Posted on February 19, 2012 by Sam Quinones
By Sam Quinones
… With my jingle going loud, I didn’t hear him come up.
“Hey, you!”
I looked up. Next to me was another ice cream truck. Sitting in the springy driver’s seat, which was begging for mercy, sat an enormous squat white man, with a cap, a mustache and a scraggly beard. His belly-button peeked out from beneath a faded blue t-shirt.
“You work for Trop?’
I nodded.
“This is my town. I’m going to dust your ass of the road.”
He roared off. As I watched him go, I said to myself, `There goes Big Al.’
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Posted on February 7, 2012 by Sam Quinones
By Laurie Trautman
In the spring of 2009 my husband and I were backpacking around Nicaragua when two women befriended me on a public bus from Granada to Managua. After we stepped off the bus, they hailed a taxi cab which we all planned to share.
They were two women — a bit ugly and fat and dirty, but two women. With smiles and pretty words. With patience to listen to my bad Spanish. The cab we got into was old and shabby, but it was a cab, wasn’t it? …
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Posted on January 23, 2012 by Sam Quinones
By Jeffrey Scott Hunter
The night before the score me and my crime partner, Dave, had seven dollars between us, and had been sleeping in our friend’s driveway in my van. With the seven bucks we decided to go to a pizza parlor and get a pitcher of beer while we discussed our future.
At this time I was still on state probation for an assault, an ounce of coke and a pound of pot. Dave is out on bond under a different name from another state. …
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Posted on January 16, 2012 by Sam Quinones
By Anthony L. Quinones
… The lights went down and the curtain started to open. Then the announcer came over the sound system. Due to having performed for underprivileged children of Washington D.C. earlier in the day, he said, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland will not perform tonight’s ballet. Instead, they will be replaced by their understudies — a Mr. Bujones and a Ms. Van Hamel.
The audience went wild. A man two rows in front of our group stood up and shook his fist. The Japanese ambassador, who was sitting in the presidential box, walked out in protest, with his entourage in tow. …
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Posted on January 9, 2012 by Sam Quinones
By Gabi DiMarco
The winter South African sun shone weakly through the window I had been resting against. The rest of the bus was beginning to stir as our classmates stashed their iPods and books and reached for the matching navy-blue windbreakers we had been instructed to wear at all times. We filed out one by one and waited patiently for our guide, Mr. Brown, to instruct us on what to do next. …
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Posted on December 19, 2011 by Sam Quinones
By Manny Marquez
It was two days before Christmas, and I was visiting my cousin’s home the night SHE came over. The lights on the Christmas tree were twinkling like stars in a country sky and cookie crumbs and empty milk glasses line the coffee table. Everyone was jolly, really into the spirit of things. Not me, no, I had retreated to my cousin’s room where I climbed into a bed, blared the sound on the TV, and hid. Outside in that living room was the girl that I had a major, major crush on. …
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Posted on December 12, 2011 by Sam Quinones
By Thomas Sullivan
The first stage of any interview is always a strange dance of snap judgments and feigned excitement, where each person tries to gauge the other’s worthiness — like meeting your teenage daughter’s boyfriend for the first time. But I’m well matched for a job teaching computer software to adults. If this job works out, it will be the second time I’ve worked for a private training school….
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Posted on December 5, 2011 by Sam Quinones
By Mo Burke
At the end of a fall quarter at Cal, I packed my feminine feminist best – army pants and plaid flannel shirts – for a road trip with my first boyfriend, known to this day simply as The Bear. The Bear bought a beater with a student loan and we took off for Redwood Country, never having been that far north of San Francisco. Sleeping under those trees was a draw.
December of 1979 displayed the north coast in all its back-to-the-land glory. At autumn’s end, leaves colored and fell. We camped on logging roads and drove through redwoods, along the Smith River swollen with rain. There was one surrealistic dinner – ragged hippie kids dining with Crescent City’s finest, all beehives and chiffon, in the new, swanky Denny’s. …
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Posted on November 28, 2011 by Sam Quinones
By Terry Soto
The day before I killed Donald Evans I did not even know he existed. The day he died I was smoking crack cocaine and when I smoke crack, nothing else matters. Not family, not friends – not even God.
Each time that I smoked crack, I could hear little demons, their excited little whispers. I knew what I was doing was wrong. That pleased them even more.
At the time, I was out of money and robbing drug dealers on the streets of Los Angeles. …
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Posted on November 21, 2011 by Sam Quinones
By David Lee Caudill
I never got to hunt with my father. As far back as I can remember I would watch my father, along with his brothers and their father, come home from a hunting trip. They would show off their deer, explaining every detail that led to the kill. Then they would describe how the deer feel, how far he had run after the shot. I was never there for the fall, the shot, the first step into the woods before the sun sparkled on the frostbitten fields of tall grass and dormant wheat. But I was always there when they came home….
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