Our Lady of the Flowers

But along with this desolation, a new joy was being born within her.
The joy that precedes suicides. Divine was afraid of her daily life. Her flesh and soul were turning sour. There came for her the season of tears, as we speak of the season of rains. Once she has switched off the light and created darkness, for nothing in the world would she take a step out of bed, where she thinks she is safe, but in the same way that she thinks she is safe in her body. She feels rather protected by the fact of being in her body. Outside reigns terror.

The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations. But no way out.

. . . It is regrettable (in a minor key; then, continuing in the major) . . . it is regrettable . . .”

When he walked by, Darling was smoking, and a slit of abandon in the woman's hardness of soul chanced just then to be open, a slit that catches the hook cast by innocent looking objects.

The room smells of whore.