STORY INDEX
✨ Tales by Ernesto Beckford
Welcome. These stories are fragments of a larger voice—quiet, layered, and shaped by the lives I’ve lived and imagined. Some rise from memory, others from dreams, and a few from moments overheard or long carried inside. You may catch traces of Buenos Aires, queer identity, family inheritance, and the uncertain beauty of growing older. They are short. They are meant to be read slowly. I hope one of them lingers.
A note about my work:
My stories and poems often echo moments from my life, but they are not diaries. They are fiction—woven from memory, imagination, and intuition. Real experiences inform them, but they are meant to stand as stories, not transcripts of my days. The narrator may sound like me, but they are not necessarily me.
Chat with Mom and Dad
In this poem, memory returns in fragments—sweetness and silence, punishments and longing. A child’s mute resistance, a mother’s anxious gesture, a father’s belt, and the hush that follows loss: together they form a lyrical conversation with parents long gone, both loved and resented, never fully forgiven.
Story Themes
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Childhood silence and dyslexia
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Sweetness of memory alongside harshness of discipline
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Parents, inheritance of wounds and tenderness
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The absence left after parents are gone
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Reconciling love, resentment, and memory
Three Stars for a Prayer Book
While sorting through family keepsakes, a nearly forgotten prayer book resurfaces—revealing a grandmother’s quiet presence, a mother’s pointed gesture, and the subtle weight of what we inherit without asking.
Story Themes
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Unwanted heirlooms and second-tier inheritance
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Family distance and quiet legacies
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Mother, grandmothers, and what’s passed down
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The residue of objects long kept
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Memory trigged by physical touch
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Penciled names, emotional weight
The Prophecy
Set in Buenos Aries, the Prophecy explores what we inherit emotionally -- from silence, memory, and ritual. It is a quiet reckoning with the past, told with intimacy and reverence.
Story Themes
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Emotional inheritance
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Prophecy and maternal lineage
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Return and memory
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Queer identity in traditional spaces
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Buenos Aires as remembered home
Skyscrapers
Returning to Buenos Aires, Eduardo finds a city transformed — and must confront the fading outlines of childhood, family change, and the vertical rise of memory.
Story Themes
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Returning to one's homeland
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Childhood memory and dislocation
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Family silence and emotional distance
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Argentina in economic and cultural flux
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Nostalgia and the limits of memory
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Eavesdropped Conversations
From a table at a restaurant cafe, a narrator listens to the fragments of others’ lives — tender, broken, and absurd — while reflecting on his own place in the fragile human chorus.
Story Themes
• Urban solitude and accidental intimacy
• Listening as inheritance and ritual
• Aging bodies, undiminished spirit
• Shared sorrow and brief companionship
• Art as consolation and connection
• New York as both setting and character
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