Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

But when Juan stood up from his wicker chair and kissed both her cheeks, all those men and women seemed like the practice sketches of a clumsy painter, tentative versions made by a hand that was learning, until finally it drew Juan and gave him life and said, This is it, this is what I was looking for, the perfect finish.

Renunciation is easy when you have a lot, he thought. He had never had anything.

money, as the Bradfords often said, is a nation in itself.

I don’t know what it’s like to be in contact with that power and I never will, but I do know it’s not possible to reject it. No one could.

He was going to say something (What? That he loved him?), but his dad had already taken another drink from the bottle, and his eyes were closing.

I wish I could stop loving him, forget him, I wish he’d die.

He was never afraid with his father; he could be afraid of him, but not with him.

You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

Argentina were the champions and it felt like flying, as if nothing else existed but that moment, a moment that was forever and joyful and so sad because it couldn’t last.

Gods always behave like the people who make them. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

What I learned over the years is that the nation of affluence is monotonous.

That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for beauty and the refusal to offer even the dignity of a name.

We are servants to those people, we are the flesh that they torture. We’re the rickshaw drivers transporting rich little girls in India. I’m the lumberjack who fucks the plantation owner’s daughter. You’re going to have to disobey them if you want to follow me.

I was coming to understand the power of a secret. You walk among others but are not one of them. Some—I suppose Florence, for example—must feel that they walk above the rest, but not me. I feel I walk along passages of colors no one else knows; I feel like the others are lit by a weak little bulb, while I am lit by a blinding light. It’s strange I would think of light, because it was always explained to me that we are for the darkness.

Love is impure, that’s what Anne’s eyes were saying. And it was true. It contaminates you and makes you possessive, savage, destructive.

They sought me out, here I am. I don’t know how to let go of the dead.