B-SIDES

I’ve been fascinated with the short-short story as a genre, micro stories, as you would call them in Spanish, for a long time. Brief, compact, deictic, these are the literary equivalent to a physical gesture–a finger pointing to an isolated incident in the middle of the dark empty night which forces the reader to create some, any, form of context.

The earliest tales included in Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges date back to 2005, though the collection didn’t really take shape until three or four years later. One of the first stories was “Un amor perfecto“, which appeared in Letralia in 2009.

Many micro stories didn’t make it to the collection, though some have found a home elsewhere. One of them was adapted to the photo project “54 semanas” by Erik Molgora also in 2009. Another one, “Cold War” was featured in the “Summer Readings” section of Sint Maarten’s The Daily Herald a couple of years later. More recently, Akashic published a dizzying account of extravagant habits titled “Knock Yourself Out” and then asked me to write a little piece to introduce their new flash fiction series Duppy Thursday. “El Silbón” was the result.

Here’s some of the discards and extra material that never made it to Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges:

• TRACK 1, “At Walthamstow Central”
• TRACK 2, “The Kiss”
• TRACK 3, “Breathing”
• TRACK 4, “L’Esperance”

Want more? Take a look at the possible COVERS we discarded before publishing the book, or explore the PLAYLIST.