[Editors’ note: the miCRo series will be on hiatus during August but back with new content in September.]
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In these two related stories, narrative is conveyed through small details, like a bruise on an arm or a view of a mountain range. I admire how Matthew Torralba Andrews moves from one thought to the next in the prose and also how the two pieces (and the others in Andrews’s work-in-progress of linked microfictions) work to knit together story from discrete moments.
Listen to Andrews read “Silhouettes”:
Silhouettes
I’ve forgotten most features of the apartments we grew up in. If it was in Lodi where the bathroom floor was carpet. If it was in Stockton where Keely and I shared an old army bunk bed. If it was in Galt where our mother installed a swamp cooler. But I can recall the smell outside every apartment in late summer—like a nearby campfire—and the brown sky and orange sun. I can picture rows of houses in the foothills singed black, similar to the burnt structures I spotted yesterday as my plane landed in Arizona. Homes reduced to silhouettes. Shadowy outlines of what they used to be.
When Keely and I enter Mom’s Flagstaff hospital room—a single bed and four bare walls—she’s lying down, facing away from us. A fluorescent ceiling lamp spotlights her shrunken frame and purpled arm, where linoleum again caught her fall. And although her snores reverberate, it’s as if she’s turned her back to us; as if she heard me tell Keely outside the room about my visit to a senior home back in California; as if she learned of Keely’s plan for us to tour one here this afternoon. It’s as if she knows this next move might be her last; as if she’s shielding herself from the blaze.
Listen to Andrews read “Island Hopping”:
Island Hopping
The manager leads our tour of Flagstaff Senior Springs into the rec room. Keely inspects the contents of the shelves—the spines of books our mother might read, the lids of board games she and Mom could play. I stand before the room’s wall-size window and look out on the most expansive view of the San Francisco Peaks I’ve seen yet on my trip. I recognize for the first time how the mountains resemble islands—giant masses of rock clustered in a sea of desert.
Mom used to tell us that upon arriving in Manila from the States, she took ferries island to island to visit her home in Bohol. Tito Boboy spoke of the ports throughout the Pacific where his naval ship docked and the days between when all he could see was blue. As kids, Keely and I hopped from couch to recliner to ottoman, imagining the floor as the ocean and the furniture as islands. With each jump, we shouted the names we heard in family stories—Cebu, Guam, O‘ahu—charting a path from Bohol to California, our map home.
The manager directs us down the hall to the dining area. For a moment, Keely and I remain in our sections of the room, and I wonder if after I return to California, the space between us will only grow; if with Mom staying in Arizona, home will get lost among our different towns and states; if when Mom eventually leaves us both, the blue will stretch farther than we can leap.
Matthew Torralba Andrews (he/him) is a queer writer of mixed Filipino descent. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, Bellingham Review, Sonora Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and lives in northern Arizona.
