Piano is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she explores the personal histories and cultural tensions that generate violence between two men while they are playing an ostensibly innocent game of dominoes in Agüeros's short story.

"Dominoes," a short story written by New York author Jack Agüeros, investigates the intricate relations and personal histories of four Latino men playing dominoes on a neighborhood street in New York one summer day. The men, Ebarito, Paco, Tito, and Wilson, know each other almost too well, and it is the tension that results from their familiarity during an ostensibly innocent game of dominoes that engenders the violence at the end of the story. By using the game of dominoes as both a setting for the story and its central metaphor, Agüeros creates a complex world...