Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos

since thwarting her children’s greedy fantasies was impossible. As revenge, I would tell them about one of the Poles’ extravagances: that they had a room just for knick-knacks, or that the maid’s room had its own toilet.
    ‘I don’t like you going,’ my mother kept saying to me.
    ‘I won’t go again, don’t worry.’
    But I kept on going, at least while the summer lasted. My relationship with Jarek would not cross this threshold, as was to be expected. I had known from the start that when he went to school he’d choose his own friends, with whom he could talk about the experiences they had in common from the convenient position of not having to explain things all the time, like he did with me. He had to explain everything to me: not just how to play on the Atari or what the United States was like, but also details such as why mayonnaise was eaten in great heaped spoonfuls and not spread in thin layers.
    Showing off might be satisfying, but it gets tiring after a while.

‌ Little Grey Men
    ‘The twins were abducted by aliens.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Don’t you speak Spanish, arsehole?’
    This was the big surprise of the new school term: Aristotle wanted to become independent and he was going to attempt to do so in the most absurd way he could imagine.
    ‘Why do you think the police didn’t find them?’
    ‘Because the police are arseholes,’ I said, repeating my dad’s version of events.
    ‘Because they didn’t look properly, that’s why they didn’t find any clues. They didn’t find them because they didn’t look where they should have.’
    ‘And what were they supposed to do, go and search on other planets?’
    I thought it was impossible for the twins to have been abducted in the supermarket. This was my main reservation: not so much the existence of aliens, which I was prepared to incorporate into my system of fictions, but rather the plausibility of a methodology that allowed for the abduction of humans in overcrowded spaces in broad daylight. Surely it would have been more logical for them to have been stolen away one night from our house, up on the Cerro de la Chingada? According to Aristotle, the aliens had no reason to obey human logic. The aliens didn’t come from Greece.
    ‘But there was no spaceship in the ISSSTE,’ I replied weakly, feigning resistance to my brother’s aggressive attempts to convince me.
    ‘Don’t be stupid. They probably used telepathy to control them, ordered them to leave the shop and then took them to the place where the spaceship could pick them up.’
    ‘What place?’
    ‘Mesa Redonda.’
    In other words, they came down one hill to go up another one – the Round Table – poor things. We called it the Round Table because, after a brief, gentle incline, Mesa Redonda was cut off at the top, as if neatly sliced like a boiled egg. The hill’s uniformity produced an almost perfect circumference at the summit. The truth is, even without imagined conspiracies, it had a highly suspicious artificial appearance. Indeed, years later a trip was organised to analyse the hill with metal detectors and other contraptions, and half of Lagos turned up to volunteer. And the other half had to believe afterwards, in spite of the lack of evidence, that ‘strange things’ had been discovered.
    Aristotle’s theory proposed that the pretend twins had walked ten kilometres from the ISSSTE shop along the San Juan highway, and then covered 4,000 metres of dirt road leading to the foot of the hill, and then – phew! – climbed all the way up it. And all without anyone seeing them.
    ‘Don’t be an arsehole.’ It was his preferred method of persuasion, calling me an arsehole. ‘They must have made them invisible, or used teleportation.’
    Oh well, that changed everything. I allowed myself to be convinced out of pure, shameless self-interest. My brother was planning on moving from ideas to action and I had my plans too, lots of them. I was prepared to do anything to escape from