Brink Magazine released their new issue today, and their fiction selection was my short story, “mija.” I started writing this story so long ago that I barely remember it. The original file for it on my computer, dated July of 2005, is called “Car Journey,” which seems like a really stupid name. I remember that, at the time, I imagined I was starting a novel. I don’t remember how it was going to be long enough to be a novel, but I remember that’s what it was going to be.
Somewhere over the next year, though, the story stopped being a potential novel and started being nothing at all, which is to say that I stopped working on it entirely. I don’t remember why. Maybe I had realized by then that it had no novel potential whatsoever and I was getting tired of working on it. But then, sometime after I started my MA program at Hopkins, I re-discovered it while rummaging through the hard drive of the computer I was about to get rid of and realized that it might be worth saving. Not as a novel, certainly, but as a short story that I ended up liking a lot. I’m happy to see it placed in Brink Magazine, too…I’ve been reading them for years. They rejected me once before (no hard feelings there), but it was a kind rejection, and I’m happy to see that my second at-bat with them turned out for the better.
Anyway, check the story out here: http://www.brinklit.com/fiction/mija-by-pete-pazmino.