House of Bone and Rain

by Gabino Iglesias

His anger was like a leech, always looking for something or someone to attach itself to. He was always the first to throw a punch,

soul shrivel and die a slow, agonizing death.

You don’t have to stay where you’re born. People aren’t trees. We can move around.

Still, they were outsiders, and that had been enough to make them brothers.

She was a collection of angles under big brown eyes.

reminders of how the Spaniards had taken over and forced their God, laws, architecture, and language down the country’s throat.

Clubs always remind me that we’re all sad animals looking for something to lift us out of the mud we lived in and make us think being alive was worth it.

The brain fog in my skull wasn’t enough to cover what had gone down a few hours earlier, and the ugliness peeked through it like a shark’s fin protruding from the muddy waters of my brain.

she jumped out of her seventh-floor balcony, and the pavement in the parking lot below didn’t give a flying fuck about her youth or good looks or the possibility that I had a crush on her that was as bad as the one she had on Tavo, or the fact that maybe life had a few sweet surprises in store for her.

Rivers would turn to morgues, carrying folks away,

Sometimes the only thing holding a friendship together is the stuff you don’t say.

someone willing to look down on us while literally holding a fistful of warm shit.

And sometimes we make excuses for the people we love just so we can allow ourselves to keep loving them.

Whatever it is that’s doing the hurting, it always hurts the poorest folks the most.

We work hard to bring good into the world because evil always comes by itself.

the darker things get, the faster people turn to booze to keep the demons at bay… or to invite them to dance.

pain did things like that to people: harden them where they’d been soft, make them hurt in places where laughter used to live.

I once heard someone say that we’re not afraid of being alone in the dark; we’re afraid of not being alone in the dark,

The smell of the ocean felt too big for my nose.