Featured Posts
The Santa Fe Springs Ice Cream War
By Sam Quinones
About three weeks before the start of my senior year in high school, I needed a job that I could quit easily when school began. I was 17. I went down to Tropical Ice Cream.
A pasty-faced man with gray hair met me at the door. I think his name was Ed.
Nineteen, I told him. He asked for my driver’s license. Simple math would have told him my true age. You’re hired, he said.
Rosa
by Anonymous
Two years have passed and still no one has seen Rosalba Andrade. She was kidnapped soon after her 46th birthday. Her houses, cars, clothes, and other property have been divided among those who envied her and befriended her. Even her family has stripped away at all she owned.
The Archive
by K.C. Glynn
A requirement of the program was to organize and catalogue primary materials for the “Special Collections” division of CSUN’s library which, I discovered, is one of the largest repositories of erotica and pornography in the United States.
Bringing Luz
by Sylvia Castañeda
Luz returned from a trip to Santa Paula to find her home on Columbia Street empty. Her family had vanished. Her husband was gone. Frantic, Luz went door to door, inquiring with neighbors. She spent days searching. A neighbor informed her that Lupe had fled to his native Mazatlán, Sinaloa. She went there. Back then, it was a trip that took many days. But in Mazatlán she found nothing.
Birds
by Jian Huang
Nobody here understands what I say. They just look at me funny when I ask them which way is home. At school, the kids sing songs that sound like they could be Chinese. I try to sing along, but I can’t make out the words. Then Mrs. Wintersmith gets mad at me because I don’t participate. I want to participate. I want to tell her I want to participate
Wanna Burrito? A Prison Tale
By Richard Gatica
In some prisons it’s not easy to pass an item from one cell to the next. If our cell door is too low to pass anything, or the cell we want to pass to is above or below us – in those cases, we fish – which is what I was about to do with Manny.
Song For The Living
By Diego Renteria
I was accustomed to the occasional grito or exhortation in the middle of songs, clapping at the end of songs, and song requests, but this audience seemed unusually indifferent.
Carmen
by Jacqueline Gonzalez Reyes
That afternoon, driving her home, my car got a flat tire. I called AAA, but it was clear that due to the holiday help would be a long time coming.
So it was that I found myself with Carmen Sanchez in the middle of downtown Houston on July 4th.
The 10
by Sarah Alvarado
I don’t want to go to my Dad’s house.
I can’t pinpoint why.
I always feel guilty when I don’t want to go. I feel guilty about a lot of things.
The Toolbox
By CJ Salgado
When I was a little boy growing up in East L.A., my father kept a toolbox. It was at the very back of the garage, covered by a blanket, piece of cardboard, or shop towel at the end of each day to hide it from any would-be-burglars. That was my job, to cover it.
Emri’s Chest
by Rachel Kimbrough
I thought, for these four years, that if I opened that chest, I would die. And I don’t mean a piece of me would die, or whatever–I mean I thought I would physically perish. There is such a thing as too much to handle.
Cardboard Box Dreams: A Bracero’s Story
By Celia Viramontes
Men sat cross-legged, others propped themselves against each other, their hats slumped over their faces, shielding them from the Sonoran heat. Lines of aspiring braceros snaked around the station.
Black
By Matthew Loflin Davis
After getting back from Thailand without my score, I wound up on the streets of Ann Arbor — the homeless shelter on Huron to be exact. I had built up a sizable habit in Asia and now was sweating it out cold turkey in bunk beds with a bunch of other junkies, drunks and thieves who swept through the room at night going through the pockets of the destitute, stealing what they could, and pretending to be friends in the day.
From My Father’s Log
By David Lee Caudill
By the time I was 14, my father couldn’t hunt anymore. Walking was a chore for him, therefore hiking was impossible. I tended to post-surgical wounds and listened to his cries in the night. In the morning, he would reach for the window sill near his bed, pulling with all his might just to get himself upright before hobbling to the bathroom and then the living room.
Killing Donald Evans
By Richard Gatica
The day before I killed Donald Evans I did not even know he existed. The day he died I was smoking crack cocaine and when I smoke crack, nothing else matters. Not family, not friends – not even God.
The Ballet and NASCAR
By Tony Quinones
I go to the ballet for the same reason people go to watch NASCAR: The pile up in turn number three. For a long time, I’d had the same ballet experience as everybody else. Making fun of guys in tights. Going to see the holiday productions of the Nutcracker and the annual pain of watching Swan Lake.
Wasn’t About the Money
By Jeffrey Scott Hunter
I’d been robbing banks for close to a year when I came to the realization that it wasn’t about the money any more.
I was hooked on the adrenaline rush, the preparation, the recon that went into laying out the perfect score.
City in Flames
By Cristian Vasquez
At the Century Boulevard exit, Dad’s white Chevy Cavalier station wagon idled at the red light when the song playing on K-LOVE was interrupted by Pepe Barreto’s voice:
“Breaking news: the four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of police brutality against Rodney King have been found not guilty.”
Brushes Were Forbidden
By Ondrej Franek
Society Normalization – the government’s Newspeak for Russian occupation – was in full swing by that time and life was not much fun for anybody. Everyone’s career had been planned already by the Communist party planners who lacked any sense of adventure, let alone fun.
Almost blind children were no exception to that rule.
A Piece of Myself
By Susanna Whitmore Franek
At 16, I ran away from home and crossed illegally into Mexico. I dropped out of college in my late 20s to go live in Spain with my boyfriend, a Spaniard, to study flamenco and become a professional belly dancer.
