Why Does Everything

By Rafael Spregelburd
Translated by Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevich

Sometimes I hide a document. I put it somewhere secret, and I start to gauge the effects. When I see everyone’s desperate, I pull the document from its stash, sign it and get the belt running again. I make myself indispensable, you understand?

On the Other Side of the Sea

By Jorgelina Cerritos
Translated by Margaret Stanton and Anna Donko

Cerritos’ concern with the theme of identity, not as an ethnic construct, but rather as an existential angst, is expressed through techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd such as the lonely desk on an isolated beach, Dorotea’s insistence that her lone client gets in line and the obsession with documents as proof of existence, documents that cannot be obtained without, ironically, other documents.

The Kittens

By Críspulo Torres
Translated by John Thomas Howard

For them, for all Colombians who have lived through the conflict, there is no silence whatsoever; there is only the endless report of bullets, the continued sound of explosions going off in the distance, and the sirens and the screams that accompany these things.