We didn’t believe when we first heard, because you know how church folks can gossip. Like the time the elders were convinced Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian when she began playing rugby in college. For weeks, we heard the grown folks whisper about how no girl should be playing football—it just [...]

In a wonderful world where grass sprouts and divided cells sing the words of the Elevator Blues, which unofficially goes, “Give a little piece of the pie, we would all love to be refined,” Aaron Veedon was popped out and turkey bastered to breathing.  His heart, the four-chambered rhythm machine already formed and months old, [...]

The town had grown too large, and so I decided to let some people go.
I spoke first to Mac Trueba, the founder of the town’s abstract realist photography collective. He was living with three friends and his wife in an apartment in the Colonia.
“San Expedito’s just grown too large, Mac,” I said. “We had the [...]

My parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, a root louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps below. For weeks, the groundskeeper had taken soil samples, leaves, bits of debris from all the vineyards and slowly, methodically produced a timeline of [...]