The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

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.

When your child is healthy, you think of sick children and feel like crying, like helping. When your child is sick, you don’t give a shit about other children.

Oh, and the incidence of leukemia is higher among Hispanics. Even awful diseases are fucking racist.

You don’t know horror until you’ve spent a few hours inside a hospital looking at the fitful sleep of a loved one who is being taken from you.

God always takes from those who have nothing to give, and I’m tired of it.”

We’ve been strangling and beating each other with rocks and sticks since we stopped dragging our knuckles and swinging from branches. Guns are the natural next step.

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.

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 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.

El valor de tu vida es lo que vale el segundo en que alguien aprieta el gatillo, el segundo en que alguien pone toda su ira en su mano y te clava un cuchillo.

You know, because 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.

Fuck. I had picked the worst time to start paying attention.

lived for glimpses of towns past their expiration date where cracks, ghosts, and memories outnumber residents. That’s the real America. The soul of this country lives in the gap-toothed smiles of gas station cashiers, the matted fur of small-town dogs, the buzzing of neon signs in small dives where a layer of dust covers every surface, the shattered spirit of drive-through employees in nowhere towns, the weird smells and carpet stains in cheap motels where the windows look out at empty parking lots.

I loved nameless diners and Waffle Houses with dirty cutlery where the server had a gold tooth that outshined most people’s souls.

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

The pinche frontera crossed us first, pendejo, so don’t ever send anyone back anywhere. This land isn’t yours; this place is ours. Esta no es tu pinche casa. Next time your little white supremacist bullshit pops into your head, remember your family came here on a fucking boat not that long ago.

He was echoing my thoughts: a silent ally isn’t a thing.

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.

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.

We were there to get a vehicle full of guns and somehow Brian ended up getting a job offer and I was called an undocumented immigrant. That’s how systemic racism works. It was so dumb it was almost funny. It was the story of my life: my education and my résumé never looked as good or as trustworthy as a white man in a suit.

To blow a man’s head open is to violently push chunks of his past out into the world.

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.

I already knew the devil was everywhere. I closed my eyes and wished he would take us home safely.

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.

saying? A brown man with a hundred thousand dollars in his pocket and rocking a designer suit is still worth only a third of what a white man with a twenty in his wallet and some jeans with holes in them is worth.”