The Morning Reading: "Library Girl, reads, looks for forest fires"

Once more to Denver and the AWP. I was there to present on the Sudden Fiction Latino panel, moderated by contributor Daniel Olivas. Also in attendance were two of the editors - Robert Shapard and Ray Gonzalez, whose work I have long admired. The panelists included Stephen D. Gutierrez, Pedro Ponce, Alicita Rodriguez, Edmundo Paz Soldán - and me.


Here's an excerpt from Alicita Rodriguez's short story:

"Imagining Bisbee"

Few people live in Bisbee; the town’s history makes it so. When miners decided to strike in 1917, the sheriff’s deputies, with their big guns and small teeth, rounded them up like cattle, packed them into train cars, and shipped them to New Mexico—dumped the strikers, with their soot-covered faces, smack in the middle of desert. A few of the miners walked back to Bisbee, each step, each raising and dropping of the foot taken amidst a jumble of hallucinations. These are the forefathers.

And so, their progeny.

Bisbee Bob, drug dealer, father of two suspected arsonists.

Walking Bob, Francophile, tours the Côte d’Azur each summer, raves about the country’s footpaths.

Bible Bob, eighty years old, thin as a pencil, eats only carrots, skin hangs in folds, scribbles in notebooks, recognizable by red rubber raincoat.

Crazy Nancy, bright lipstick, black hair, junkie. Reportedly a brutal suicide.

Library Girl, reads, looks for forest fires with perro callejero.

To read the rest of the story, from the pages of Ecotone where it first appeared, click here.

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perro callejero = street dog

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