We present the English translation of “El instante indicado”, a short story written by the Mexican author Emiliano Monge, included in his 2017 collection La superficie más honda [The Deepest Surface]. In his books, Monge's stories act as a meditation on how violence troubles the Mexican landscape: violence as a spontaneous phenomenon, irrupting without warning into daily life, violence as manifest in the virulence and caprice of social media, violence as an embedded facet of culture, an expected and consequently invisible part of the cityscape, violence as a facet of the imagination, both personal and collective. This is reflected in the short story selected here—translated as “At the Precise Moment” and in a rather free version—in which the author constructs a palimpsest of moments, past upon present, that culminates in a lapidary execution of the form. [Adapted from the introduction written by the translator, Josh Dunn].
