The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

“When the fear comes,” she’d said, “pay attention to something else. Anything else. Look at what the person next to you is reading. Read billboards, or count how many red cars go by in the street.”

“No other city in Spain has more crazy people. There aren’t as many in Madrid, and even fewer in Zaragoza; my brother says not in Seville either. It’s only here. Full of crazies on the loose, I don’t know.”

“It’s as if…What I’m about to say is insane. But whatever. 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,

she just wanted that vaguely distant, chemically induced state that disconnected her but still let her live a little. Less and less, but enough.

Twenty years of not enough money and then dying alone;

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.

“People react to trauma and loss in different ways. Some families get obsessed and never stop searching; others act like nothing happened. That doesn’t mean they don’t love their kids.”

“Don’t spend too much time online, it’ll drive you crazy.

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.”