Mariana

“In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where spticemia and putrification creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care-not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“In her tiny dorm room bathroom, under the bright buzz of fluorescent tubes, Knox and Severin silently draw. When they finish, they stare into the mirror, at themselves, at each other. Severin flicks off the light switch. The tiny room plunges into darkness, but their reflections remain bright in the silver glass, skin like pale moths, hair like flame, eyes like fireflies. Slender green threads of electricity travel up and down the spikes of their mohawked heads. Knox turns to her: their tongues touch tip to tip, briefly, and small sparks arc out from their blackened fingernails, leaving feathery singe marks on the yellowing countertop”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“I’ve given up condemning that streak of anarchy that was injected into us- into your blood and mine- by someone who wanted us fierce and unyielding, even a little, but I’m starting to wonder. Long before conceiving us, when she was nothing but a wave of pleasure in her own mother’s belly( not even a fetal reality, or a spurt of semen shared by two living people just at the moment when pleasure explodes into delirium, but a mere body sprawled on these white sheets, unable to contain the strength of desire), long before all that, tell me, do you think she already wanted us the way we are?”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Without Mother there, all of our psychological mechanisms were rusting from lack of use. Without hate, what good was our love?”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb