Hello, Universe

by Erin Entrada Kelly

that’s how the Salinas family was—big personalities that bubbled over like pots of soup.

“This is Turtle,” his mother said. That was their name for him: Turtle. Because he wouldn’t “come out of his shell.” Every time they said it, a piece of him broke.

So it’s not the dark that keeps me awake. It’s the nightmare.

Virgil had long suspected that his brothers were crafted out of a factory that made perfect, athletic, perpetually happy children, and he was made from all the leftover parts.

There are more than seven thousand islands in the Philippines. Some don’t even have people living on them. And then there are some that once had people, but don’t anymore. Like the lowland island of Balatama. Lola had told Virgil all about it.

It feels anticlimactic after everything, but sometimes things don’t end the way you expect them to.