The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

Brian focused on his food like his life depended on it. Like a lot of white people, his whiteness turned into confusion wrapped in shame in the face of blatant racism.

I thought about the impossible green of El Yunque, where my abuela took me a few times. There were small worms that came out of the soil one time after it rained. They blew my mind. Knowing there was an entire universe under my feet was too much for my young brain. I spent weeks thinking about worms underneath the house and the street, worms under the tiny church in town and under the grocery store, their slick bodies burrowing, always burrowing.

In the Caribbean, night falls on you like someone flipped a switch. The sun doesn’t crawl down the sky to hide behind the ocean—it drops like a piece of radioactive fruit an angry kid hit with a stick. In Texas and New Mexico, that’s not the case. In the American Southwest, the sun comes down politely, like it’s letting you know it’s about to get dark. It plants bruised kisses in the sky and often spills orange, pink, red, and purple watercolors on the clouds.