Consortium Book Sales (Small Beer Press’ distributor) has posted a blurb about the Interfictions anthology (the one that bought my story). They make it sound quite hip and cutting-edgy. Which I suppose it is.

The lineup of the Interficitons anthology.

Karen Jordan Allen, “Alternate Anxieties”
Christopher Barzak, “What We Know About the Lost Families of – House”
K. Tempest Bradford, “Black Feather”
Matthew Cheney, “A Map of the Everywhere”
Michael DeLuca, “The Utter Proximity of God”
Adrián Ferrero, “When It Rains, You’d Better Get Out of Ulga” (translated from Spanish)
Colin Greenland, “Timothy”
Csilla Kleinheincz, “A Drop of Raspberry” (translated from Hungarian)
Holly Phillips, “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom”
Rachel Pollack, “Burning Beard – The Dreams and Visions of Joseph Ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt”
Joy Remy, “Pallas at Noon”
Anna Tambour, “The Shoe in SHOES’ Window”
Veronica Schanoes, “Rats”
Léa Silhol, “Emblemata” (translated from French)
Jon Singer, “Willow Pattern”
Vandana Singh, “Hunger”
Mikal Trimm, “Climbing Redemption Mountain”
Catherynne Valente, “A Dirge for Prester John”
Leslie What, “Post hoc”

I am making my way through the hauntingly familiar streets of a South American city. There are landmarks I remember: street corners, alleys, shortcuts I know I have taken before, though perhaps I can’t recall in what order they ought to come or where they lead. But I have been here before. It isn’t just a feeling. I know I’ve been here.

A broad, crowded city square. Spices on the air, the smells of barbecue. Fried plantains served in the peel from a vendor’s cart. Uneven cobblestones. There is a breeze, a sense of open water nearby, a cool palate of greys and blues punctuated by the bright colors of people’s clothes. I feel no sense of claustrophobia, yet the buildings and awnings crowd in so close I can’t see the sky.

At the west end of the square is the opera house, a breathtaking, intricate marriage of baroque and neoclassical styles. Staggered clusters of pillars, three-tiered and set with alcoves where larger-than-life marble figures in robes lounge together discussing philosophy and art like the figures of Raphael’s _School of Athens_. I lean over the rail at the edge of the curb and stare at them for a long time, astonished, more moved than I have every been by anything in the Old World. What a pompous idiot you’d have to be to criticize this place as the product of crass colonial aspirations. There is more earnestness in this facade than in that of the Coliseum.

But I stir. My attention wanders, and I follow it. There is so much more here, all so different, new. I am so glad to be back.

My cousin Luke lives in this city. His apartment is only a few blocks away, on the tenth floor of a high-rise overlooking a strangely monastic tropical garden. Moss everywhere. Weeping willows. A plaque, bearing a dedication describing the rigors undergone and good works achieved by students attending a convent school in Peru. A peaceful place, especially at dusk, with the warm light from the windows of Luke’s building trickling from above. He lives alone, in a narrow, ascetic room with his bed built into the wall behind a lightweight cotton curtain. I was there last night; I slept on his floor. Now I am trying to find my way back.

Instead I take a right, a left and a right and find myself in a cul-de-sac among the back streets of the city’s Little Tokyo. An asian dude in a black running suit gives me a suspicious look as I make my way past his posse towards a spiral staircase, vaguely recalling a shortcut somewhere above opening onto Luke’s street. But as I lose myself among the cloudy veils of laundry lines and sharp looks from old ladies on balconies, I begin to have my doubts.

Suddenly I hear my sisters calling from below. “Hey, Boon! What are you doing up there? How did you get all the way over here in Little Tokyo? We’ve been waiting for you!”

Sheepishly, I begin to make my way down again.

I never make it, but awake instead.

Something else just occurred to me that must have contributed to the sense of awe I got out of the natural settings of the Yucatan.

The distinction between ‘old growth’ and ‘new growth’ that exists elsewhere in the Americas–that phenomenon which causes nature lovers of the pacific coast to scorn us easterners and our baby forests where none of the trees are any more than seventy years old–is completely inapplicable in the Yucatan. The soil here is so porous and so thin that the only time you ever see a tree older than fifty or sixty years is when it was cultivated to grow that way.

I had been, until I arrived in the Yucatan, perhaps mildly unclear on the distinction between rainforest and jungle. Rainforests are old-growth. When you come in with the gas-powered buzzsaws and cut down the glorious mahogany to make tables for the wealthy imperialist, that shit doesn’t just grow back. The trees are hundreds of feet high, and the canopy so thick it blocks out most of the light and limits the types and the density of undergrowth capable of surviving beneath it. I’ve hiked in a rainforest before in Hawaii, and while bushwhacking one’s way around might not be the wisest idea, it could certainly be done.

A jungle is nothing but undergrowth. The trees don’t grow taller than 25 feet. I considered a few times, while traveling in Yucatan, the possibility of exploring some of the jungle on my own, the way I would in a woods in New England. Considered it for about twenty seconds, from the safety of a nice, cleared path, before giving the notion up as insane. Foot travel in a trackless jungle is well nigh impossible. Cutting a path through jungle with a machete would be like snipping a path through a cornfield with a pair of swiss-army scissors. Nobody cuts down a jungle, except to make space for farming, or maybe to construct a shamanic temple, or to clear off one that was already there so you can invite white people to it and swindle them. And when you do cut it down, you better not look away for twenty years or it’ll all grow back just the way it was.

The result of all this is that when you are walking around in the jungles of the Yucatan, they look exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago.

Except for, you know, the occasional corrugated metal cerveza shack.