We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores, a near-future dystopian novel out from MCD on February 11th.
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town’s mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets.
Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town’s last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí’s possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick’s forces, Neftalí and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tías, rise up to reclaim their city—and in the process, unlock Rivas’s connection to Three Rivers itself.
Neftalí and Proserpina raced across the supposedly haunted pedestrian bridge, over the busy intersection of Fourth and La Cuchilla, then sat down to catch their breath at the far edge of the embankment. The onyx smokestacks from the fish cannery whirled in the distance, against scattered patches of purple smog. Yellow low-flying clouds often moved through the streets like packs of giant dogs, lapping up windows, leaving muck residue to harden on the pavement.
Proserpina pointed at a burning mass in front of the old tamale shack and said, “You see those gnarly fires happening constantly now. What do you think everyone’s burning so much?”
“Probably garbage. What do people expect? The fires never get that big or grow out of control inside the city, anyway, and people gotta get rid of their shit somehow. Garbage is piling, stinking everything up, right when we’d figured out the rat problem, too.”
They loitered where the pedestrian bridge met the embankment to look down upon gutted, abandoned tractors, and the mossy Brown Apollo statue on the grounds of the burned-down elementary school. Neftalí had memories of reading short-story anthologies by the statue’s immense feet when she’d attended the school as a girl; at the same spot, Proserpina had first met the man who’d sold her the carbon papers and emulsion to forge ration cards. The Brown Apollo statue seemed to raise its arms in a flex as Neftalí and Proserpina wandered the charred foundations on the property.
With the skeletal remains of the gymnasium behind him, Brown Apollo watched as a thick ground-level cloud approached Neftalí and Proserpina from the direction of a discontinued bus stop. Laughter and the whirring of tires and gears were heard, as if the whale-sized, turmeric-colored mist had hidden wheels and levers operated by giddy, sadistic gnomes. There was another sound—like an empty can of soup trying to sing—and as Neftalí’s eyes focused on the silhouettes emerging from the cream-thick haze, she made out the bad doom metal, all treble, playing out of a small, possibly broken speaker. Four souped-up tricycles rushed by them, grazing their arms and canvas bags.
Proserpina immediately recognized the riders as the four boys she’d teased before they stopped at Doña Julieta’s. She chuckled to herself, and it took all her strength not to say the first thing that came to mind. They were inside the belly of this yellow mist, lost in an artificial desert dust storm, and hard-pressed to see anything beyond its organism—the oxygen thinned, making it somehow easier to inhale the industrial pollutants.
Doom metal continued chirping from the miserable little speaker, then a voice said, “Surprise, surprise, to see you sneaking into New Freeway, Neftalí. Maybe you recognize your neighbors here? They caught me up with what happened over at your house last night.”
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The voice fluttered out of Santo as he rode his fixed-gear bicycle like it was a miniature donkey with shuffling hummingbird legs. He wore a denim jacket with torn sleeves, old skinny jeans, and shoes with missing laces.
“Your old drummer, Proserpina, here, too? Very special. And where’s big-money-machine Alexei?” Santo continued. “Bring in the old bass player, get a whole band reunion going. Surely he must be looking for old bubblegum wrappers to convert to dollar bills? Or maybe it’s shit-stained toilet paper squares today?”
The tricycle boys were clearly amused by Santo’s variety of humor. He sat taller on his bicycle than the boys did on their tricycles, and Neftalí quickly gathered that they made up a small gang. Dry axles begging for an oil reprieve could be heard creaking louder and louder from somewhere within the devouring mist, as if the gears were trying to fiendishly laugh, too.
Proserpina grabbed a stone by Brown Apollo’s sandaled feet, tracked the speaker hanging from one of the tricycle boys’ shoulders, and pitched it at a calculated moment. The speaker fell, hit concrete: the doom metal stopped, plastic and metallic guts spilled out unceremoniously.
Santo and his small gang were one of many units of boys sweeping Three Rivers, wreaking their brand of havoc on the population. Their antics came handsomely rewarded by Mayor Pablo Henry Crick. Ever since Crick’s administration started deploying book shredders to average citizens, boys like these had had carte blanche to find and discard books that the Three Rivers authorities had missed.
A large boy emerged from the haggard fog, pedaling with the strain of Sisyphus, barely making it over the cliff—behind him, strapped onto a flat wagon with those pleading, thirsty axles, sat a mechanical beast with four wide, sharp, well-fed mouths, like a savage prince being promenaded through the jungle, waiting for fresh grapes for dessert.
Two of the tricycle boys stepped off their rides, approached Neftalí first, made as if they weren’t afraid to put their hands on her.
“Don’t make this hard, Neftalí. Just hand over your bag.”
“What, you’re gonna feed your machine my shit? What’s in this bag is all I got left.”
In three flashes, and perhaps blinded by the immeasurable depth within the lurking mist, the two boys effortlessly snatched Proserpina’s bag, then slipped off Neftalí’s like a choreographed magic trick.
Santo emptied both canvas bags at the feet of Brown Apollo, like an offering among thieves. Even within the diffused sunlight inside that abnormal, low-flying cloud, the two books that fell out of Neftalí’s bag were clear as day. The boys’ faces all wriggled into large smiles, as the largest boy unstrapped the four-mouthed oblong shredder from the bed of the squeaky wagon, balanced it on the uneven school grounds, then yanked on the cord to start it up.
After plenty of unsuccessful yanks, Santo ordered: “Clean the gasket.”
“You’re really gonna do this, Santo?”
“Neftalí, do I look like a politician? It’s the law.”
“Bullshit,” Proserpina said.
“All right, all right, let’s switch places, and you are me. And you find me here, carrying two books, when… when a literacy permit is required and strictly enforced. Now, seeing as how you know the person with said books, what’s the nicest thing you could do, without having to call the bosses?”
“Listen to the way he talks,” Neftalí exclaimed to the other boys, unable to contain her disgust at Santo’s words. “We both learned how to read in a class together, once upon a time—”
“You don’t need to invent lies,” Santo cracked, as the large boy finally got the shredder’s four mouths chewing, complete with thousands of micro-blades crunching, spinning, and shrieking to be fed through the miasma. “Now that you’ve considered my point of view, and given your lying nature, what would you do in my place?” he yelled.
Santo reached for the book on the ground that appeared the most seductive to him—the hardcover. He traced the embossed title with his right middle finger: Understanding Urban and Agricultural Hydraulics, then slowly flipped through its pages, pretending to be interested in the knowledge it offered, to spite the young women.
Proserpina noticed Neftalí shaking, and felt that her friend was capable, at any moment, of making the rashest decision. In the blink of an eye, Proserpina imagined flying sparks involving crowbars, machetes, all sorts of vengeful madness, so upon returning to the present moment, she harbored an urge to keep the peace, and in the friendliest tone she exclaimed: “That book can be useful to somebody, even if you think it’s trash. Why destroy it?”
Neftalí missed these words, looking up as Brown Apollo’s torso and head seemed to descend on them with the passing of the yellow cloud, and for a sliced moment she indulged her innermost fantasies of why the two of them had even stopped to visit this monument; she imagined Brown Apollo approaching them with his cast iron muscles, and their conversation turning immediately to galloping horses: the difference between the wild horses on the pampas and the horses by the shores of bombed South Padre Island. Brown Apollo would give them tips about wearing seashells as masks; Proserpina and Neftalí would brainstorm questions for Brown Apollo, to take advantage of this rare close encounter with a god. But mostly they’d want to have a chill time with him, to have drinks and watch Italian movies about ancient Greece with the divine bulwark himself.
This was the delirium Neftalí found herself in as she watched Santo feed the nearly impossible-to-find hardcover copy of Understanding Urban and Agricultural Hydraulics, meant for Bettina on her birthday, to the buzzing, chomping, four-mouthed book shredder. It surprised most people, despite repeated firsthand accounts, that the machine’s micro-blades pulverized the book entirely, dust blowing into the wind after the procedure like a wildflower bouquet’s ashes. Brown Apollo seemed to turn his head away, perhaps in disgust, or perhaps reluctantly agreeing with the perspective of the young men and the book-banning laws.
Santo thumbed through the remaining dog-eared paperback. “Ghosts… in the Zap… otec Spher… icals,” he read aloud from its time-yellowed title page. “By Jazzmin. Mon… elle. Rivas. She’s correct about one thing, boys. I was one of the last to attend this burned-down school. Learned how to read here. So take it from me. You’re not missing much.”
Dense boxcar fog floated over from the elevated pedestrian bridge, and with it appeared two women. They whispered contentiously to each other, then walked around Brown Apollo, stopping on opposite sides of his giant mildewed ankles. One of the women hunched low to the ground, inspecting the sputtering book shredder. She wore a dark purple cloth that covered her entire hair and torso, while her longbraided partner stood with immaculate posture, muffling her ears against the ornery machine.
Santo was mere moments from feeding the worn paperback to the wailing beast, when the braided woman grabbed a stone from the ground and gently lobbed it toward the machine’s four clamoring mouths. The book shredder’s microblades and manufactured innards crunched to a pained, smoky halt; it seemed to turn its mouths inside out, while spewing resin from every pore. A plume of swampy grease left the prostrate machine’s body like a sin-soaked soul, forming a beast on three backs along with the yellow haze and natural fog copulating near Brown Apollo.
“That oughta do it,” the braided woman said triumphantly.
“Lady,” Santo said, coughing, batting the swirling smoke away, as the tricycle boys circled Brown Apollo clockwise, “now what am I supposed to tell the boss about this?”
“Don’t lady me, I’m a tía,” said the braided woman, pointing a violin bow like a switchblade at Santo.
“Sorry, ma’am. I mean, Miss Tía.”
The covered woman used a ratchet set to dismantle the book shredder’s metallic organs, while the braided woman, raising an eyebrow, said to Santo: “We understand the mayor gave anyone permission to use these shredding devices and take the new reading law into their own hands. Even young boys like you. Said it was for the good of the community to stop the spread of unholy ideas. Now, is Mayor Pablo Crick your boss?”
“These boys answer to me. And my superior, I guess, answers to Crick. But we don’t know him in person,” Santo said, now in a supplicating tone that echoed his schoolboy days.
“Well,” the braided woman continued, using the violin bow to punctuate her syllables, while her diligent partner piled up oily bolts, gears, and screws from the disemboweled book shredder, “you tell your superior to tell Mayor Crick that the tías of Three Rivers killed this machine. And we’ll keep killing many more. Got that?”
“Yes, lady,” Santo said. “I mean, yes, ma’am. Or tía. Sure thing.”
“Okay. Now hand this young woman back her book. It’s nobody’s business but her own. And every one of you mucha chitos: get lost.”
The patchy natural fog that had arrived with the tías passed like the freight of a ghost train. All that remained of the noxious yellow haze was a slight tail, as its elephantine mass floated sluggishly toward the labyrinthine skeleton of the burned school. Santo and the tricycle boys followed this tail, the large boy sheepishly pedaling away with the mangled shredder’s pathetic, grease-stained shell.
The two tías departed in the opposite direction, whispering to each other in a scandalized yet composed manner that to an outsider could’ve appeared argumentative.
Neftalí stood in a near-catatonic state, clutching her book like a golden ticket in a sandstorm. Proserpina waved a hand before her friend’s unblinking, dilated eyes, snatched away the recovered paperback, and stuck it in her bag. Neftalí returned to the moment with a gasp only after Proserpina snapped her fingers. Not knowing which course to take, they walked behind the two women—the tías, their temporary saviors—as the violin strapped to the tall one’s back looked at them like an excited puppy, validating their decision.
Excerpted from Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores. Published by MCD, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Fernando A. Flores. All rights reserved.
