Over the holiday break I read—more like gorged on—Sandra Cisneros’ short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek. Many of her short stories are only a couple of pages, yet they left me feeling full, complete and utterly haunted. Cisneros speaks of her writing on her website: “A good story doesn’t care. What matters is that the story cast its magic, that it silence you into listening, and move you to laugh, and even better, to cry and then laugh, and a long time later, to haunt you. Long after you have closed the book, it’s what haunts and stays with you that matters, for then the story will have done its work.” I encourage you to read these short stories, as well as post a comment on any books or stories that have recently been haunting you.
“Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.
“There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn’t talk, just walked around all day with his harmonica in his mouth. Didn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.
This is how it is with me. Love I mean.”
— Sandra Cisneros, from Woman Hollering Creek