Summary

In “Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera,” Diaz recalls staying at a crane sanctuary in Nebraska and receiving a phone call from her brother. He was frantic and explained that he had taken apart his Polaroid camera and needed her to tell him how to put it back together. She did not know how to do this despite having received similar calls from him before, as he believed the mafia planted transmitters in his camera. She tried to distract him by talking about the cranes. Later, she looked at her own camera and imagined what it looked like on the inside. She wondered where her brother kept getting the Polaroid cameras.

“The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn” opens with the subheading “Powdered unicorn horn was once thought to cure melancholy” (77). Diaz describes a metaphorical wound left by a horn, a...