The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

It’s not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person, but a girl can’t be desperate and reasonable at the same time.

I had to definitively stop thinking in terms of what was possible and what wasn’t.

Clearly, carrying a dead baby around everywhere I went had affected my mind.

“Damn old ghetto son of a bitch,” said Mom, and she started to cry.

is that... is that the Dad??? wait what?? im confused 😭

because she was so, so very afraid to jump.

this one is just so sad

Sometimes I think the crazies aren’t people, they’re not real. They’re like incarnations of the city’s madness, like escape valves. If they weren’t here, we’d all kill each other or die of stress,

it was so difficult that she no longer answered the phone and barely replied to emails and they would just have to deal with it;

funny, that's exactly how i've been for the past 3 years

she had nothing more to talk about or dig up, she just wanted that vaguely distant, chemically induced state that disconnected her but still let her live a little. Less and less, but enough.

Sometimes she even brought a book to the bar, and that attracted some glances, but no one had ever bothered to ask what she was reading. With a book, she could tune out the conversations of the other office workers, which didn’t interest her at all.

Because nothing bad ever happened to goddesses, not even when they were so sad and streetwise.

It was the first time Graciela had seen a moribund person walking, a person whose mind didn’t register the death of the body. She’d been shocked.

The Japanese believe that after people die, their souls go to a place that has, so to speak, limited space. And when all the places are taken, when there’s no room for any more souls, they’re going to start coming back to this world. And that return heralds the beginning of the end of the world, really.”

“In summer we’ll come down.”