Nineteen stories, one-hundred seventy-four pages: there is no settling in Tomás Downey’s book of short stories, Diving Board, translated by Sarah Moses. Five pages are allotted for a character to grow a live horse from a seed and then watch it crumble; eight pages for the story of a father who takes his daughter to the pool where she climbs onto the diving board, gets a running start, jumps, and then seemingly vanishes from existence; fifteen pages contain a haunting so pervasive that the woman this ghost left behind falls ill and is unable to conceive a child with her new partner. There is no time or space to get comfortable before tipping over into the next uneasy scenario with a force that takes hold of the reader and compels them onward so that all the stories can be devoured in the course of a single night.

Similarly, there are no resolutions. There is only the strange, the uncanny, the wondering; possibilities slashed open and then left gaping like a wound. Three sisters make a blood sacrifice, a wish, burn the carcass of a piglet to set their own home aflame. A woman confusing a soap opera for reality attempts to locate the cemetery in which a boy on TV is buried. When a woman’s wild lover settles to be more docile, she abandons him in the middle of vast grasslands. No answers for us, none for the translator.

A translator’s task is to understand, to form the most intimate connection with the text, including the physical words, the unspoken, the space between and around all the symbols on a page. It should be said that Sarah Moses is no stranger to the disturbing depths of existence. She is the translator of Agustina Bazterrica’s body of work, notably the horrifying Tender is the Flesh. Once more, Moses probes the limits of language to bring the kind of stories to an English-speaking audience where the words all align, but the subject matter looms as neigh unexplainable. Here in Downey’s first work translated into English, one must ask what’s more important: what’s there, or what isn’t? And who gets to decide that?

With an impressive economy of language rendered in English, Downey provides only the bare bones scaffolding required to follow along in each story where every detail proves itself as necessary. In “Alejo”, the schoolboy has a disturbing dream of his classmate Inés, notices her white sleeves rolled above her elbows, the diagram of the vulnerable body on the board, all so that later he can use his stolen scalpel to slice deep into her inner elbow. The schoolboy gorges himself on the blood of girlhood.