Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories

by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

“Bridging tenderness and violence, and brimming with danger and magic, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds will leave you breathless.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis

“In these 14 hard-edged and unapologetic stories, debut author Garcia tackles topics ranging from human trafficking and drug abuse to eating disorders and middle-age angst, and in no-frills prose, carves out bizarre and palpable realities, breathing strange life into a horde of depressed, deprived, and abused characters.” — Publishers Weekly

The boundaries between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative, are shattered in this remarkable debut collection for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, André Alexis, and Angélique Lalonde

A girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.

Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world out of step with reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.

Release date: October 3, 2023

Publisher: ECW Press

Print pages: 208

Sample

A Golden Light

After her father died Sadie stopped moving.

It started with her throat. The day her mother called and told her he was dead she opened her mouth to scream or cry or shout or something, and nothing came out. She pushed her throat muscles together and moved her tongue around until she felt ridiculous and then, at last, a bubble of sound slowly pushed its way out of her mouth. It was a tiny, tinny “no” quickly buried underneath the sobs which flagged in and out from the receiver. She tried again to say something more, but this time she spoke only silence.

Hello? her mother called over the receiver. Sadie, hello?

I will never be able to talk again, Sadie thought mournfully, and she thoughtlessly placed the phone back in its cradle.

But the loss of sound was only the beginning. It was soon followed by a loss of movement. Walking up and down a flight of stairs became an insurmountable effort; soon even walking on the flattest of flat sidewalks seemed an undertaking too painful to bear. She began to feel like she was struggling underwater each time she stood up on her own two feet. By the time of the funeral her hands had become slow and dimwitted, clumsy and uneasy to manoeuvre.

At the burial Sadie stood in the front row and, as they lowered the casket into the ground, she realized that she could no longer hear the morbid sounds of the coffin scratching along the dirt. She strained her head forward, listening for the sounds of tears and the unwholesome noise of noses being blown, but there was nothing except a strange humming void.

I’ve misplaced my ears, she thought, and tried to remember if she had put them on that morning or had simply gone out without them.

She looked around for her sister, or her mother or her brother-in-law; instead she caught the wandering eye of a middle-aged woman, some variant of cousin or family friend. She touched Sadie’s hand, her eyes watering in a fresh wave of tears. Be strong, she read off the woman’s lips. Sadie nodded vaguely and let her hand be clutched, let herself be dragged into the sea of black cloth that wept and reminisced on her shoulder. They all seemed so sad, but Sadie, dazed from the loss of her senses, kept forgetting what they were being sad for.