The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

Those strange words were said in a voice that was both impossibly sharp and velvety. Her soft delivery didn’t help. You can wrap a shotgun in flowers, but that doesn’t make the blast less lethal.

A sad woman is a blade hanging over the world, threatening to fall at any moment.

When you have an accent, people often think you possess the intellect of a fence post.

Funny how parents can take a bullet and smile if they think it’ll keep their kids from worrying or crying.

Le invadió los pensamientos. Se metió en sus sueños and it slowly killed ours.

Your daughter has cancer, but you’re not being productive, motherfucker, so we’re firing you. Welcome to the American Dream.

Bullets don’t believe in remakes or second chances.

If a gun embodies everything that’s wrong with humanity, the internet is a festering mirror that shows us what happens when humanity has been completely lost.

Una vez miras a los ojos vacíos de La Huesuda, todo cambia. La muerte recluta soldados sin anunciarse porque su poder es innegable.

Women are pillars. The only thing that changes is what or whom they hold up. Take a woman out and you’re left with just the spaces between the other elements and a lot of debris.

“You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.”

You can only sleep in a bed full of snakes for so long before one of them decides to sink its fangs into you.

Everything seemed to be a shade of brown or gray. The palette of poverty.

Not all white people have the same level of privilege, but they all share an aversion to being forced to step momentarily into otherness.

Being broke is not a financial status; it’s a state of mind. It breaks you. Every setback pushes you closer to believing you don’t deserve better, that you’re struggling because you deserve it, because you’re worthless.

The worst part of saying you no longer believe in God is knowing that God is still there, listening to you. That’s why the praying sneaks back in when shit goes south. That’s why not believing is just standing on the opposite side of the same room you’ve always been in.

They tell you that with enough willpower and effort a person can change their essence, alter their mood, transform their reality. They tell you positive thinking is a powerful thing, that praying is sometimes the only solution. That’s all bullshit.

sometimes God is your copilot, but it’s the Devil who takes you home.”

It sounded faint and annoyed; the voice of an old woman who’s done screaming at life and wants to be left alone.

The thing about humanity is that it’s always worse than the worst you can imagine. We are base, vile creatures rutting in the muck we’ve created, our eyes looking up at a poisoned sky we’ve populated with ghosts to help us sleep at night, to allow us to come up with reasons to do the things we do.

None of us are as brave as we think we are.

Poverty pounds away at your will and happiness until you’re left with nothing, just stumps.

The distance between a desperate man and a dead man can be a fistful of dollars.

When someone we love is hurting, lying is the easiest thing in the world. So is violence.

Being in the presence of monsters is okay as long as you don’t think too much about what they’re capable of. The scarier thing is when you realize what you’re capable of yourself.

There’s a place beyond pain where feelings are so strong there are no words to describe them.

Revenge is as normal to humans as hunger or thirst. We need it. We crave it whenever we feel someone has done us wrong. But it also makes you do dumb shit.

His hand moved away, but some of its warmth remained, the soft breath of a lazy ghost.

Possibility is a dangerous thing. It’s almost as dangerous as hope. You start asking yourself what needs to be done so that the thing in your head, the thing invading you, becomes real.

Ignorance is dangerous, but knowing takes time and effort, and that’s something many of us don’t have.

The past is the present trapped in a perpetual echo. The present is just an amalgamation of everything that preceded it, molded together with memory. The future is the floating unknown that shifts between nothing and possibility, between death and new beginnings, between uncertainty and hope. We are the knowing, insignificant fragments of flesh trapped in the space between all three, aware that every sentence we start is made up of a silent half waiting in the future and whatever we just said already an irretrievable chunk of the past.

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.

The aftermath of a gunshot is a god cracking his mouth open and letting out a mournful note, a sustained cry that announces the end of a life.

For someone who’s supposed to be all about good, God finds himself involved in some pretty awful shit.

We go through life trying to inflict pain on those who hurt us. In their absence, anyone will do. It’s human nature. To fight against it is to deny ourselves, to turn a blind eye to the ugliness that makes us human, the animal instinct that keeps us going while everything around us burns.

Something brings the fucked citizens of the world together. Suffering makes us family.

there is something universal about poverty that allows us to understand the hardships of those who share it with us.

Sadness and pain are yours to treat as you wish; forget about them for a while and everything will be fine for the duration of your amnesia. But they always return.

True pleasure is not wanting anything. Sure, some things feel great when we do them, but we often take for granted what we have, and sometimes what we have is enough. The laughter of your child, for example, is something no degree of poverty can touch.