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Staff and contributors recommend their favorite short fiction of the year. the translator of Mouthful of Birds about what it takes to bring a book like this The title story ran in Recommended Reading back in , but with a.
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Cart 0. Singapore stories by Singapore's largest independent publisher of fiction and non-fiction for all ages. See more: Books. Pooja Nansi ed. Jason Erik Lundberg series ed.
Sample Synopsis The best short fiction published by Singaporean writers in and You might also like. Fall In! This Side of Heaven Preorder. Signup for our newsletters Right. The son must be around five years old. He has a very disturbing method: after offering the prayer cards to the passengers, he obliges them to shake hands, a brief and very grimy squeeze. The passengers have to contain their pity and disgust: the kid is very dirty and he stinks. Any- way, I never saw anyone compassionate enough to take him out of the subway, bring him home, give him a bath, call social services.
People take his hand, buy the prayer cards. One night, we walked together from the subway station to my house. When I reached the door of my house, though, he said good-bye. I told my friend Lala while she was cutting my hair in her house last Monday, which was a holiday. She earns more money and is more at ease in her apartment. She rolls her eyes then and explains that all the plumbers cheat her, they charge her too much, they never come back.
I believe her. It also hurts a little when her thick fingers smooth my hair. Lala decided to be a Brazilian woman years ago, but she was born a Uruguayan man. There are no witches around here. I sigh. She never moves. The people in this neighbor- hood, mami , are really. Real high class, this one. At least not during the day.
And I check to be sure the front door is good and locked, and the door to the balcony, too. And sometimes I stand there looking out to the street, especially toward the corner where the dirty kid is sleeping beside his mom, completely still, like nameless dead.
One night after dinner, the doorbell rang. Strange: almost no one comes to see me at that hour. Only Lala, on some night when she feels lonely and we stay up together listening to sad rancheras and drinking whiskey. I ran to get the keys and I let him in. He came running in, but he stopped before he got to the dining room door, as if he needed my permission.
Or as if he was afraid to keep going. One who, moreover, had a house, a beautiful and enormous house right there beside his little patch of concrete. He was barefoot. Had he taken them off in the heat? Or had someone stolen them in the night? I sat him down on a kitchen chair and I put a little chicken and rice into the oven. While we waited, I spread cheese on some delicious homemade bread. He ate while looking me in the eyes, very seriously, calmly. He was hungry but not starved.
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He shrugged again. I felt like shaking him, and right away I was ashamed. He needed my help; there was no reason for him to satisfy my morbid curiosity. And even so, something about his silence made me angry. I wanted him to be a friendly, charming boy, not this sullen, dirty kid who ate his chicken and rice slowly, savoring every bite, and belched after finishing his glass of Coca-Cola.
This he did drink greedily, and then he asked for more. I asked him if he wanted to go, and he said yes with a smile that changed his face completely; he had small teeth, and one on the bottom was about to fall out. I was a little scared to go out so late, and to the avenue, no less. But the ice cream shop tended to be neutral territory; you almost never heard of robberies or fights there. Instead I stuffed a little money in the pocket of my jeans.
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In the street, the dirty kid gave me his hand, and not with the indifference he had when he greeted the people on the subway who bought his prayer cards. He held on tight; maybe he was still scared. We crossed the street; the mattress where he slept beside his mother was still empty. We had to walk three blocks to the ice cream parlor and I decided to take Ceballos, a strange street that could be silent and calm some nights. The less-chiseled transvestites worked there, the chubbiest and oldest ones.
But he walked barefoot with assurance; he was used to it. That night the three blocks were almost empty of transvestites, but they were full of altars.
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I remembered what they were celebrating; it was January 8, the day of Gauchito Gil, a popular saint from the provinces of Corrientes who has devotees all over the country. A policeman killed him, hanged him from a tree and slit his throat. And the boy got better. Then the policeman went back, took Antonio Gil down from the tree, and gave him a proper burial, and the place where he had bled to death became a shrine that still exists today; it gets thousands of visitors every summer.
I found myself telling the dirty kid the story of the miraculous gaucho, and we stopped in front of one of the altars. There was the plaster saint, with his blue shirt and the red bandanna around his neck—a red headband, too—and a cross on his back, also red. There were many red cloths and a small red flag: the color of blood, in memory of the injustice and the slit throat.
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But there was nothing macabre or sinister about it. They make pilgrimages to the Mercedes sanctuary in Corrientes, with its fifty-degree heat; the pilgrims come on foot, by bus, on horseback, and from all over, even Patagonia. The candles around him made him wink in the half-dark. I lit one that had gone out and then used the flame to light a cigarette. The dirty kid seemed uneasy. Back there, you often see shrines to saints a little less friendly than Gauchito Gil.
She only goes as far as the embankment, and only during the day, because it can be dangerous. Does your mother bring you back there? And then he tugged at my arm to urge me on toward the ice cream shop.