I’m Straight

In Manuel García’s stories, desire never arrives loudly. It slips through the corridors of memory, across balconies that nearly touch, through years that pass without extinguishing what once seemed impossible even to name. These are stories of men who watch, hesitate, deny, and then surrender to what has always moved within them: the hunger for a body, the vertigo of a glance, the brutal tenderness of confession. In I’m Straight, the title story of this collection, an unexpected return reopens the door to an obsession never truly finished: the neighbor he longed for as a boy moves in next door again, and summer does the rest.

“When he brushed against my arm, I understood that certain desires do not grow old: they simply wait for the right moment to reclaim everything.” A warm, vulnerable, and dangerously truthful collection. Some forms of waiting, after all, ripen best in silence.