House of Bone and Rain

by Gabino Iglesias

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.

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.

They were women raising kids by themselves, and that brought them together in a way only other women like them would understand.

death and curiosity made good dancing partners.

My abuela always stayed with us during hurricanes. She was convinced bad spirits came with each storm, that the angry winds birthed demons and pulled dark things from the bottom of the ocean.

We fit together. We stuck together. We had each other’s backs. When I was with them, I was less alone. Maybe that’s why I always went along with anything they said.

We said nothing because family is sacred and what happens at home is no one’s business unless you want it to be. But when it happened again a few weeks later, a black eye that time, we paid Richard a visit one Saturday morning when we knew Tavo would be at the beach. Richard never put a hand on Tavo again.

Real family

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

Todas las historias son historias de fantasmas. 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.

I’d once heard someone say that you don’t need a huge army to take over the world; you need three or four crazy motherfuckers who really love you and are willing to do whatever had to be done. These four were my crazy motherfuckers, and the world was ours to take.

Death very rarely feels right.

Cuando la tiranía es ley, la revolución es orden. When tyranny is law, revolution is order. Si el voto cambiara algo, sería ilegal. If voting changed anything, it’d be illegal.

“I already told you I’m with you, man,” I said. I had no idea if my words were meant to comfort Bimbo or to show Paul he was a coward and a lousy friend or to let Xavier’s ghost know I was going to make the assholes who killed him pay for what they had done. I didn’t care. Everything felt out of place.

Lying is one thing, but not telling the truth is a different story.

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

We come into the world a mess, and we go out the same way.

I didn’t know what to say. I was sitting next to a guy who’d put his neck on the line for all of us dozens of times and apparently was also a bloodthirsty monster.

The island became a playground for death, a place of death and angry ghosts, a shuddering house of bone and rain.

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.

“So, Altagracia prays to angels and saints from different religions?” “We all do, man. Puerto Ricans. Dominicans. Cubans. Voodoo. Santería. Palo. Trust me, man, everything you’ve ever heard is true. God. Elegguá. Shiva. Whatever. You can pray to whoever has the tools to help you out.”

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.

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

colonialism is like being the child of a neglectful parent.

Hurricanes feel like a personal attack because they take away things like your power or your ability to move around or go to the places you want to go to, but they also feel like a collective attack.

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.

Fuck. We were here for all the wrong reasons, and it was too late to call it quits.

He’d never told anyone. He’d kept his mouth shut and never mentioned it even in passing. My brother had carried my secret like it was his own. I’d do the same.

I wanted to believe in Bimbo more than I had ever wanted to believe in anything else in my whole life.

Hearing about something awful and seeing it with your own eyes are two of the most different things in the world.

Everything in life has a fucking price.

Welcome to amateur hour. We were all fucking idiots. The fact that only one of us had died was surprising. We were winging it on a level of the streets where people died every day for less than what we’d done so far.

It’s crazy to see the things getting hurt can make you wish for.

All stories are ghost stories, and some stories turn us into ghosts.

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

Nothing will give you a sense of freedom like looking at the ocean, and nothing will make you feel more landlocked than knowing you’re stuck on a tiny speck of green surrounded by infinite blue.