists in our blood, lingering. The verb steckt suggests something active, positive or negative, but a presence nonetheless.
New York 1954
Mrs. Rudikoff had an unsettled and frightened look on her face when she left our apartment in Spanish Harlem that evening. She also appeared to be full of judgment; mostly towards how my brothers laughed instead of how they should have taken pity on her when she said she felt attacked. Also, she probably was judgmental because she knew when she would tell her daughter that there were 40 tiny mice running on the floor in the Manhattan complex her daughter would scream.
