Temporary and Ongoing

The stories I selected for this issue are all told from the point of view of someone who has been displaced, silenced, or made to feel invisible. They are all also characters who, despite the challenges and circumstances they face, resist, fight, and dream. In “When They Came for Us,” Ahmed tells the story of Aafreen, who finds her world turned upside down in Assam and ends up in a detention center where the “nights weave into each other.” In Ferreras’s story, “You Must Be This Tall,” hot dogs mysteriously appear outside one’s door and fresh fish are being gutted to satiate the missing of home—Dominican Republic. In “Paradise Garden,” Mar’s character Tala is on the hunt for a cheap place to live and finds one among fortune-tellers and women who answer the door when the other knocks. In the story “By the River Cibuco” (featured on KROnline), Di Iorio tells the story of Tani, who must decide if she should heed her mother’s warning about the storm or run off with her lover. In Natera’s “Curandera,” we are swept into a world where community healers are preferred over hospitals and doctors. And in “Help Me Help You,” Poddar’s story takes us to Mumbai’s call centers, where customers call in to modify their flight reservations, reminding us that on the other end of those calls, those who “serve” us are working hard to keep their jobs and also have their own aspirations.

When I selected these stories, it was pre-corona. I selected them because they offered a way of seeing or being in the world that I had never quite read before. I was taken by the voices of the characters, the intimate look into worlds of characters who, before reading the stories, were lumped into an inconceivable number in some news article: numbers like 1.9 million people becoming stateless in Assam, India, and an estimated 2,975 people dying in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria. Great storytellers remind us that each number is a person.