Wealth Can’t Absolve the Families of the Disappeared

Electric Literature has published a new short story by Patricia Grace King, "Already Gone," set in Guatemala City in 1981. It opens with six-year-old Ester learning that her parents, graduate students active in their university's student union, have been seized off a downtown street by masked men in a van — one of the forced disappearances that marked Guatemala's civil-war era. The story then follows the extended family gathering in shock at her great-aunt's house, where wealthy relatives and her parents' student friends argue over what to even call what's happened to them, according to Electric Literature.

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