“I never see the sick;” Yasmin says. “They visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and the dying … Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.”

“You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.”

“I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.”

“We're on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we're still good, next week maybe.That's the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?”

“Those last months. No way of wrapping it pretty or pretending otherwise: Rafa was dying. By then it was only me and Mami taking care of him and we didn't know what the fuck to do, what the fuck to say. So we just said nothing. My mom wasn't the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities-shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat.”

“They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú - generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since.”

“The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever.It's a start, you say to the room....In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace-- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”