A Salvadoran woman looks for a sister who went missing while trying to make it to America.

Well, that took a dark little turn, didn’t it? No matter. Bad behavior always needs an audience.

On Korean reunification and my father’s death.

Do the same fingers that skim her neck in bed when he returns in the early hours of the morning also press buttons that discharge AGM-114 Hellfire missiles that destroy enemy safe sahouses in faceless desert towns?

“Hey, Superman, hey, Superman,” a bum drones as he shuffles by, and Kent ignores him but also feels maybe he isn’t one to judge, broke as he is and some kid’s dried puke flaking off his leg.

There was the time I found an entire horse or cow skeleton laid neatly on top of the shed roof. When I asked my brothers what it was doing there, they looked at me patiently and said, We found it in the desert.

One spring evening in the year 1999 my mother and I were watching Wheel of Fortune when a news bulletin interrupted the show: two young children had been kidnapped from a Native American reservation in New Mexico.

The boat voyages that shaped a family’s identity.

He offered me a fist bump, then seemed to reconsider, and clasped me in a masculine, endearingly chaste hug. “My brother!” he said. “Your wife is a very lucky woman. I hope you get home safe to her, and happy.”

I take the empty injector and bring it to my neck. I hit the trigger and stab and hope maybe I’ll get something. I hit the trigger again.

Did it ever occur to either of you geniuses that maybe he’s just tired of being the only black kid at that school?