The Consequences, a new collection of short stories by Manuel Muñoz set mostly around Fresno in the 1980s, features characters whose lives are precarious in different ways. They’re often queer and sometimes unsure of their identities. Many are Mexican migrants looking for work. But in one way or another, all are living on society’s tattered fringes. 

In one story, a teenage girl, who just had a baby with her controlling and dumb teen  boyfriend, lives with her mother in Section 8 housing in a dusty agricultural town outside Fresno. The place is populated by migrants eking out a living. Her mother thinks that everyone in the building is running a scam to stay in cheap housing. But Nela knows better. Her neighbors working under the table at dusty, marginal jobs, trying to stay ahead of trouble. “It was a savvy that Nela understood now, with the baby in her arms, and it made her sad for knowing it, for having grown into wishing for something different.”

This painful awareness—of knowing too much and wishing for something different—is the tie that binds the characters in this collection. Some lead middle-class lives: a bored gay bureaucrat drinks too much as his wealthier boyfriend flirts the night away, a middle-class family is torn apart by the closeted husband’s movie-theater handjobs. Others are poor or economically precarious. Whether they are gay or straight, looking for work or for lost lovers, Muñoz’s characters are on the margins. The slightest misfortune could topple them into a yawning void of exile, death, or despair. 

What is striking is how often the smallest decision can spiral out of control—not in an operatic, Coen Brothers sense, but in a series of unravelings. In “The Pink House At The End of The Street on the Other Side of Town,” Eliseo, a delicately built migrant worker, hurts his ankle in the fields. With the other workers, he is staying at the home of Poldo, a fellow traveler who is both a boss and a migrant. He is and is not one of them. He gets ahead by traveling on the backs of others. Yet he is also trying to survive, just like Eliseo. 

Staying back from work, Eliseo goes shopping in town with Poldo’s wife. Why he goes is unclear—perhaps he’s bored or wants a friend or simply enjoys shopping. Some of the men hint that it is a feminine thing to do. But contradictorily, according to the masculine and possessive codes of this place and time, the excursion equates to cuckoldry. 

The action has fierce consequences for the wife, whom the men hear being beaten. The abuse is accepted without question. Such is life in a precarious marriage to a man with a temper who lives by an archaic code. Besides, the men depend on Poldo. He provides them with work and a place to stay. His power is shown again the next day, when immigration agents come to the fields. He has obviously called in a favor. Instead of chasing everyone, the agents just take Eliseo. “‘And that’s how everyone knew Eliseo wasn’t anyone’s primo or anyone’s friend,’ one of the men later remarked. ‘Because no one ever missed him. No one ever called looking.’”

That’s how it goes in Muñoz’s stories. Some people just disappear completely, swirl down the drain, disintegrate into memory and then into the light dust of the forgotten. 

The title story is among the most harrowing. In it, a bored gay Fresno bureaucrat named Mark, whose life consists mostly of watching movies at night with his mother, enters a romance with a younger man he meets on a weekend jaunt to Los Angeles. To his surprise, Teddy—born Teodoro, he uses an Anglicized name—moves to Fresno and truly seems to want to be there. 

Mark never quite trusts the gesture. He doesn’t get why this handsome, happy man wants to be with him, of all people. Mark pushes Teddy away, and Teddy returns to his family in Mathis, on the Texas Gulf Coast, a place of “skinny streets and too many churches” that he tried to escape—and in fact did escape, before Mark’s insecurities drove him back. 

But why must Teddy go back to the bigoted hellscape of Mathis? Because he is dying. He has AIDS—it is never called that, not then, at the beginning of the epidemic—and his family are the only people he has left. 

Wracked by guilt and regret, Mark somehow finds the flyspeck town. He calls, and you can feel the grinding weight of the rotary phone. He drives through dark American fields, through fog and deserts, through ancient lands bisected by highways and dotted with truck stops. He arrives in time for the funeral, a small Catholic service, where Teddy’s family weeps. “Mark turned away from them, from the quiet, from the pleading. He left the door open to continue listening and sank to the low steps when the silence only grew. He began to weep. He hadn’t loved Teddy and yet now he did. He deserved this feeling.”

It’s easy to agree with Mark, to think that we deserve to feel the hurt we’ve caused others. But that’s not really fair. Mark made decisions and those were tragic. But Mark’s actions, and indeed, his concept of consequence, were forged under cruel circumstances: the precarity of migrants, who are both needed and rejected, the ostracism of the queer community, and the legacy of the border, that deadly artifice. They are bound by decisions made by people who aren’t concerned with how they tumble down into the lives of people they’ll never meet. 

Muñoz is a gifted writer and a keen observer of the burdens shouldered by those who live on the margins, where it’s easy to topple out of sight, fall off the map, or disappear completely. There are consequences to actions, yes, but for such people, those consequences are heavier and more difficult to bear. As far as power is concerned, the lives of people on the margins don’t matter. They are inconsequential.

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Manuel Muñoz is the author of two previous collections and a novel. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and three O. Henry Awards, and his work has appeared in Best American Short Stories. A native of Dinuba, California, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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Brian O’Neill is an independent writer out of Chicago focusing on books, international politics, and the Great Lakes. He blogs infrequently at shootingirrelevance.com, and can be found tweeting on books, politics, and baseball @oneillofchicago.