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Dogs tame easier than people. It is why there will always be yanquis trying to convince you you’re a mutt instead of a man.
“What do you think our fate will be in this life—or the next, for that matter—now that we have stolen a god from the river?”
Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.
This man was absolutely full of shit. But he’d also called me a bold spirit. And that was a damn sight better than being called Wheezy.
We all cleaned our plates despite Vera’s culinary deficiencies, which told me more about my new housemates than their posters in the Menagerie ever could. You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.
“Good English don’t build cities,” I said curtly. “Good smithies do.”
“Emmett’s opinion don’t matter on account o’ his oddity being the gigantic stick up his arse,” Vera deadpanned.
I’d lost track of all the times I had melted myself down just to recast myself as someone with a slightly better shot at belonging someplace, and here I was being offered the brass ring, no new skills required.
He sat up straight as a mast the moment I’d said the mermaid had spoken to me in Spanish. If he didn’t speak it himself, then he surely understood it, because when he slowly turned back to me, the acid was missing from his expression, replaced by a blend of shock and grief so raw and open—and human—that my stomach clenched at the sight of it.
“It is no wonder you cried out,” I breathed. “I cannot imagine losing your liberty and your mother in the same breath. I am so very sorry.”
“To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it.”
One look at him and you had to wonder if the Bible had been selling God short this whole time.
what else can I do in this cage with so costly a gift as Benigno’s song except place it in my heart beside the moon?
Your kind worships your individuality, injuring yourselves in the delusion of being separate from each other and the world,”
Perhaps the Currents brought us here because they knew we would meet.” My face flushed. “Why do you say that?” He looked pityingly up at me through the iron bars. “Because we are both caged.”
And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
“Just because she looks at you does not mean she sees you,” Río said with all the steadiness I couldn’t muster myself. “Otherwise, she would not have taken what you did not offer.”
“’Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” “Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”
“If you heard us talk, then you know he’s not a thing,” I said quietly.
“You’re just another back-seat bully who can’t stand bein’ so goddamn scared all the time, so you made up a version of me you could blame for all the bullshit you can’t fix.
“I love him,” I repeated. “And he loves me. And I don’t care if that makes me the wrong kind of freak.
Spanish has so many words for declaring love, and I needed to use them all before it was too late.
“I don’t care if it’s a postcard, a telegram, or a goddamned message in a bottle, you find a way to tell me you two made it out alive. And Benny . . .” His large hand wrapped around my bicep and squeezed. “I believe you can lift two thousand pounds.”
