Mar 22, 2019
How to Move Through the Dark
The day the women left, Clary followed her mother to the water’s edge. She would’ve followed her under, too, if the other daughters hadn’t been there to hold her back.
The day the women left, Clary followed her mother to the water’s edge. She would’ve followed her under, too, if the other daughters hadn’t been there to hold her back.
There are times you have legs. Mostly, you do not. You smile with teeth grown sharp from gnawing at chains that refuse to release.
Floating on her back, she imagines what’ll happen if she starts bleeding right then and there.
On this train ride back to his beginnings, Shettima’s mind overtook the train to another river in his memory, a river long and meandering as his days.
I started to wonder how the hell she’d found me after all these years, but I was starting to realize that any chicken with the amount of determination I was seeing now would hardly be deterred from tracking me down.
She has taken back a vintage Pac Man pinball machine, gold teeth, and hair extensions. She has taken back virginity and faith in God. But can she take something back from the shadow of a woman she loved?
Of course there was no best. Of course they were the same. I wanted to win in any case.
When it was over, Myrrh clapped as much for their own feat of love as for their partner’s artistic accomplishment. They were proud and pleased—and then came the man who sang “The Music of the Night.”
She knew this could happen. It was, after all, the way things were. The promise of Rekha’s warmth buried it.
Didn’t they get it? She was a pitch pine. She would win in the end.
Her species procreates through a sacred sermonic skin grafting ritual, but the idea of sex with a teenage human male she found truly grotesque.
“Devilish,” said all of Kharagpur, after the Rosarios and their pig walked in the annual parade. “No pig’s supposed to jump backwards. Or laugh.”
You wanted us to have a baby. I wanted your baby, and also for all the moths in the house to die.
The Big was proof that there was a God, and proof that God did not exist.
There were a number of things that shaped who Simra was. The most important was that she knew how to love a rabbit.
Alfonzo looked aghast, like they were the two most naïve immigrants in the history of New York. “ICE is preparing to break through that door with guns and night vision goggles, maybe even dogs, and you’re worried about the breeze?”
Tony had only gone on, like, seven dates with Josefín and the jodona was already lounging on Magdalena’s couch.
If you’re having a good time it usually means you’re having a bad time, I think. So the opposite has got to be true also.
Look at the ocean, they say. Every road will flood. You will be trapped. Your house will be destroyed. Look at it swell. I’m staying, I say.
Everything started when we were thirteen—young and learning to love the womanhood that our mothers forced upon us.
