Necessity has the face of a dog.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.

In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.