Welcome to Litsy!

"I could hear tree leaves rustle outside and the smoke from Yuri‘s lit cigarette was a necklace that I wanted to choke myself with."

"The flowers were blue and they made a circle around the bird, who hovered at the mouth of the cenote like a bruise. The bird looked at me with its black eyes and then its tiny body fell down into the cenote, the flowers like stars like rain, my own mouth eating the sky in an O of constellation."

"My mother made pomegranate tea for the woman and held it to her lips as they shivered in dark shades of pink like roses rotting on their stem."

"A look straight in her lover‘s eye scared her more than anything in the world. His body had been always a sideways glance, a turning over of skin, his shoulder a mountaintop turning in the sun that crept through the window blinds, when their bodies came tangled in the morning time."

"Jonny‘s father wanted to make Jonny‘s mother a ghost dress from the bones and feathers of birds that had stopped breathing. He found the five tiny bird corpses lying still in the mouths of gutter ways, their feathers like blotches of blue and red and yellow paint. There was a small slip of paper wrapped on the wing of each bird and each of these papers said, *An offering. A dress for our beloved doctor.*"

This scene reminded me a lot of Chesya Burke's story called "The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason," that I read in her brilliantly creepy collection Let's Play White. I ardently recommend both this book and that one.

"The crying jags came after all the hospitals were forced to close and my mother had turned fifty and her body had begun to turn into something like stone. When I say stone, I mean it in the most beautiful way I can think of. Her shoulder bones became sharp and her waist curved in like an upside down triangle and her hips had the curve of the new moon. Her body became the moon tipping over and over on itself."

"Storylandia is a place where mothers and fathers bring their children to learn about fantastical things right before they tell them to stop believing in fantastical things."