Author: Kathy Duong
The flight landed three days earlier than scheduled. There were no prior calls, no text messages announcing my arrival. It wasn’t some elaborate strategy to surprise anyone, nor was it the kind of paranoid distrust some men experience when traveling. The project simply wrapped up ahead of schedule, the contracts were signed, and the desire to return to my bed, my refuge, and my family proved stronger than the courtesy of giving notice. I’ve always considered myself a man of logic, numbers, and tangible facts. I was never one to believe in hunches, in a sixth sense, or in those…
THE MIRROR IN THE GARDEN You tell yourself that children are unreliable narrators of their own lives. It is the first lie you cultivate to survive the week your daughter begins coming home from daycare with the same haunting, rhythmic sentence on her lips. “There’s a little girl at my teacher’s house who looks exactly like me.” At first, the words feel harmless—the adorable, solipsistic babble of a four-year-old who thinks the world is populated by her own echoes. You assume someone else has the same light-up sneakers, the same butterfly clips, or perhaps the same penchant for crustless sandwiches.…
Her hands were still clutching the notary’s papers when Vicente, her own brother-in-law, burst into laughter that echoed throughout the office. “Oh, Elena,” the man said, adjusting the buckle of his silver belt, not caring that the office was full of the mayor of San Marcos’s men. “My little brother left you 12 hectares of pure rock and dust in the Cañón de las Ánimas. Not even the lizards want to live there.” Beside her, Don Arturo Garza, the local political boss and mayor, smiled with the false kindness of men accustomed to buying favors. “Sell them to me now…
THE ACCOUNTING OF ASHES You do not cry the day your marriage ends. Not because you are brave or numb, but because your grief has already been spent. It bled you dry three months earlier, on the night you stood in your own bedroom doorway and watched the man you married rehearsing a new future in the bed you paid for. By the time the divorce papers slide across the mahogany courthouse table, your tears are an old, worthless currency. What remains is something far more dangerous: Clarity. Ricardo signs first. He uses a heavy gold pen—a gift you bought…
Monday had begun like any other at the Ecatepec police station for crimes against persons, a hot and dusty area on the outskirts of the State of Mexico. The smell of burnt coffee at the bottom of the pot mingled with the endless piles of reports on the old metal desks. The ceiling fan spun too slowly to make any difference in the humid heat that punished the interior of the building. Detective Alejandro Vargas was sitting with his back to the entrance door, rereading for the third time the same paragraph of a medical report that insisted on making…
THE SILENCE OF THE RADIATORS The house was so dark I could not see my own hands. My stomach was so empty it felt as if it were folding in on itself, a hollow ache that had become my most constant companion. When my daughter, Emma, rushed in, her keys jingling with a frantic energy, she flipped on the light and gasped. “Mom, why are you sitting in the dark? And why is there no food in the kitchen? You get ten thousand dollars every month, so where is it going?” I opened my mouth, the dry skin of my…
THE ARCHITECTURE OF A MIRAGE When Michael died, the world didn’t just go quiet; it went cold. We had been together for twenty-seven years—a lifetime of shared coffee breaths, midnight fever watches with the children, and the comfortable silence of a marriage that had long since moved past the need for constant validation. Or so I thought. The accident happened on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. One phone call from a state trooper, and the man who had been my north star for nearly three decades was reduced to a set of coordinates and a “pronounced at the scene.” The funeral…
THE CROCHETED ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE Five years ago, I would have told you that hope sounded like my husband David’s laughter echoing in our kitchen. These days, hope looks like my thirteen-year-old daughter, Ava, sitting on the faded living room rug with yarn wrapped around her small fingers. She calls it crocheting; I call it her desperate, beautiful attempt to stitch our lives back together, one tiny stuffed animal at a time. I’m Brooklyn, a forty-four-year-old widow, and for the past twelve months, a cancer patient. When David died when Ava was just a toddler, he left me with a…
The solid gold watch on Alejandro Vargas’s wrist read exactly 9:43 p.m. Seated in the center of the most exclusive restaurant in the Andares district of Guadalajara, the tequila magnate gazed in absolute silence at the 30 empty chairs surrounding his monumental table. The restaurant’s air conditioning seemed to freeze not only the air but also his very soul. He had arrived almost two hours earlier, a smile lighting up his face, excited to celebrate his 55th birthday surrounded by his family: his three children, his daughters-in-law, his sons-in-law, and his grandchildren. He had sent out 30 lavish invitations. He…
The gray skies of Mexico City reflected the perfect storm that ravaged Alejandro Vargas’s soul. At 45, this architect, creator of Santa Fe’s most exclusive skyscrapers, lost absolutely everything in a matter of seven days. His wife, Valeria, in collusion with his business partner and best friend, Roberto, forged his signature on dozens of financial documents. The scheme was masterful: they left him utterly ruined, making him take the blame for a multi-million dollar embezzlement. He was evicted from his mansion in Jardines del Pedregal in the clothes he was wearing that morning, escorted by guards. His credit cards were…