He knelt and made a cup of his two brown hands. He was nineteen years old and should have felt as sweet as a bluebird in the dew, but in the awful damp of the early morning, after another night of sleeping on cold concrete-or not sleeping-he moved like an old man, grumbling like the world was out to get him, had in fact perhaps already gotten him, struck him down without mercy or care or intent as if it hadn’t even seen him standing there, he had just been in the way. Victor-curled into himself like a question mark, a joint hanging from his mouth Victor with his hair natural in two thick braids, a red bandanna folded and knotted to hold them back Victor-with his dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche skin, wearing a pair of classic Air Jordans, the leather so white it glowed-imagine him how you will because he hardly knew how to see himself. He put match head to phosphate strip with the gentle pressure of one long finger and the thing sparked and caught and for the briefest of moments he held a yellow flame. Yapa grew up in Pennsylvania, and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries. He won the Asian American Short Story Award and was the writer-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Yapa received his MFA from Hunter College, where he was awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship. The following is from Sunil Yapa’s novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.
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