Sam + Formatting = epicfail. For a few of the pieces, I'll do my best, but if you have a few extra minutes it might be worth just reading through the read-only. ^_^ Thank you for the reviews! This time, I'll put a few notes at the end for the nerdy.
(a word from our sponsors)
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the way things are goin’
they’re gonna crucify me.
- John Lennon
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(four eyes)
Varanasi, 1990
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It was odd to be alive in the City of the Dead. Funeral pyres had been burning for six thousand years, and the ashes of people who had been born six, seven times settled in lungs breathing through their first round. Shiva was whispering to thousands of people at the same time; so much so that there was a garbled hiss in the air where silence was supposed to be. Lakshmi knelt in the sand next to a pile of logs, an impromptu tomb for her father.
I’m dying, Lakshmi, he'd said.
She’d pulled him seventy-five miles on an old cart that lacked a mule—she was it. Her skin grew darker and rougher as she went, and when the mud caked around her feet, they looked closer to hooves than what her sandals actually hid. They talked of gods and heaven and the good days and the bad; so much so that she tried to slow down when she saw the city on the horizon. She didn’t want him to leave.
He closed his eyes at the city limits; his breathing slowed on the main street. By the time they reached the shore, Lakshmi knew he was gone. He’d been a good man. He would go somewhere better, be born once more as man of higher standing—not some poor farmer in a dirt hovel.
Making herself believe that when her chest felt like it was torn in two was the difficult part. She bit her lip and cupped her hands over his ears so that Shiva would not come to him—Shiva would not take him away.
And somehow, Shiva slipped through the gaps.
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(down the rabbit hole)
Omaha, 2004
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Alice had a dream.
In her dream, it was dark and she was sweating. Something began to claw at her legs—softly at first, and then stronger and stronger until she began to shout and swat at it. It bit at her hands, then, too, nibbling down her arm until this transparent beast consumed her entire body.
brightness.
and the beast was gone. She felt something cold grip her arm; something cold slid underneath her skin and coursed through her veins. When it crept up her neck, she fell. She fell so fast that everything spun, centripetal force hurling everything into a tight black spiral that pressed at her eyeballs and her toes.
and when she woke up, her eyes were welcomed with a place both foreign and familiar.
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(schoolgirl’s zebiba)
Abadan, 1978
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Dawn comes to a small Iranian city. As the minaret CALLS, a CRACKLING is heard from a vast pile of rubble in the heart of the downtown district—a theatre, though this is not apparent but for the caramel-colored twists of garbled English strewn between support beams. People stumble out of bed. The militiamen ringed around the rubble fall to their knees. Their leader points to the southwest, and they pray. A MURMUR curls itself around the city.
In LIDA’S bedroom, there is SILENCE. She is a small girl, wrapped in a black chador in a room that, too, is wrapped in black. Everything is mourning—everything will mourn for forty days. She falls to her knees, unsteadily, though she has done this all her life. Her hands reach for her prayer mat, but they waver. They are stained with ink and make mottled stars against the carpet.
LIDA: [softly] Allah? Allah, are you listening? Allah?
There is no answer.
- FADE OUT -
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(a postcard home)
twenty-six miles from chesapeake.
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A banker, a retard, and a dyke.
He’d been crying when he’d said it, but once he was gone, Charlotte thought her father’s description of her family was accurate. She and her mother licked the envelopes for invitations to the wake, though no one came. No one ever did. As her father had done, no one wanted to spend much time with a widowed banker and her problem children.
He’d been addled, somehow, when he stood in the dining room and shouted those things. Her daddy had been his daddy’s golden boy, and cleaned himself up to go to work with their grandfather during the week. On the weekends, he came home, lonely and angry, and drank himself into a stupor. Charlotte had never known anyone as sad as her father. When she was seven, she saw the Zoloft ad with the bouncing happy faces in her mother’s Wall Street Journal. Using the sticky kitchen scissors, she cut them out and taped them to her parent’s bedroom door as high as she could reach without having to get a stool.
They were gone the next day, the fake varnish beneath the tape strips gone, too.
After he’d had his chance to scream, eight years later, Charlotte’s mother put Drew to bed with shaking arms. When he she was guiding his hand to brush his teeth, she began to cry.
Charlotte waited for her to come out of the bathroom. “He’s lying,” she insisted. “I mean, he still loves us. He does. And I don’t have a girlfriend, so. I don’t count. He’s lying.”
Mascara and tears slid down her mother’s face in paint-drip lines like the saliva that fell, innocently, from the corner of Drew’s mouth.
Three days later they found him in the middle of a cornfield twenty-six miles from the city, dehydrated. Dead. His veins were plugged with painkillers and his arms were raw from where he’d scratched some invisible itch.
And he’d left no one but a banker, a retard, and a dyke to mourn for him.
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(don’t cry for me, beijing)
Nanking, 1937
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Her existence was a door, and that was all.
She pressed her ear up against it and listened, breathing hard. The wood scratched against her cheeks as she panted; like a dog, like something subhuman and awful.
The sound of herself made her knees tremble.
[He was a boy, and that was all.
His uniform had been bleached stiff, but inside it he was shaking. This would make no difference (it would never make a difference)—he would always be a boy, and nothing more. But when her eyes met his he bit his lip.]
When he opened the door, she fell.
It hurt less than to be pushed. It hurt less when he knelt beside her—one hand on her cheek, the other holding a knife—and pinned her to the ground.
[It hurt less.
He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that when he whispered into her ear, he meant every word.
naku na, itoshii. naku na*.]
*Don't cry, darling, don't cry.
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(the wolf-boy of pripyat)
The Exclusion Zone, 1990
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He’d been called Dmitri, once, when he lived with two-feet—pale and hairless, just like him. Now he had no chores to do and no Baba to mind, no baths to take and no women in black to hit at his hands with canes. He could stay outside as long as he liked and go to bed when he wished. He preferred the nighttime, usually, but during the winter the nights grew cold, even when he wrapped himself deep in his new mother’s fur.
It had been summers upon summers since he had seen his old mother. An alarm had sounded and everyone had lined up, orderly, to leave the city. They were in rows of two until someone screamed, and everyone began to run. She had grasped his hand, but had fallen. The people continued to stream down each side and by the time Dmitri stood up, she was gone.
He turned back to the city.
It was empty. There were no lines for the amusement park and no bullies sitting in the slide and no lifeguards with whistles telling him he couldn’t run into the pool. He ran through the streets he’d been told to look both ways to cross, and climbed through apartments that weren’t his.
He was lonely until he found his new mother—so lonely that one day he went to school, so that he could curl up in front of Lenin and cry. That portrait had always scared him before, because Lenin had always looked so angry. But when he was alone, it felt right. He fell ill and spent the nights awake, sweating through a fever he’d caught from no one.
She came in through the open school doors, limping. Her leg was raw and bloodied, but she sat beside Dmitri and licked her wounds as Dmitri slept through his. He ran his hand through her fur, thick and warm, and she lapped up the sweat from his forehead. When they were well again, she taught him to run and to catch his own food and to howl.
And she would never leave him.
She would never betray him.
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(abkhazia, irresolute)
Sukhumi, 1993
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you are not human.
you were never human, nor can you dream of becoming one of us—you will never walk free. these shackles will weigh you down until you die, tied like a dog to this earth.
.........................................................................................................and what never was, will never be.
.......................................where is your God?
........................................where is he now?
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Shiva--an Indian god who lives in the Ganges. When people die, Shiva comes and whispers truth in their ears so that they can continue moksha and move on to the next life.
Zebibah--a mark on the forehead that old Muslims sometimes develop, and that young ones tattoo on. Since Muslims touch their head to the floor at least five times a day, this mark is sign of piety, and of millions of prayers.
Prypiat--Google it! It's really cool--it's this city that was left behind after the disaster at Chernobyl. Some of the pictures are amazing.
. I’m so sad. Such a sad story. I think about the Japanese genocide of the Chinese thing? Rape? Argh. That was so astoundingly simple, with barely any descriptions. Felt a bit confused about the whole door metaphor in the beginning. Certainly sharpen it more. I feel like it would be so out-of-this-world if you include a sentence about the general atmosphere, about the environment that they are in, about other people, so that I would feel like this is happening because the way I see it, the rape is sort of being done in like a different planet or something. In space. In mid-air. Ground it on cool, yellow marble, or next to a black-soot tree. Something.
