THERE IS A RIO GRANDE IN HEAVEN

A debut collection of stories centered on the Salvadoran diaspora.

Salvadoran American storyteller Reyes threads together tales blending family dynamics and the migratory challenges of the Latin American diaspora with an edge of the uncanny, surreal, and outlandish. In “He Eats His Own,” Neto, a successful professional in Los Angeles and the child of Salvadoran immigrants, takes increasingly dangerous steps to satisfy an obsession with homegrown mangoes even as it unravels his relationship, leads to the deaths of relatives, and threatens to imprison his only surviving relation, an orphaned cousin who sobs when Neto gifts him a mango sapling, “an intense fear spreading from his throat all the way down to his green thumb.” In “My Abuela, the Puppet,” the narrator’s grandmother slowly morphs into a marionette, beginning with her oversize orthopedic sneakers, until her knockoff Louis Vuitton handbag transforms into felt and her thinning frame leaves errant tufts of wool on bedsheets and her wheelchair. Abuela the Puppet hangs on a wall in the living room until one night she sings out in a strong voice: “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores.” A series of searing vignettes punctuates the collection. Each one is titled “An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World,” and they reimagine infamous episodes from Salvadoran history, such as the quick defeat of 16th-century colonizers or the ghastly rearrangement of Indigenous remains into the shape of a dinosaur that will be named Maximilianodon, for the tyrant dictator who thought “drawing a little bit of blood once in a while was part of the job.” Tethered to historical fact and enlivened by speculative elements, Reyes’ fiction brings into focus the troubling legacies that stalk so many Central American nations: the enduring “belief that we can bury our monstrosities underneath a pile of ash and bones.”

Haunting, tender, and profound meditations on the experiences of Central American migrants and their families.