By Veronica Gonzalez Peña

Winner of the 2008 Premio Aztlán Literary Award.


... as I poured my father’s ashes into a big Ziploc bag, a little of my blood dripped in. I thought about how each cell has all of you fully inscribed in it, so that if I left those drops in there, it would be as if I were already dead too. I plunged in then, to try and get myself out, but it was all so sticky that I had to give up; when I pulled out my hand, parts of my father were stuck all over it...—from Twin Time

Witty, sarcastic, and sensuous, Twin Time: or, how death befell me tells the story of Mona, who, upon her father’s death in Los Angeles, decides to set off in search of her long-lost twin brother, given away as an infant. With her father’s ashes as a guide of dubious reliability, Mona embarks upon a quest that takes her into a forest where she’s confronted by–among other beings–a band of Nordic men, her Chinese doppelganger, a lascivious giant, and a pack of feral children. Along the way Mona recounts her parents’ past as she imagines it, a romantic tale of love and rescue set in a fabulist, idealized Mexico–a dreamy place that only vaguely resembles the harsh quotidian realities of the 1960s Mexico City her parents inhabited. When Mona finds her brother at last, she learns that he grew up in London with their mother–who had supposedly (or so Mona had been told) died in childbirth–and her parents’ story is thrown into further disarray. By the end of the journey, all Mona's received ideas of home, motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation have been overturned.

Veronica Gonzalez is the coeditor of Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings and the founder of rockypoint Press, a series of artist-writer collaborations produced in association with 1301PE Gallery. Twin Time is her first novel.