Things We Carry: Three Stories of Family and Change

By Ricardo Gómez

Three Stories of Family and Change

Three novellas. Three ten-year-old narrators. Three families where the ordinary world cracks open to reveal something hidden, dangerous, and beautiful underneath.

In Whispering Threads, young Marcela discovers that her mother's old Singer sewing machine carries ancestral wisdom-three stitches for strength, seven for safe passage, nine for secrets. As neighbors begin to disappear under a repressive government, her mother joins a hidden network of seamstresses encoding escape routes into wedding dresses, communion clothes, and everyday mending. When violence erupts at home, the family flees through the night guided by maps stitched into silk.
In The River's Time, Sof a's grandmother dies and leaves behind a secret: the quiet farm woman who painted modest watercolors was also Isabel R o, an internationally recognized artist who secretly sold work for decades to sustain the family farm. Gallery owners descend on their rural kitchen, turning private grief into public spectacle. Meanwhile, Sof a's younger brother begins drawing images that eerily echo their grandmother's hidden vision-and a mysterious Aleph above the kitchen door suggests that art, land, and time are braided together across generations.
In A Different Game, a young narrator discovers that the rules of winning-in school, in sports, in life-demand a price no one talks about. Inspired by those who refuse to play by harsh rules, the narrator imagines another way forward, grounded in cooperation rather than conquest.
Together, these stories form a meditation on what children carry for us-and what they pass on-when the world reveals its hidden architecture of resistance, loss, and inheritance.
For readers of Helen Oyeyemi, The House of the Spirits, and anyone who believes that magic lives in the things we make with our hands.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DX1YFG42
• ISBN13: 9798302599384
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"