Two boys walked slowly down the middle of a fish pond beside a one-lane jungle highway, pausing now and then to chop their bolos at the mudfish who’d grown lethargic in the heat of mid-day. The sun burned like a big white diamond in the sky directly above them, making iridescent whorls in the chemical slicks left by the kerosene they applied to the surface in the mornings to kill the mosquito larvae. Every hour or so, the roadside ferns and Tangan-tangan leaves shifted in the breeze caused by a passing Jeepney, or by a passenger bus bound for Midsayap or Davao. The only movement beside the occasional traffic was the gradual forward movement of the boys and the sudden lifting and falling of their bolos, which flashed in the sun when they chopped at the fish in the murky water.…
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My abuela always told me to never go to el valle.
“Mijo,” she said in her tremulous voice. “Please don’t go there. Everyone who goes there never comes back or they come back not quite right.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked her. I was merely entertaining her. I knew she was telling me one of her leyendas. The stories she’d told her own children when they were little so they wouldn’t go outside at night. She held these stories close to her heart and always shared them with me when I visited her. I didn’t mind. I loved hearing her stories and adding my own twists to them in my head.
La llorona transformed into my next-door neighbor who liked to water her garden at night while wearing a pale nightgown, completely unaware of how much she frightened the kids who saw her.…
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Parrot fish circle the grey reef. These huts can only be reached by boat, the website said, or a fifteen-minute trek through the jungle. You took the jungle route, you carrying most of the bags, sweeping back the undergrowth with the edge of a waterproof snorkeller’s rucksack so as not to accidentally palm some creeping stinging burrowing thing, and the mosquitoes came like a swarm for your blood. Touch nothing in the jungle, that’s a rule you’d heard somewhere. You kept checking back to see if she was okay, struggling with a bag of her own, sweeping the fronds. You made it, drenched in sweat and bitten half to shit, to this Thai-run hideaway with barely no guests and no English signage, tucked in a cove where the white sands turned to cliffs and canopy. …
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The bright moonlight illuminated Old Roy’s body as it lay splattered across the two-lane country highway. The car had not even slowed. It struck him without consequence and left him lying on the pavement. A pickup truck, following closely, hit him again—skin, bone, and hair pasted to the road. Only his scaly tail remained recognizable. Neither vehicle took notice of the prominent, unambiguous signpost: “Opossum Crossing.”
I slipped under the barbed wire fence, waddled across the field, and into the wood with a heavy heart, dreading the prospect of breaking the news to Henrietta and her joeys. Not a week went by without the community being hard hit by a fatality or two. Mostly, the very young or very old fell victim to the speeding machines, their blinding headlights making escape nearly impossible.…
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The sun through the door threw a hard rectangle of light across the red dust of the hut’s wooden floor. Hoa squatted in the shadows, watching a black beetle scaling the woven-reed screen over the window nearby. With an empty face, she dwelt on the decision handed down by her parents. She could not leave her village to study at the school in Dien Bien Phu. Her hands and body would be needed in the rice terraces and mango groves in the year ahead, though this was no consolation to her disappointment.
Truong Pho Thong Vung Cao was a boarding academy for children from the neighboring hill-tribes in Dien Bien Province and had, more than a year before, notified Hoa’s family that she was a candidate for the school.…
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Florida isn’t really that crazy. Sure, on any given day one might see a shrunken old man in a giant caddie driving on the line like it’s there to guide him from Publix to the retirement village he came from, but most of the time it’s just warm. Well, hot. But even hurricanes aren’t that crazy. Because right in the middle of one everything comes to a halt; the wind, the rain stops, and the world is silent for once because everyone is inside. Quiet until the eye passes over and the winds tear right through the palms again. But then the palms are replanted, the floodwater goes somewhere, and life is good.
So, when I say I never meant to get on the wrong side of the law I really meant it.…
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I was looking at my father’s bookshelves when I noticed things other than books. My father had put ceramics in the empty spaces. There were some vases and bowls, but among the ordinary objects were two figures. They were made from red clay, maybe terra-cotta, and their surfaces were rough—each stood about a foot-and-a-half tall. They were wearing robes, so their arms and legs were hidden by folds of “cloth.” Their faces were simplified, yet suggested nobility. Each was wearing a crown: They were a king and queen.
It wasn’t clear if they were a specific king and queen, or whether they were generic. But I soon realized they were chess pieces. I didn’t see a giant chessboard or any other oversized pieces to match. Maybe my father hadn’t planned for these objects to be used in an actual game of chess.…
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