Signs Preceding the End of the World

by Yuri Herrera

These things always happen to someone else, until they happen to you, she thought.

It was one thing to make an exception, and quite another to change the rules.

You are the door, not the one who walks through it.

Makina spoke all three, and knew how to keep quiet in all three, too.

The city was an edgy arrangement of cement particles and yellow paint. Signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe, friendly, innocent, proud, and intermittently bewildered, blithe, and buoyant; salt of the only earth worth knowing.

More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born.

Whatever once was there had been pulled out by the roots, expelled from this world; it no longer existed.

And what was the point of calling the cops when your measure of good fortune consisted of having them not know you exist.

I guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.