#incurables

(...) all your bodies, ghost-filled. Bodies, you think, are like haunted houses.

(...) Ay, dile que no espante los espejos de mirada niña. Había tres balcones sangrantes, había tres balcones como tres heridas incurables del muro, había tres balcones y siete temblorosos escabeles. Ay, dile que no asuste las palabras palomas, que no deje que vayan batiendo un aire usado con                                        alas de cuchillo.

Our bodies, my body, as damp as dark as any other damp, dark place; damper, darker.

You may not have been the pretty one, but soon you will be known as the escape artist of the city of incurable women; it was said you could rip a straitjacket to pieces with your teeth.

We were always on the verge; the difference is the best girls are fluent in the language of their pain.

She'd grown bored by the Lives of the Saints, its guiding hand forever moving her toward a moral. The reflection at the end of each entry could be boiled down: Poverty is good, suffering and death better, submit, submit, submit. There was much talk of the odor of sanctity, and though she didn't know exactly what that smelled like, she knew an odor never smelled good. Sanctity, even worse.

You, too, lived in a body that filled weekly with holy yearning and a desire that unbound you from the world where the theologians and scientists lived. It unfurled you tender into a place where there were no words except those you made with your body, irresistible as the place itself.