We’re hunkering down here in South Texas, amigos, on the verge of Hurricane Alex. We’ve hit up Wal-Mart and stocked up on our non-perishables and water. We’ve filled up our gas tanks, boarded up our windows, stacked sandbags by the front and back doors, just like the local news told us to.

ME: All prepared, hon.

WIFE: Did you bring the Duracells? What about the candles?

ME: Shit.

While we make our way back to Sam Walton’s cornucopia one more time for those AA’s, check out this week’s fiction picks. They’ll tickle you with words like raindrops. They’ll jolt you with thunderous prose.

Until the storm passes, dear friends. Enjoy.

– Robert Paul Moreira

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The FIFA 2010 World Cup is well under way in South Africa, and we’ve been bitten by the soccer bug, folks. We’ve got our shorts and cleats on. We’re ready to hit the field, ready for the fast break, ready to score some goals. Here’s a list of the jerseys we’re sporting:

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We dance among the ruins and sunbake in the rain. We drive straight through the barn door and sleep with whiskey in the hay. We write stories at night and read stories at day and then leap up like a piece of lightning and settle on the tops of buildings and say to the world: You Must Read This Fiction.

Yeah.

– I wanted Anjali to go home. I couldn’t think of a better place for a Canadian than Canada, but she was very comfortable here. She stayed in a small room down the road from my grandmother’s house and spent her time sending postcards to the folks back home. She wrote about how this was a real-deal Indian town that didn’t have many cows but there were lots of black pigs and goats that never stopped farting.  Water only came out of the taps twice a day and you couldn’t drink it because it was filled with malevolent strains of cholera, typhoid, malaria and small pox. She wrote about how she saw dead rats in the daytime, how people peed at the side of the road, how the electricity came and went as it pleased. Once a month her sister wired her fifty dollars, but Anjali wanted to expand her horizons and you couldn’t do that on fifty dollars. This is why she wanted to sell her appendix. One afternoon she came to my grandmother’s house and started tugging at the front door. — Kuzhali Manickavel in Agni

– In the fields, we didn’t sneak our trash into other people’s bins. We dug a big hole and dumped everything into that. Sometimes we would sprinkle dirt atop it and hum a little song, maybe to bless it, maybe to distract ourselves, maybe just to hear our voices humming little songs. Other times we heaved the stuff in and told the children ominous tales about bad children. Don’t get too close to the bees near the trash, we told them. We’ll know if you do. — Jen Gann in Gigantic

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What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?

A beast, no more.

Jeez, Hamlet. Relax. It’s just a Big Mac and fries.

This week’s tasty morsels of fiction are nothing to feel guilty about, we promise.

Munch. Burp. Aah.

Beasts, O Prince of Denmark? You bet, and with curves. — Robert Paul Moreira

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This weekend, we tried explaining to Moms what a balk is in baseball after watching a replay of the quirky incident with Chicago White Sox’s pitcher Mark Buehrle at Progressive Field in Cleveland.

“It’s all about deception,” we explained.

Decepción.

She didn’t get it.

We felt bad. We should have started out with double plays, worked our way up to the more complicated stuff. It just wasn’t fair. We swore to make amends.

So, in her honor, we’ve decided to keep things simple this week. No subterfuge in the prose below except for the prescribed dosage. We scoured the net and found simple fiction — simple in style, that is, but hard on the soul, as all good writing should be.

Enjoy. — Robert Paul Moreira

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