ISSUE TWO: July, 2019

COSTUME

by ILIANA VARGAS (translated by TOSHIYA KAMEI)

She was returning home from a costume ball. She had listened to the music from a lemon balm vent. Her body became disarranged every so often by the painful rattling sounds piercing her ears. The music, the chant of raging wasps, caused her to blink uncontrollably. She left in haste, hounded by the unceasing buzz that grated along her nerve endings.
It was getting light outside when she entered her building. She opened the door of her apartment and wanted to stuff cotton in her ears, wondering if she would be served the almonds she had left soaking in the kitchen because, after searching the bathroom and the closet in her bedroom, she found out that she had run out of cotton. Persistent, the subtlety of the sound remained constant. She heard gas hissing in every space she went in a frantic search for silence. Driven desperate by the ineffectiveness of the toilet paper stuffed into her ears, she was filling her ears with pieces of that already feeble fruit that ended up filling her body, first until she fell unconscious and then until she was exploded. The next day the headlines read without exaggeration: Woman Found Stuffed with Almonds.

ILIANA VARGAS was born in 1978 in Mexico City, where she still lives today. She is the author of the short story collections Joni Munn y otras alteraciones del Psicosoma (2012), Magnetofónica (2015), and Habitantes del aire caníbal (2017). Her short stories have appeared in Coffin Bell and Speculative 66.

TOSHIYA KAMEI holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations of Latin American literature include books by Claudia Apablaza, Carlos Bortoni, and Selfa Chew.