Naomi

“These humans, these creatures who play at kindness, are each ruled by wounds that, when triggered, make them the opposite of kind. Often, they justify their actions with excuses as shallow as a rain puddle, unable to see that I have my own kind of beauty simply because I’m a mermaid.”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories

“I was neither a victim nor a prisoner, even though I lived like one, and there were days when the loneliness and loss tore at my heart. My voice, my song, my essence were mine and mine alone.”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories

“She was running for all those ordinary, fragile souls whose bodies had been shamed like hers. In them, she had found herself. And so she ran for them, for those who, like her, had found comfort only in cut-out posters of clownfish. Now they had a different poster they could dream about: an athlete, an international star, her body neither fully boy nor fully girl, but simply the body of Johanna Venter, Girl Wonder.”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories

“In beauty lies hidden pain; in pain, hidden freedom.”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories