Fiction · New Texas 2021
Coffee Port Road
A high-school painter in the Rio Grande Valley, an older rival he admires, her reckless boyfriend, and a stretch of road driven at midnight with the lights off.
About the piece
The narrator is Ramon again, now a sophomore at Porter High, where a painting of his father selling limes has made him a minor celebrity in the art room. That brings him into the orbit of Julia, the senior who had held the top prize before him, and of Reeser, her boyfriend, a metalhead with a black Monte Carlo and a habit of running Coffee Port Road at midnight in the wrong lane with the headlights off.
The story is about friendship between two young artists who want different things from a canvas, about what one of them gives up so the other can leave for art school, and about a crash on a caliche-shouldered road that the title has been pointing to from the first sentence. It closes with the narrator's father on the subject of variables, and a small roadside memorial.
The piece was posted in September 2020 and tagged for the 2021 issue. It continues the sequence begun in Ports of Entry and The Limes.
The author
Rudy Ruiz is a Texas-born writer whose story collection Seven for the Revolution (2014) won four International Latino Book Awards. His novels include The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez (Blackstone, 2020), Valley of Shadows and The Border Between Us. He holds degrees from Harvard University.
Sources
First published October 22, 2026. On how this journal is rebuilt and sourced, see the about page.