“This month, things are different. I am the team leader for the first time. We stay in the airport hotel, and I can still hear the roars of rising planes, the concussions of landings, even though, for the moment, I am still. I call home. My mother announces she has been diagnosed with cancer. That night, I dream of giant, hulking, metal-and-silicon mainframes plugged into the ocean sand like beached whales. The mainframes fizzle and crackle with sparks as we bucket water over their metal shells. We know we cannot save them, their invisible information, their electric memory, but we try.”

Read the rest of this essay here:

http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/almendras/