Kelly

“I can tell how sad I look. It's something in my eyes. There's this dull light inside them. I'm starting to wonder if it's always been there. If I looked that way before your father, when I was a teenager, or even a little girl...What happened to me that made me look so sad?...I get embarrassed. I kept wondering how many people recognized that sadness in me. Probably more than I'd like to know. But it changed...The world did. It became less urgent, somehow bigger, and I didn't worry so much about being loved.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I followed my mother to the main house, where she rang the doorbell and gently knocked. From behind her, I could make out her shoulder bones, ridged, as if her skeleton had been shattered and glued hastily back together. When the door opened and we were ushered inside by a man's high-pitched voice, my mother's back disappeared, swallowed by indoor dimness.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Her stance was wobbly and unrefined, as though she had given someone else permission to wear her skin. That's when I knew she was forever caught in her own undercurrent, bouncing from one deep swell to the next. She would never lift me out of that sea. She would never pause to fill her lungs with air. Soon the world would yank her chain of sadness against every shore, every rock, every glass-filled beach, leaving nothing but the broken hull of a drowned woman.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I always told him Tonto means fool...He claimed I was too literal.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina