Story of the Week

Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the American Book Award in 1992 for his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust. His many other awards include a Southwest Book Award, the Paterson Prize, and the Americas Book Award, and his collection of short stories set along the Texas-Mexico border, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, won the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His most recent poetry collection is The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Sáenz is the chair of the creative writing department at the University of Texas at El Paso.



2013


He Has Gone to Be with the Women

A Story

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
1.


The slant of morning light made him look like he was about to catch on fire.

Every Sunday he was there. A singular, solitary figure—but not sad and not lonely. And not tragic. He became the main character of a story I was writing in my head. The first sentence would read, Some people are so beautiful that they belong everywhere they go.

I always noticed what he was reading: Dostoyevsky, Kazantzakis, Faulkner. He was in love with serious literature. And tragedy. Well, he lived on the border. And on the border you could be in love with tragedy without being tragic.

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