{"id":47067,"date":"2026-09-16T19:57:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T01:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/pink-slime-translated-by-heather-cleary\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T20:03:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T02:03:22","slug":"pink-slime-translated-by-heather-cleary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2026\/09\/pink-slime-translated-by-heather-cleary\/","title":{"rendered":"Pink Slime, translated by Heather Cleary"},"content":{"rendered":"

A hair-raising, poetic work of literary horror and climate fiction about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford\u2014a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows\u2014even if staying means being left behind.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, <\/span><\/i>Pink Slime<\/span> is buoyed by humor and its narrator\u2019s resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable translated novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too. If I didn\u2019t have Mauro, I\u2019d spend all day wandering around, guided through the fog by the neon sign flickering in the distance: PAL CE HOTE . The missing letters hadn\u2019t changed, though it wasn\u2019t a hotel anymore; like so many other buildings in the city, it had been taken over by squatters. What day was that? Sometimes I can still hear the neon, its electric hum and the crackle of another letter on the verge of shorting out. The squatters kept the sign lit, but not out of laziness or nostalgia. They did it to remind themselves they were alive. That they could still do something arbitrary, something purely aesthetic. That they could still transform the landscape.<\/span><\/p>\n

If I\u2019m going to tell this story I should choose a starting point, begin somewhere. But where? I was never any good with beginnings. The day I saw the fish? Certain details leave their mark on time and render a moment unforgettable. It was cold, and the fog condensed into droplets on the overflowing dumpsters. I don\u2019t know where all that garbage came from. It seemed to consume and excrete itself. And how do you know <\/span>we\u2019re<\/span><\/i> not the waste? Max might have said something like that. I remember turning at the old corner store, with its windows boarded over, and how the greenish-red light of the hotel sign washed over me as I stepped onto the rambla.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mauro would be back the next day, bringing with him another month of confinement and work. Cooking, cleaning, monitoring his every movement. Each time they came to collect him I spent a whole day catching up on the sleep he threatened or interrupted. This endless vigil was the reason Mauro\u2019s parents paid me the exorbitant salary they knew would never compensate me. Breathing in the stale air of the port, prowling the streets, visiting my mother or Max\u2014these were the luxuries I afforded myself on the days my time didn\u2019t carry a price. If I was lucky, that is, and there was no wind.<\/span><\/p>\n

The only people on the rambla were fishermen with the collars of their jackets pulled up around their ears, their hands red and cracked. The water stretched wide in all directions, an estuary where the river became a shoreless sea. The fog blurred the horizon. It was ten o\u2019clock or eleven or three under that flat, milky light. The algae floated nearby like bloodshot phlegm, but the fishermen seemed not to care. They rested their buckets next to their beach chairs, baited their hooks, and gathered the strength of their brittle arms to cast their lines as far as they could. I liked the sound of the reels spooling out: it reminded me of summers spent riding my bicycle in San Felipe, no brakes, knees angled high to avoid the pedals. That bicycle contained my whole childhood, just like those beaches that would later be cordoned off with yellow tape the wind would periodically destroy and a few policemen in face masks would rehang. KEEP OUT, it said. Why? You\u2019d have to be crazy to want to go like that: infected, exposed to a nameless disease that didn\u2019t even promise a speedy death.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once, long before I married Max, I saw fog as dense as it was that day. It was in San Felipe, just before dawn, sometime in early December. I remember because the beach town was still empty, except for the few of us who had been summering there all our lives. Max and I walked slowly along the road, not looking at the black sand of the beach, accustomed to the rhythm of the breaking waves. That sound was like a watch to us, a certainty of all the summers to come. Unlike the tourists, we didn\u2019t go to San Felipe to get away from it all. We went there to affirm the continuity of something. It was pitch-dark except for Max\u2019s flashlight, but we knew the way. We stopped near the lookout, where lovers often hid, and leaned over the white wooden banisters. Max pointed his flashlight at the beach and through the fog we saw a swarming mass of crabs. The sand seemed to breathe, to swell like a sleeping beast. The crabs gleamed in their halo of light, they gushed from cracks in the boardwalk. Hundreds of them, tiny. What did Max say? I don\u2019t remember. I think we were both shaken, as if we had just been alerted to the existence of something incomprehensible, something bigger than ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

In winter along the rambla, though, there was no sign of so much as a mullet. The fishermen\u2019s buckets were empty, their bait waiting useless in plastic bags. I sat down near a man wearing a Russian-style hat with earflaps. My hands trembled from the cold, but I didn\u2019t do anything to still them. Unlike Max, I didn\u2019t view a person\u2019s will as independent from their body. This belief had led him to dedicate the last few years to extravagant experiments: purges, privations, weights hooked through his skin. The ecstasy of pain. The fasting organism is a single vast membrane, he would say, a thirsty plant left too long in the dark. Maybe. But Max was after something else: to separate himself from his body, that indomitable desire-generating machine, which knew neither conscience nor limits\u2014repugnant but also innocent, pure.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fisherman sensed I was looking at him. With my feet dangling over the water, my maskless face, and my backpack, which seemed to be loaded with stones, he must have thought I was another lost soul ready to jump into the river. Maybe my whole family was dead, admitted one by one to the critical care wing at Clinics, never to emerge. The water barely made a sound as it lapped against the seawall and the air was completely still. How long could this calm last? Every war had its ceasefires, even this one we fought unarmed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The line suddenly tensed, and I watched the fisherman cinch and reel in until a small fish popped into the air. It arched weakly, but the glint off its silvery scales brought a smile to the man\u2019s face. He grabbed it with his gloveless hand and removed the hook. No one could know what death and what miracle that animal held within it, and the two of us admired it accordingly. I expected the man to drop it into his bucket, even if just for a little while, but he threw it back immediately. It was so slight that it made no noise as it broke the surface. The last fish. One minute later and it would be far away, immune to the dense seaweed, to the death trap of algae and waste. The man turned to look at me, gesturing with his hand. This is the starting point I choose for my story, its false beginning. I could easily make an omen of it, justify it as a sign of things to come, but I won\u2019t. That\u2019s all: an hour like any other on a day like any other, except for the fish that soared through the air and fell back into the water.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated by Heather Cleary<\/span><\/h5>\n
From <\/span>Pink Slime <\/span><\/i>by <\/span>Fernanda Tr\u00edas<\/span><\/a>. Copyright \u00a9 2025 by <\/span>Fernanda Tr\u00edas<\/span><\/a>. English language translation <\/span>\u00a9<\/span><\/i> 2025
\nby Heather Cleary. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pink Slime <\/i><\/b>is available now from Scribner.<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n
Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A hair-raising, poetic work of literary horror and climate fiction about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse. In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5741],"tags":[5738],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[3137],"lal_author":[3110],"class_list":["post-47067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autora-destacada-fernanda-trias","tag-numero-39","translator-heather-cleary-es","lal_author-fernanda-trias-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47068,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47067\/revisions\/47068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=47067"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=47067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}