Book excerpt: A loose retelling of Calderon's Life is a dream set along the contemporary border between Texas and Mexico, the story begins when a powerful drug smuggler banishes an undocumented midwife back across the Rio Grande and incurs a curse that gestates for 18 years. In that time, the smuggler's son Lazaro grows up alone and untrained in human interaction on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio, while the midwife's two surviving children, Blanca and Pepín, swim north across the river to exact revenge for the pain caused to their mother and to claim their birthright. All manners of border, geographic, political, gender, and metaphysical, are crossed in this struggle to know one's place in the world.