Early on in “The Other Day After the Rain,” in describing the decaying building in which he lives, the narrator identifies it as being in the “residual phase”, a phrase which puts…

He throws the arm with the machete around my shoulders, the edge of the blade scant centimeters from my neck.

Born in Mexico City in 1973, Guadalupe Nettel had already won Radio France Internationale’s award for best French-language short story from outside the Francophone world by the time she was nineteen.…