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“When a shite whistle’s banjaxed, means something spooky’s afoot!”
Are you even speaking English???
All those little whispers they think I can’t hear—I can tell they’re a bit threatened by our new exhibit.
everyone knows you been sweet on Benny ever since you shared a backseat in the coach!”
What for you need to suspect Benny?”
“He ain’t one of us,” Emmett said without missing a beat.
“You’re all so eager to trust this wisenheimer just ’cause he speaks E...
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Morgan finds out how much more of it he can keep with only a merman and a Porto Rican scab to pay for?”
Whoa. You’re a nasty dog
“I ain’t a scab,”
a dope you can talk about like I ain’t in the room!
“Not even a two-bit, peeled-potato, grousing come...
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Timmy giggled “Peeled potato!” into his milk,
You said everyone in this house was family, and I believed it.
Jesus, maybe I am a dope.”
“Lulu gave Emmett a talking-to like she ain’t never gave Timmy.
“If you knew him better—” “No thanks.”
“I know all I need to know about that paranoid pendejo.”
Manhattan’s hep,
Buen provecho.”
Soy un extranjero.”
“Perhaps you should seek a better harmony.”
“What’s a ‘harmony’?”
Harmony’ is how we refer to our family groups.”
much better ring to it than ‘a school of fish’ or ‘a murder of crows.’”
A murder of crows’?”
“Drag me on a reef, but humans ...
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“Tití Luz foresaw me on an island of loneliness and pain without her,”
she made me promise to follow a different path to liberation in New York.
once she was gone, the person I was disapp...
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I guess I came here to ...
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There is genius in the way Benigno softens bleakness with humor.
guayabera.
Left both his eyes in mourning,
What?
“Emmett’s not a bad guy, Benny.
He’s just been broken in more places than his leg,
sometimes it’s hard for him to understand that the whole world ain’t tryi...
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“You look a good deal larger than that mermaid that tried to capsize us when I was young.
I know everything about you. I’ve collected lore from every region
malas mañas
he ate like a juí bird,
telling me there was no place in an independent Puerto Rico”—I
for a nameless queer like me.”
Manos a Dios,
I thought my whole body might dissolve through the grill from shame.
“What ridiculous savagery,”
“would make humans spurn a person for something so . . . so . . . ordinary?”
“¿Río?” “¿Qué?” “Won’t you give me your name?”
“No.” “Why?” I whispered.
“For the same reason you could not confirm aloud what Eli and Emmett already knew about you.”
That’s actually not the same thing and stupid
unimaginable cruelty from the humans who bound their own kind in chains and filled the hulls of their creaking vessels to bursting with fledglings and the grown.
When in desperation these prisoners would cast themselves to the sea, our kind laid their bodies to rest
