From A Question of Belonging, which was published last month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner.

A long time ago, Atilio and I lived in an apartment that my mom had purchased because Atilio said the last one depressed him so much he couldn’t work. He had a point: the elevator in my old building had been jammed for about seventy years. When the windowpane fell onto us, we patched it up with cardboard and resolved to start a new life in a smaller, but newer, apartment. I dreamed of decorating it to my taste—I…