Dreaming Of America

In the faraway Andes lies a village. A dark girl lives there, and she hopes day after day that one day she will be living in an apartment in America. She has never been to America, she has never even heard of America. She is fifteen years old and the few possessions she owns bear the myriad marks of the beast – symbols and swooshes and faces – that mean nothing to her except the alien feel that each has in her world of hand-ground maize. She dreams of these aliens, and one day she wants to be an alien.