The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

You can wrap a shotgun in flowers, but that doesn’t make the blast less lethal.

People fear being someone else’s hope. I understood her, but I wanted her to be our hope.

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.

She said she was sorry to hear about Anita’s health and then said she regretted to inform me they had to let me go because I’d used up all my sick days, personal days, PTO, and then shattered every absenteeism record in the company. I hung up. Your daughter has cancer, but you’re not being productive, motherfucker, so we’re firing you. Welcome to the American Dream.

There is something unsettling about how we’re given life and then spend a large part of it trying to engineer better ways of killing others.

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.

Hiding like this reminded me of playing hide-and-seek with Anita. Children never really hide. They think they can’t be seen if they hide their faces or head. We laugh at that. We find it cute. It’s not. All grown-ups do the same shit. We’re in plain sight, but we hide because we’re using a mask, hiding our real faces from the world.

Most important, we blamed each other, and that filled us with a kind of loathing that was as strong as the love we had for our dead daughter.

No one should witness the death of an angel.

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.

“Don’t come looking for me,” read the last line of the note. “The thing that held us together is now food for the worms.”

The thought of having to interact with other people at a job made my skin crawl.

Maybe the angels she saw would become real if I filled my veins with smack. Maybe heroin would help me see Anita again. Maybe the right combination of drugs would make the world melt.

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

They had me less than a year later, a little brown kid with veins packed with old ghosts, colonization, pain, desperation, and whatever else they were both running away from.

The thing about poverty is that it obliterates geography; poor people have the same haunted look all across the world.

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

The world watched it happen online and on TV and forgot about it the day after it ended because the idiot at the White House said something more stupid than whatever stupid thing he had said before.

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.

Sometimes things go wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it. And yet, we mostly refuse to give up. Instead, we invent gods to help us push forward. Pain invades us and we find reasons to carry on. Death approaches, bony arms outstretched, and we fight it with that inexplicable desire to keep living.

The majority of people always want to think life is worth living, that we must do everything in our power to keep going, to stay alive. They don’t grasp that the value of their life is much lower than they imagine.

The value of your life is zilch to most people. That’s why they sell you food that will kill you. That’s why they put poison in the water and don’t care if you get cancer. That’s why they allow you to rely on our shitty health system and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage based on a ridiculously long list of preexisting conditions, one of which is probably being alive.

Sometimes, I think faith is like a disease in our genes, something we can’t escape despite knowing we should. However, I couldn’t help but feel that what had happened, and my response to it, meant there was someone looking out for me.

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

“What’s wrong, gabacho? Scared that you’ll get too close to God and he won’t turn out to be White Jesus?”

The thing about humanity is that it’s always worse than the worst you can imagine.

Maybe the money would mean a second chance. What people with money don’t understand is that most poor people’s problems can be solved with money. There are problems that won’t go away no matter how many bills you throw at them, but for people like me, for folks whose nightmares have names like hunger and eviction, money is a wonderful thing that can make tribulations disappear in a matter of seconds.

Long drives have their own language, their own rhythm, their own reality. They always trigger memories for me.

The middle of nowhere is incredibly consistent in terms of being unremarkable.

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

Life is what happens between the things we think we know and the things we learn about too late to do anything about it.

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

Whoever said it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was probably an asshole who never lost anything they actually loved.

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.

It’s easy to ignore bad shit when you have a full belly, you know what I’m saying?

His eyes had that glazed-over look some people get when their bodies are left in the present but their minds go back in time.

Fear is like steroids for stupidity.

“When you come across these things, you have two options. Option one is to try to make things make sense. This is what most people do. They experience something and they try to mold the event to their experiences, to understand what happened using the filter of what they already know. This never works. It only leads to confusion and frustration, yes? The second option is to accept that strange things happen, that the impossible sometimes is real. When you accept it, you can move on with your life. Our ancestors invented gods for this reason and they were happier because of it.”

I was thinking about getting a tiger or a lion, something strong with a powerful mouth that could eat whoever fucked with me, but then I watched a documentary with my daughter and changed my mind. The documentary talked about how crocodiles have a…serum in their blood that helps them fight off infection. They get hurt, but they never get sick. You can cut one with a machete, drop him back into that nasty water full of shit, and he won’t develop an infection. I loved that about them. Do you know why, Brian? Because I am like these crocodiles; I’m always swimming. I swim in the darkness, surrounded by shit, but I never get sick.

Men often complain about women because they know how to hurt us with words. We do the same. I think the only reason we complain about women is because they do it better.

Possibility is a dangerous thing. It’s almost as dangerous as hope.

Maybe he was trying to say “I love you” but couldn’t because masculinity is weak like that and showing we love someone somehow makes us less manly.

Guilt is a painful thing, and humans have a talent for finding ways of blaming things on others to steer clear of it.

We go back to our native tongue for important things. We return to our native tongue to speak of our mothers, the food of our childhood. We return to our native tongue to ask for forgiveness and to pray. I know Melisa would read a Sorry and understand it, maybe even accept it, but she would feel a Perdón in her heart.

Outside, the night was pregnant with the possibility of the wretched earth, with secret agendas and promises of death, but they were all quiet, the way all things are before they actually arrive. I paid attention to what the silence was whispering to me.

I also remembered the word for bleeding to death: exsanguination. I had never used it, but I had learned it because being a brown guy with an accent is hard and knowing fancy words helps. Plus, exsanguination is a better word than histologic. Exsanguination sounds like a dark ritual or a death-metal band. Histologic sounds like the history of logic, and there is no logic in this world.

My mother was a ghost that haunted me in life. In death, she was sometimes a memory so sweet it drowned out everything else, but other times she was a reminder of how addiction can turn angels into rotting demons.

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.

Too many coincidences often mean there is no coincidence at all.