Free Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

vacation once the war ended. They built variations of themselves, portraits of their unborn children, unique amalgams of their best features. My voice, Norma said, for speaking. No, Rey said, laughing: mine, for singing.
    They made love regularly and hopefully, just as the doctor prescribed. And nothing. Passionately and desperately—still nothing. When he didn’t return, Norma’s period didn’t come for ninety terrible days. She wrestled with the possibility of raising his child alone, almost allowing herself a glimmer of happiness—but it was only stress, her body as traumatized as her heart, shutting down, slowing very nearly to a standstill. She discovered in the mirror one day that she’d lost weight, that she was as spent, as ragged as the soldiers returning home from the countryside. All bone, gaunt and pale. She wasn’t pregnant: she was dying.
    Now the boy slept with his face buried in the cushions of the couch. Norma turned on the radio: softly, a melody, strings, a wistful voice. The boy did not stir. She edged the door closed, the blue light vanished. She was alone again, in darkness. She undressed.

FOUR
    Y EARS AGO, a lifetime ago, it went this way: on a moonless night, Rey and a few friends tossed back shots of grain alcohol and then tested their aim against the front wall of the school, rocks against brick and glass. They were drunk and alive, just boys playing a prank. But that same night, something else happened: a small, homemade bomb exploded inside the mayor’s office. This was the war’s prehistory, its unnatural birthing, more than a decade before the fighting would begin in earnest. It occurred in a distant town, in a country as yet unaccustomed to such things. The blast awoke a restless, confused crowd. Fire tore at the roof, and windows were blown into the street in neat, glowing shards. The men lined up with pails of water, but it was no use. The water ran out, or their resolve did, and so they stopped. The sky was black, a soft breeze blowing. The building smoldered. It was a beautiful night for a fire.
    Rey was only thirteen years old, but he would end up in jail that night, locked away for his own safety. Outside, a crowd would be callingfor his head, gripped with the paranoia only a mob can feel. The jailer, his father’s brother Trini, would be preaching calm. Inside, Rey’s father, headmaster of the aggrieved school, would be red-faced and shouting, “What did you do, boy? What did you do?”
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    T HE TOWN’S jail was two blocks off the plaza, sharing a quiet side street with the humble homes of maids and stonemasons. The exterior of the building was a pale blue, adorned with a rudimentary painting of the national seal, which, if examined up close (as Rey often did), was as blurry and inexact as the pixilated photographs that ran on the front pages of the town’s only newspaper. An old Indian maxim— DON’T LIE, DON’T KILL, DON’T STEAL —was inscribed in severe black lettering above the door-jamb, perhaps giving the sleepy jail an import it didn’t deserve. Rey liked the jail: he liked to sit with his uncle, whose job, it seemed, consisted of waiting for trouble to manifest itself. According to Trini, there wasn’t enough of it. He complained bitterly about the quiet town, and liked to tell stories of his year in the capital. There was no way of knowing which were true and which were false. To hear Trini tell it, the city was peopled with thieves and louts and killers in equal parts. To hear Trini tell it, he’d been a one-man crime-fighting machine, justice patrolling the crooked streets, all grit and courage. The city! It was hard to imagine: a rotten, dying place, even then, crumbling and full of shadows. But what did it look like? Rey couldn’t picture it: the boiling, black ocean, the jagged coastline, the heavy clouds, the millions draped in perpetual dusk. Here, there was bright sun and