Lana Popović

“[She] had sounded like the rain. Sometimes storms, sometimes light patters, sometimes the sweet, lashing gales after a long drought. Sometimes even the kind that came with rainbows. The kind you wanted to feel on your face while you held the rest of your body underwater in the summer sea.

Rain could be so warm. No one ever really talked about that.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“For me, it was the hibiscus flower, the petal red and fleshy as our mother trailed it over the tip of my nose, before she let me gum it to release its tart flavor. For Malina, it was a gleaming, perfect cherry, which Mama crushed into a paste that she let my sister suck from her ring finger. It was bad luck to name a daughter after the thing that first sparked the gleam, Mama said. So I was Iris, for a flower that wasn’t hibiscus, and my sister was Malina, for a raspberry. They were placeholder names that didn’t pin down our true nature, so nothing would ever be able to summon us. No demon or vila would ever reel us in by our real names. Even caught up in the story, Mama could never quite explain what the gleam looked like once she found it.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire