Even now that my writing is focused entirely on novels, short fiction is still the genre I feel most protective of. I teach the form every year without fail, and when I’m asked to give a lecture on a literary form (a rarity), the short story is inevitably my craft subject du jour. I guess you could say I’m one of those true believers. I’ve spent past 20 years reading and writing short stories-which, given some careers, ain’t all that much, but it is more than half my adult life. A couple of years later Yunior went away to college and he doesn’t know where the fuck she went.The following is the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2016. Nilda was wearing a tank top, and Yunior, who wanted to play baseball, made her put on a shirt before he’d let her be on his team. But the moment closes and they’re back in the world they’ve always known. Yunior, his heart beating, thinks, We could do anything. “He treated me the best.” What else can they say? They walk back through the old neighborhood. She tells him that she misses his brother. Yunior’s twenty-three and he’s washing his clothes up at the minimall when he meets Nilda.
She started to put on weight and she’d cut her hair down to nothing. She was in and out of school until she finally dropped.
Nilda fell in with more stupid niggers, and got beat up and lost some teeth. Two years later, Yunior’s brother had died of cancer, and Yunior was out of school most of the time and smoking mota. A week later Rafa was seeing some other girl. About a half hour later she got up and left. How she wanted to get away from her moms and open up a group home for runaway kids. One night, at the end of summer, Yunior heard Nilda telling Rafa about her plans for the future.
He quit school and work and dreamed of going to California.
He noticed Nilda because she was wearing this tank that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze. One day, when Nilda was visiting Yunior, she met Rafa. Then the old cat bounced, and then she got tossed by those cats from Parkwood. When Nilda got back from the group home she got scooped up by this older nigger. that would have broken you in two but he would have traded it in for a halfway decent face in a second. But as soon as Rafa showed up she’d jump into his arms. Nights she and Yunior would sit on the couch while Rafa was off at his job at the carpet factory or working out at the gym. Yunior’s brother, Rafa, would sneak her down into the boys’ basement bedroom at night. Nilda had super-long hair and a world-class chest. The Dominican-American narrator meets his brother’s old girlfriend in a laundromat years after his brother’s death and thinks that anything-even escape from their downtrodden world-is possible, but the moment closes.
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