The Fiction of truth, the truth of fiction

NOTE: I wrote this story in the summer of 2002 or 2003, when I was living in 125th Street, Harlem. My friend Karine had an apartment there, and I was staying with her during the last part of my stay in New York. The tiger was reported to be only a few blocks away from where we were. It occurred to me that it was a little too close for comfort. I wrote this story and sent it to many publications, all of which unanimously rejected it.    MING'S DEFENSE SUSHMA JOSHI My name is Ming. I can't tell you why my owner named me Ming. I can only hazard a few intelligent guesses. In some blurry, peripatetic part of his brain, Alfred must have thought I came from China. Perhaps he thought I was descended from the Ming Dynasty. Who knows? Alfred, to put it kindly, is not the brightest of human beings. He watches too much television. In one of those channel hops, he must have seen two minutes of Ming Dynasty in the History Channel, and that episode about the great Dynasty...

Amparo was very upset about something. She was going on, in that passionate way, about an issue of great concern. She saw me looking at her and she realized I was clueless. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” she said.  I admitted I was clueless. “They have started to tinker with watches. Now people have to wear watches which show their gender-whether they are male or female, and their height as well!”  I was bemused. “Does it matter?” I asked.  “YES, IT DOES MATTER!” She said, in that inimitable Amparo way. “OF COURSE IT MATTERS. It is screwing with universal standards!”  Those who know Amparo know she yelled a lot, often in frustration, often at those who failed to understand the urgency of the situation. How urgent it was to have the same universal standards of rights, everywhere, everytime! What was my dream about? If Amparo was yelling at me from across the divide of Death, this was definitely something quite important. The clocks/watches, I ...