House of Bone and Rain

by Gabino Iglesias

It’s normal for people to report the death of a parent. Old age. Cancer. A heart attack. Whatever. Old people die and we expect it, accept it even. It’s normal. Murder is different. Murder is a monster that chews up whatever expectations you had regarding death and spits them in your face. Murder is an attack on someone’s life, yes, but also an attack on those left behind.

Death swallows words, or at least shows you how fucking useless they are.

When my pops died, when I was ten, I didn’t want to be home, because he haunted every corner of it. He’d hung every picture on our walls. The kitchen table smelled like his aftershave. He’d painted my room. He was everywhere,

Men are weird when it comes to love, but sometimes a You good, man? on the phone is as good as I love you, brother.

Losing my father had broken me and built back a strange version of the kid I’d been.

Perhaps one of the most painful things about growing up is realizing that rather than go away, the things you don’t talk about lurk in dark corners and grow.

Funny how sometimes you can’t wait to get the hell out of a place—only to miss it like crazy once you do.

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

“You talk so much shit you should call your mouth your asshole, P,” said Bimbo

The chickens on the top branch shit on the chickens at the bottom, but they’re all chickens.

You can fool yourself into thinking bad things will stay away if you don’t talk about them, and we were all experts at doing just that. Hablar del diablo lo hace venir porque decir las cosas las hace nacer. Talking about the Devil makes him come because saying things brings them to life.

the Spanish Is the same sentence as the English one about the devil

Remembering María made me think of how some people exist in the periphery of your universe without ever taking center stage. María had been like that, one of my best friends’ moms and a woman I saw regularly and who basically took me in for a while, but she’d never been at the center of my life the way her son was.

The silence that followed Bimbo’s words was so dark and deep I was sure there was something awful living inside it.

a moon so full Altagracia had no doubt it was pregnant with nightmares.

Altagracia exhaled another plume of smoke through the metallic window slats and thought about turning into a ghost, a silent entity floating through the world, safe from the dangerous thing that lived in all men and unafraid of the nightmares she knew hid inside the moon.

There’s that easy silence that often crops up when friends spend a lot of time together, but this wasn’t it. This was like the silence in the car outside El Paraíso Asia, a kind of silence in which something lurked.

The sound of the bass was a massive heartbeat that gave the street life. I could feel it shuddering through my chest.

All stories are ghost stories.

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.

They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. If that’s true, Bimbo’s soul had taken a vacation.

The rain was a living thing right outside the garage, a thing determined to drown the world.

The images kept flashing in my mind, and every time they did, my brain tried to tell me it wasn’t real, that I had imagined it all. Sometimes lying to ourselves is the only survival mechanism that makes sense.

Sometimes life’s sense of humor is like a knife to the heart.

In front of us, impossibly blue, was the Atlantic Ocean, teasing us with the vast, unreachable world that existed on the other side of it.

Strange how ruined lives can sometimes effortlessly dish out salvation.

Death is death, but when the particulars are vague, it’s easier to deal with as a concept, to comprehend, to stash away somewhere between “everyone dies” and “shit happens.”

We’re surrounded by sharks even when we’re on land.”

For people who cry regularly, it can be a way of exorcising small demons, a way to cope with the ugliness of the world. For those who bottle things up, tears always feel like blades running down your face.

The worst thing about smart women is that they smell the stupidity on everyone else.

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

Nothing will fuck with your balance—and your plans—faster than punching air with all you’ve got.

Some words are so powerful, so true, that they haunt you forever.

Outside, the wind howled as if it wanted to devour the world.

They say ignorance is bliss, but that doesn’t apply to times when not knowing what’s going to happen means you could end up staining a sidewalk with your blood.

Sometimes lost love is like a disease that sticks around quietly and flares up from time to time, making the world a bit dull and rekindling the flame of that fucking pain that refuses to go away.

A hurricane’s winds, especially a Category 5 hurricane’s winds, are awful, but the wounded silence you find when the storm is over is almost worse. I stood there and listened. I wanted to hear neighbors yelling or something, but even the animals were silent, as if the previous vicious attack had driven fear into their tiny bones and they were scared of making a sound and bringing back whatever the fuck that thing had been that had destroyed everything around them.

Category 5 hurricanes pummel cement and mess up paint, but they obliterate wooden homes. Whatever it is that’s doing the hurting, it always hurts the poorest folks the most.

The aftermath of a hurricane always drives silence into you, as if instead of being in the world, you’re inside a punished chapel, a place where uttering a single word would be akin to screaming an insult.

The heat was awful. It stuck to my skin as if it were trying to strangle me.

Some stories are like really cold nights in that they seem to suck all the sound out of the air.

Old women are often right about the most important things in life… and in death.

In life, we can be surprised both by the stupidity of our fellow humans or by the way they seem to have an understanding that lets them know your innermost thoughts, your darkest desires, your deepest pain.

Nothing could be done. Death had visited them and ripped them in half and no one in the world could do anything to make it better.

Everything in life was always about trying, failing, and trying again until you got it right or died trying,

“How much—?” “No payment,” said the woman. “You’ve lost enough to know the most important things can’t be bought with money.”

There’s something strange about holding a thing that can obliterate a life in a second. Having the gun in my hand scared me and also made me feel a bit better;

The beating of my heart became so loud all the sounds of the Caribbean night around me faded into the background.

They say anger is poison to your soul, but I think it feeds other parts of you. It can be like gasoline for your soul, but also like cocaine for your spirit.

In the aftermath of a hurricane, waiting becomes a state of mind, and time loses its meaning.

Natalia mistook my silence for an invitation to continue, as if my lack of words meant I wanted more of hers.