Álvaro Bisama - Dead Stars

Sometimes we talk on the phone, about whatever, almost always in the middle of the night. That's what remains of what we had: insomnia. In those conversations, every once in a while, there are silences where all we do is listen to each other's breathing on the other end of the line. Then, we pick up the conversation again and fall asleep from exhaustion.

She never mentioned Javiera and Donoso again, except when she'd tell me: I had another nightmare about the little dead girl.

We're still alone.

Everything familiar to me was extinguished. All of humanity became a legion of vampires, a crowd of rats frozen in the middle of the dance floor, just centimeters from the precipice. We never went back to the Hesperia. Sometime after that, whatever there had been between us devolved into a lament. We acted like animals, we acted like people. We never came out of that café. We never left it, we never really left the port. The city burned down, it disappeared. The sky filled up with dead stars.

Álvaro Bisama (Valparaíso, Chile, 1975) is a writer, cultural critic, and a professor at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago. In 2007, he was selected as one of the 39 best Latin American authors under the age of 39 at the Hay Festival in Bogota. Estrellas muertas ( Dead Stars ), his third novel, won the 2011 Santiago Municipal Prize for Literature and the 2011 Premio Academia, given out by the Chilean Academy of Language for the best book of 2010. His most recent novel, Ruido ( Noise ), was published in 2013.

Megan McDowell is a literary translator from Richmond, Kentucky. Her translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Mandorla, LARB, McSweeney's, Vice , and Granta , among others. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, and Juan Emar. She is also a Managing Editor of Asymptote journal. She lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

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