Excerpt from Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He pulled out the documents he'd shown at customs, but the woman shook an impatient head and thumbed her fingertips in the universal sign of This is what I'm talking about. So he pulled out some of the money he'd brought, in pesos, which the woman assessed for a moment before she nodded, They're legit, took them, and gave an order to the kid, who trotted off down the hall.

They followed him to an inner courtyard containing nothing but broken chair parts and stacked- up tables, and a door at the back, which the kid opened for them. Two cots. One whole chair. A hook to hang clothes on. A pewter basin. The kid pointed to another door on another side of the patio, with any luck the toilet. The boy gazed at them in silence for a minute. Then made the universal sign of Welcome to the Hotel Cincinnati and left.

His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things.

When it was finally his turn he had pulled out his papers, but instead of taking them, the bureaucrat supposedly helping him had asked a question or two: Where are you from? Why have you come? What do you do? What is your name? Not all of them: one or two. He decided to reply to them all, one by one. The official gave him an exasperated look, snatched his papers, and began copying down his details, but when he reached Occupation the bureaucrat stopped and asked him something. Looking at the word the bureaucrat pointed to, he replied Abogado, lawyer. The bureaucrat gazed at him blankly and wrote Merchant, and then paused again on seeing the age listed on the document: 47. Looking up, the man studied him in genuine curiosity, almost amiably, and wrote 21. The bureaucrat also wrote the wrong date of arrival, though perhaps it wasn't the bureaucrat but he who was wrong: for a long time now he'd had no idea what day it was.

He'd kept his mouth shut when his papers were handed back. And Pepe had been dispatched much quicker.

They had been on their way out when the compass man landed at their feet.

A cockroach traversed the ceiling as if setting out across the desert, illuminated by a band of light coming in from the courtyard. They tracked its progress in silence even though each of them knew the other was awake. They watched it wander back and forth for a while. Then Pepe said:

"When can we go back?"

The cockroach turned and scuttled off to a corner.

"Soon, no doubt."

Excerpt from Season of the Swamp. Copyright © 2022 by Yuri Herrera. English translation copyright © 2024 by Lisa Dillman. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org