Harper

rma, said my father, what do you want from this life?
I sat down next to him and touched his arm for half a second. It was a surprise and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t expect an answer. It was a kind gesture for any man from around here to ask a question of his daughter.

If I could only interpret my dreams I would know what I wanted from this life and then I’d be able to explain that to my father.

My anger, I said to myself. I liked the sound of that. I needed something of my own, something I could keep

if thoughts and home were random patterns then actions were too, all actions, tender, desperate, lucid, treacherous ones and the promises we make and break, the secrets we share with dying Venezuelans, and the bruises and bleeding cuts on her back. All of them random patterns. And that they didn’t mean a thing.

had asked a good question. And not only had I finally asked a good question, I had asked a good question of someone I was trying to be friends with as opposed to myself. A question that had breath attached to it, that had left my own body.

I guess that’s how the world works. How it sucks you in by being all beautiful just when you’re ready to leave.

I was hoping we’d find some little street to live on that straddled eternities

ne minute you’re jumping in the sparkly waves for the first time in your life and completely unable to stop laughing and the next you’re shedding the useless lining of your uterus and smearing messages in blood in porcelain bowls and sandy beaches. Words of shame like I’m sorry about this mess and the smell and I don’t know why the hell I’m crying on such a beautiful summer day.

hen we landed the three of us moved dreamlike through the artificial world of the airport and then out and into the real world of Mexico City and for the first time in a million years it occurred to me that my chest wasn’t hurting and it was as though I were experiencing a strange, foreign feeling like bliss or something

understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say: