Works in Progress
Let Me Take Care of You: Stories
These stories show how Puerto Rico’s recent record of outsized natural disasters, financial crisis, and exploitation by stateside billionaires has paradoxically spurred the kaleidoscopic forging of new bonds among people who might otherwise never have met as well as the collective will to regroup and regrow.
Characters include: a girl who has a vision of an indigenous figure from colonial times during Hurricane Maria; a couple who sell 38 million bottles of expired water that FEMA failed to deliver to storm victims; a woman who kills the crypto-billionaire who raped her daughter but finds the man won’t die; two tropical fruit who fight each other through migration and diaspora; and a woman convinced her lover is the incarnation of an Afro-Caribbean trickster god.
Tragic yet sometimes deliriously absurd, sexy and ethereal, the stories swing from violence to meditative character analysis. Gothic and surreal touches sharpen the sense of an uncanny return of colonial history. With psychological precision and a little otherworldliness, the stories offer insights on how, amid global conflict and natural disasters, we might better connect with other people and our better selves.
When Darkness Calls (a literary thriller)
Lucy Storer is a female serial killer or, as she says, “a life ender.” Her job as a Spanish/English translator for the Manhattan courts and police helps her track murderers. She is not your garden-variety serial killer, vigilante or otherwise. Through a ritual linked to the Catholic saints, she redeems these criminals even as she punishes them. She’s proud of her work.
But one day she’s called to a crime scene and discovers that the killer also uses symbols linked to the saints. More disturbingly, the crime recalls the murder of Lucy’s sister in Puerto Rico years ago.
In the meantime, the new assistant district attorney at court is asking about Lucy’s past. Does he want to date her or prosecute her? Maybe both?
Ultimately, Lucy must accept the idea that the secrets of our past can reveal more about our motivations than we ever imagined as she confronts the evil that has shadowed her from one island to another.