Years from now, fiction writers will grapple with how to approach 2020 in the United States. With two very long months remaining, we’re still enduring a raging pandemic we should’ve tamed months ago, against which backdrop we’ve undergone a summer of racial-justice protest, countered by futuristically militarized stormtroopers let loose to “dominate” the protesters; a rapid escalation in the effort to undermine, from without and within, our election process; and the specter of creeping fascism, which is emboldening hate groups and far-right militias and domestic terrorists. And the worst! Is yet! To COME!
So, good luck covering 2020 in one novel.
In “Oblivious,” Rudy Ruiz tries to cover it in one short story, and given the confines of our short story contest’s 2,500-word limit, he does an excellent job. While the virus sweeps through Texas, an attorney splashes around in family gore; a young couple turns inward to battle what they consider to be the real threat—garden pests; and teens Yankee and El Chulo learn to stand up against inequality while all around them, the people, “in the hospitals with ’Rona or in the streets with police officers’ knees on their chests, they couldn’t breathe.” —David Duhr, fiction editor
