Dali-Roo’s troubles began in the last year of the drought that spanned the millennium and sucked the green from the countryside.

So begins our short story offering of the week, “Aibo or Love at First Sight” by Eleanor Bluestein, winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.

Because of the drought, Dali-Roo trades farm work for factory work, riding off on his motorbike each morning to the Sony plant and leaving his ox to stand idly on the cracked earth of his front yard.

As if this forced life change wasn’t bad enough, Dali-Roo goes on to make the awful discovery that he’s a thief. “[P]owerless even though he understood he was gambling his family’s future, even though he believed that a thief in this life returns as a worm in the next.”

This collection of stories, Tea & Other Ayama Na Tales (BkMk Press, 978-1-886157-64-4), takes place in a small country in South East Asia. Like many small countries of the day, it struggles with peace after war and returning to the old versus embracing the new. What is different is that this particular country does not physically exist. Yet Bluestein’s canny storytelling, her perfectly imagined dialogue, her vibrant characters, both native and foreign, create a place familiar, intimate, and utterly believable. Tea & Other Ayama Na Tales is a wry and thoughtful reckoning of the human condition.

Eleanor Bluestein’s work appears in the GSU Review (Georgia State University) and other magazines. She lives in La Jolla, California, with her husband. For thirteen years, she co-edited a magazine called Crawl Out Your Window featuring the work of local writers and photographers. Tea & Other Ayama Na Tales is her first book.