The Saddest Place on Earth

Book excerpt: Camille Rose Garcia's world is a beautiful place. It is the ballroom of an Empire, a forest of aquamarine jewels, a place where cream-layered cakes, crystal castles and opiate abundance serve to sedate the masses. but as the telescope retracts, the glossy veneer of privelege falls away to reveal another reality. Machine guns and machetes decorate the landscape alongside exploding poppies. Deer and princesses hand suspensefully in a cloud of malaise and disbelief becomes the ether of the living.