Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think by Grace Spulak (Fiction ’24)
Fiction alum Grace Spulak has a new story collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, out from Autumn House Press. Read an excerpt below.
Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think
sister Cherise, and we lived with her off that old highway that
goes from Magdalena to the Alamo Reservation, at first crowded
together in a fifth-wheel trailer, then later, when Jessie got some
money from a settlement after a Forest Service truck ran her off
the road, in a single-wide with a dusty air-conditioning unit that
never worked.
Jessie never liked girls, and she said this was the reason she never
liked our mother, although when she wanted sympathy, she had
no problem going on about what a tragedy it was that our mother
died. Boys were better, she said, because they weren’t crazy, and it
was just her luck that our brother Darryl was the one to go with
our mom. Given all that, you’d think she would’ve liked Wilson
Padilla when they gave him to us as her one and only foster kid,
but she didn’t, as far as I can tell. She only signed up to take foster
kids because she could get a payment for them. With Jessie it was
always some scheme to get money.
