Today we have yet another Luisa Valenzuela story prompted by the underlying violence in her world. A major theme is the injustice of harming someone out of fear based on how they look. The protagonist is a pubescent girl in an isolated seaside community. She spends a lot of time collecting clams along the beach with her sister. In the process, they fantasize over the imaginary depraved, murderous activities of a seemingly harmless recluse living nearby. The additional conjugations of “to kill” at the end of the story suggest that the girls may have taken matters into their own hands.
Original Text / PDF (1,221 words)