Outside on the porch’s front steps, I can hear my niece Andrea cry and cry and my father yelling at the T.V. that’s playing his favorite game show Wowowee—you know the one, where scantily clad, fair-skinned girls dance to American pop music as an older pinay from the barrios steps into a tank with floating money, catches as much as she can with a broomstick, and everybody laughs. I can hear my sister on the phone as my aunts surround her, harping, barking orders in Tagalog. The wedding is in three days.
A Matter of a Few Hours by Ramola D
Cameras. Lights. His face on television, pinched, distraught, out of control as he wept. He had never intended to break down in front of all these people, but the horrible loss of his one-year-old son, an infinitely vulnerable baby, pushed him to it. He had shaken her on camera. Taken her by the shoulders, shouted. Her face blank when they played it back, white in the glare of the lights,
The Boy Who Climbed His Mother Into Heaven by Andy Johnson
I will climb my mother to Heaven, he said to himself, tittering, mumbling, unafraid to walk the dusty streets of Gbarnga day or night even during the riots because his mother, the woman who loved him, the woman he found years ago after coming home from the market with no chicken but the head of a cassava fish a merchant had thrown to the dogs and found boys no older than himself, six or seven, Charles Taylor’s boys singing, dirty, ransacking their house for food and clothing, chanting He Kill My Ma, He Kill My Pa, I Vote For Him.
Angry Blood by Estella Gonzalez
When the Chilanga head housekeeper with the red hair and eyebrows like Maria Felix came around to inspect the floors, Merced didn’t blink. Did the Chilanga think this was Merced’s first time training a new hotel worker? She’d done this many times before. The only difference was that this time she was training her daughter Alma.