Content Warning—self-harm and/or suicide attempt When I visit from the states my cousin Marco becomes wind. In the car to the restaurant where our mothers wait he’s all curls dancing, all cheeks stretching, speeding so fast I’m sure…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
After Lorna Simpson’s Head on Ice series and using language from testimonies of eleven Jane Does in the lawsuit against the handling of their sexual assault cases at Eastern Michigan University. Sandra No woman I know got ready with…
They always knock with questions and promises. They assure me that checking these boxes will only take a few. forward. minutes. But time winds serpentine when so many voices crescendo with each box that asks me to fit inside.…
My Favorite Elvis The boy and the dog were both named Elvis. Whenever Daddy hollered “Elvis” they both came to him. Even when it was one of them he wanted: the boy for a chore, the dog for a…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
Essay by Michelle Ross • Since the first time I read a Sara Lippmann story, I’ve been smitten. Among the inventory of qualities I admire is her wit, her raw honesty, her faith in her readers’ ability to keep…
The blocks of the Westside development whipped by us. All the houses bled into one another, a single stroke of adobe beige. No veterinarian had settled into this part of Albuquerque—it was too new, plastic, hollow. If one had…
We search the face of every old Puerto Rican man we meet, hoping to see our grandfather’s face looking back at us. The way to and from school is paved with old brown Boricua men. Up Riverdale and Rockaway,…
Who gets to tell a story? Whenever I talk to students or aspiring writers about point of view, the same question always arises—how do you go about selecting the point of view for any given story? Which is really a way of asking how do you know when you’ve chosen the correct point of view for the story? For example, if you can simply hit the Control + H function and change all the pronouns from “she” to “I” and have the same exact story with nothing gained or lost, it is unlikely that you have hit on your point of view. I know I’ve chosen the right one when the information revealed in that point of view is crucial to the story and accessing the information through that lens is the only way in which the story can be fully advanced and properly understood. To get to this point, I always think about (and encourage others to think about) the ways in which a story could or would change if told by a different or additional viewpoint character. No two people’s memories or experiences will ever be exactly the same—not even if they are identical twins. Members of the same household will often disagree on when and how something happened, siblings may remember their parents differently, et cetera. But what about when two siblings are united by the same desire and yearning? What happens when their voices are close enough to be one voice, when their words could be coming from one mouth? Who then gets to tell the story? Those are some of the questions that prompted me to adopt the first-person-plural point of view in my crafting of “What the Mouth Knows.” The use of the “we” voice captures two siblings just when they are young enough and earnest enough to be of one accord and one mind in their shared desire for family, language, and culture and in their goal to reclaim what they believe is missing. The siblings’ differences in age and gender are revealed gradually as the story progresses, but when the story begins they could easily be mistaken for one another. Their hunger, yearning, and desperation for this missing family member puts their words in each other’s mouths and it is only when they take action that their voices diverge with the older brother suggesting an action and the younger sister picking a target, the older brother initiating the plan and the younger sister being the bait. So when I asked myself who gets to tell the story when a brother and sister are in such accord, the answer was obvious: they both do.
AMINA GAUTIER is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. More than one hundred forty of her stories have been published, appearing in American Short Fiction, Boston Review, Callaloo, The Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly among other places. She is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Find her on Twitter @DrAminaGautier.
