Two of my uncles hoisted the balikbayan box out of the truck bed. I heard the package hit the ground even though I was ten meters away, sitting on the porch, where I always sat. My seven younger cousins played with marbles in the shade, but when my uncles waved them over, they raced across the driveway to swarm the gift like moths around a fire. My aunts and uncles tore the tape away and removed a dozen toys, each wrapped in colorful cardboard and pristine plastic, jammed between hand-me-down … [Read more...] about Balikbayan
short story
Rockaway
In May, Amy called to say she was squatting in the caretaker’s quarters of the Rockaway Motel. She needed her car; she wanted to sell it. When I pulled her old Volvo wagon into the dusky parking lot, I could see it had once been a nice getaway: empty pool in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by a clutch of cabins. Thick stands of pitch pine protected the motel from the sea. The caretaker’s quarters were cavernous and shadowy, a paneled welcome desk near the door. I shouldn’t have been … [Read more...] about Rockaway
The Chimp
Down slid the chimp. Not quite like a fireman, more hand-over-hand because the pole inside the four-foot-wide acrylic cylinder running floor-to-ceiling in the middle of my apartment had branches. Surely, shit piled on the floor below – the chimp was good at tearing off his diaper – but the beauty of it was I couldn't see it or smell it, and the rent was great because the chimp's owner kept the top and bottom apartments of the triplex. You'll never meet your neighbor, said the realtor, but his … [Read more...] about The Chimp
Child of God
https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/child-of-god-by-genevieve-abravanel I was drunk. I mean, not usually. Not on a weekday. But that night, Bill had been out with Petra and then he’d texted me. He wanted to hook up. He and Petra weren’t married, not for another month, but she was my friend and she didn’t know and if I told her about Bill, I’d have to say I was the other woman. And I wasn’t. Not usually. I turned off my phone and went drinking, down at Darby’s where they know me. I … [Read more...] about Child of God
Cazones, 2016
My dying father and his friend, the former mayor, told me that if it was stories of the massacre I wanted, then there was this farmer living in a seaside village we should track down. So, we lowered ourselves into the mayor’s old green Volkswagen Beetle—my wheezing father in the passenger’s seat and myself in back—and made for La Costa Esmeralda. From what I gathered on the road, this farmer we were after, he’d been a riot policeman at La Noche de Tlatelolco, the massacre during the 1968 … [Read more...] about Cazones, 2016
Even on Good Nights
1. On my morning walk along the service road, I see through the chain-linked fence a man on his knees. He’s smashing his fist, the flesh of which is a bloody mush, into the pebbly shoulder of the highway. The sound of it is like the slapping of a paper bag full of wet sticks into concrete. He’s not an old man, but not young either. There’s a bouquet of flowers on the ground beside him. He’s weeping and cursing. I call through the fence, “Hey man, please don’t do that. Please . . .” He stops, … [Read more...] about Even on Good Nights