Mouthfeel

Words By Audrey Gutierrez, Art By Isabel Burke

Part I: Hors D’oeuvresA month ago, my papi and I moved to the panhandle, a place that lacks the constant stream of Spanish that Miami is known for. Here, everyone has blond or light brown hair and light eyes. Here, people say, “y’all,” and one out of five gives you odd looks when you say…

Flaming fiddles, it looks like there’s a roadblock here! If you’d like to finish reading this piece, please buy a subscription—you’ll get access to the entire online archive of F(r)iction.

Audrey Gutierrez

Audrey Gutierrez is a Cuban-American writer from Louisiana. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was awarded the Mary Blodgett Fiction Prize from the University of Iowa. In summer 2022, she was an Alaska State Parks Artist-in-Residence and a 2022 PEN America Emerging Writers Fellowship Finalist. She is finalizing her novel, The Fractures of Nos Castillo, about five sisters living on the edge of Cuba during the Revolution, and working on a collection of stories called Tales from the Swamp. Her work has appeared in CALYX Press and Artslandia Magazine. Audrey teaches fiction at Lewis and Clark College.

Isabel Burke

Isabel Burke has been drawing ever since she could pick up a pencil. She brought her passion for storytelling from Austin, Texas to the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she will graduate in 2022 with a degree in illustration and a minor in sequential art. She hopes to continue working in the publishing and editorial industries to bring stories to life through comics and illustration after graduation. When she’s not drawing, she loves cooking, watching historical dramas, and reading!

First Featured In: No. 20, winter 2023

The Bodies Issue

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