Fresh Dirt From the Grave is another Charco Press title, this time from Bolivia. It is a collection of six stories that unsettle the reader, navigating paths outside the norm, revealing aspects of characters, of circumstances and inclinations that pierce like a wound, while evoking expressions of love, justice and hope.

Described as where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet, these short stories by Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero are not my usual fare, however I chose to read it for #WITMonth and discover what the boundaries of Gothic really means.

There are six stories and the first few were tales of macabre revenge that reminded me of Yoko Ogawa’s excellent collection Revenge.

Overall an interesting, dark collection that brings out a quiet consideration in each of the protagonists as they grapple with their challenging situations and must either make a decision or give in to one made by an other.

blessed are the meek

A young woman is violated. Everyone around her seems to be denying the gravity of it. The family moves away, until the opportunity arrives to bury their grief, literally…

It shouldn’t have been her family that had to leave. But they were the ones who left.

fish, turtle, vulture

A man survives 100 days at sea, the young apprentice companion with him does not.

Now he is meeting the mother of that young boy. She feeds him tortillas, asking him to repeat again what happened out there.

Atoning for his loss, he will atone for hers.

Tell me more, she says, pushing the plate of tortillas towards him as if she were paying him to tell the tale with that warm, fragrant dough.

it looks human when it rains

A Japanese widow in Bolivia teaches origami to women prisoners in a jail. She is curious about these so-called murderers, until she teaches them how to make a snake – and observes in the eyes of one woman, something terrifying.

She was surprised to find that she was not appalled by their crimes, their mistakes, their unbridled passions, the gross misjudgements that had led them there. Who was she to ponder their failings.

Her own past comes back to haunt her, a young woman lodger helps her in the garden, things that were buried resurface in her mind, in her life. A sense of injustice, a prickle of rage. The year of the snake had been the worst, the part she had tried to bury. Origami was a path, a light, because it never resorted to twists or curves to fix a form.

No one who had been so fortunate as to find themselves among the group of émigrés that embarked on the voyage to Brazil and Peru in 1957 before settling in Bolivia, in the eastern rainforest of Yapacani, had returned to Japan carrying the wilting flowers of the fiasco on their backs.

Socorro

“Those boy’s aren’t your husbands” says a deranged Aunt in the opening lines.

I didn’t know in that moment, what shook me more: the mad woman’s barbed remark or the cackle she unleashed as she spoke those words, which felt like a reprimand.

A woman, her husband and twin boys visit her mother and Aunt. She is an expert in mental health but being around her Aunt unsettles her in ways that her professional self finds hard to deal with. The moments of lucidity among the madness, reach in to her own hidden aspect and threaten to overwhelm her.

Donkey Skin

Two children orphaned overnight are sent to live with their French Aunt in Winnipeg, Canada. When they get to 17 years old, they plan an escape, and their world gets turned upside down again.

The only blood uncle we had left in Santa Cruz, Papa’s brother, said that children were always better off being raised near a female voice, and so without saying a word, he signed all the migration papers needed for Dani and me to leave Bolivia and his life for good. Being Bolivian is a mental illness, he told us in that good-humoured way of his, which made us forgive him for everything, even for handing us over like pets to Aunt Anita, who, when the time came to appear at the juvenile court, despite all those breath mints she slotted between her teeth, still couldn’t disguise the stench of whiskey.

Kindred Deer

Intelligent but struggling financially, students sign up for medical trials that promise to cover their debts, but at what price.

The medicinal smell that rises from Joaquin’s body like an aura has taken over our bedroom. It’ll be gone in a few days, they told him.

They ignore the corpse of a dead animal outside their window, leaving it longer than they should to address. Like the strange mark on his back that shouldn’t be there, have they left that too late as well, will he pay the ultimate price?

Pay him double or I’m leaving, I say.

Author, Giovanna Rivero

Giovanna Rivero was born in the city of Montero, Santa Cruz, Bolivia in 1972 and is a writer of short stories and novels.

She holds a doctorate in Hispano-American literature. In 2004, she studied on the Iowa Writing Program and in 2006 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, enabling her to take a masters in Latin American literature at the University of Florida. In 2014, she received her doctorate.​ In 2011, she was selected by the Guadalajara Book Fair as one of the 25 upcoming stars of Latin American literature.

She is the author of the books of short stories as well as children’s books. She has published four novels: Las camaleonas (2001), Tukzon (2008), Helena 2022 (2011) and 98 segundos sin sombra (2014). Her literary work, which moves between horror literature and science fiction, is regarded as a major contribution to the renewal of the Gothic and fantastic genres in Latin America.