Dogs of Summer

The tide was high. I stayed near the edge and dunked my head all the way to the bottom, grabbed fistfuls of pebbles and tried to bring them all the way back up. But when I got to the surface, my hands were practically empty. One time, I wound up with a small, empty burgado seashell that looked like a shiny, worn moon.

Summer rain made me uneasy. First came the damp, then the cascade of water rushing down the road, then the puddles in the furrows.

That’s when Doña Carmen took hold of her chin and looked deep into her green eyes, into her eyes green like green grapes. She rooted around Isora’s eyes like she was mining for groundwater in the mountains. The old woman shrank back. Is somebody jealous of you, miniña? Isora froze. Why, Doña Carmen? What’s wrong? Miniña, you’ve got th’evil eye. For

I liked the colour of her arms and her hair. I liked her handwriting. She wrote the letter g with a huge tail that muddled the words on the line below. I liked her eyes and a bunch of other things too. I was jealous of how she talked to grown-ups. She could barge into a conversation and say no, you’re thinking of the Gloria that lives round the ben

As we scoffed it all down I could already feel a sadness stampeding towards me, a stabbing pain at the pit of my stomach – and my mouth went dry, like when you eat powdered milk mixed with gofio and sugar. We wouldn’t get to leave the neighbourhood that summer, and the beach was far, far away.

Eufrasia crossed herself and, since I didn’t know what to do, I crossed myself too, but in a real quiet way, like when you wave hello to someone who doesn’t wave back, then scratch your cheek to cover it up.

Jus a teeny bit. It was always jus a teeny bit with Isora. She’d try anything. One time she ate some pet food they sold at the minimarket because she wanted to see how it made her feel. She’d try anything and then, if she didn’t like it, she’d puke it up. I was scared my parents would smell the coffee on my breath and ground me, but Isora wasn’t sc

We sat at the table and started eating as fast as the boys racing makeshift bum boards down the road during the Tablas de San Andrés festival. Except there was nothing at the bottom to cushion our fall.

The two of us played at being drunk and stumbled all over the classroom with our arms around each other’s shoulders, like a pair of men who had cheated on their wives and were now sick with regret.