Adham comes to our room most nights. Sometimes when I arrive he’s already settled in the space next to his mother. Sometimes he comes in only after I walk through the door. His body ends at my hips and when I lie next to him his hands find their way into the heavy folds of my neck. He no longer smells like baby, but like dust, like the thin ring of mildew below our sink, like our clothes when Farzana hangs them on the line too soon after it’s rained. He’s already decaying, just four years after he is born. I wonder why it has to start so early.
He’s not in our bed tonight. I leave the door open to the bathroom as I wash my hands, the lavender exorcising the feel of the airplane, the memory of Aerolife from my hands. …
...continue reading
Cole Santos sat cross legged on his bed and tore open the letter for which he’d been waiting. In the weeks before its arrival he woke up early with a pounding heart, felt sweat in his palms whenever he checked the mailbox, and allowed himself to entertain fantasies about its possibly positive contents.
Cole read the letter. When he finished he folded it neatly, inserted it back into its envelope and gently placed the letter on the bedspread in front of him. Something moved inside him. He inhaled and expanded his chest. He exhaled and collapsed his chest. He felt stillness within him once more. Cole raised one hand and looked at it. He clenched it into a fist before relaxing it and opening his palm.…
...continue reading
For seven long years
she was my client
I counseled her for naught
As she said, You’re just a
paid friend.
She loved nothing better
than taking medication
she thought it would fix her
a woman who could never
be fixed.
In utero, she was doused
with a diet of caviar and
booze, by a brilliant mother,
also named Julie, who won the
advertising account for
Look Magazine.…
...continue reading
“How may I assist you, Sir?” A white haired salesman wearing a dark suit and tie called out from behind the counter. There was a halo of blue light around his head.
Bazza, in a hoodie and low-slung baggy trousers, gazed past him, looking for the guys who’d served him last time, regular dudes in Whizz Electronics tee shirts who skateboarded to work.
“Alright,” he said, noticing the man’s tie begin to pulsate and change colour. “I wanna buy a new cell phone, mate, one I can use for Skyping.”
“I’m sorry, Sir. Cell phones haven’t been invented yet.”
“You’re a fecken riot, you are. I gotta get a new cell phone so I can Skype my girl, Sheila. She’s splitting to The Big Apple next week.…
...continue reading
In the same way that strangers on the train might communicate through subconscious cues it was apparent, at least from the periphery, that she was wary of anyone she might objectively qualify as deserving of her love; not because of her upbringing or past experiences but because of the paranoia stemming from a vapid and distant society that pushes the intimacies of human relations to brief economic exchanges and the violence of the streets.
She meets with her peers on this level only after surviving the cruel gears of humanity, and it was this distrust of other people that served as the bond between her and her friends. Not that she made these bonds intentionally or even consciously but she did consciously jeer at strangers on the street, especially men and especially men of a different generation without really knowing why except for the realization that, they too, survived the gears of humanity but from a different vantage point.…
...continue reading
He said he didn’t want anyone to think he was a coward, to think he was weak. He didn’t want anyone to think that he’d backed down from the pain or that he couldn’t face it. It was just the doctors told him that whether he took the treatment or not, he didn’t have much longer. He wanted to make sure everyone understood. It was just time.
They stopped treatment and moved him home so he could be somewhere familiar. They loaned him a hospital bed that was set up in the living room by the patio door, overlooking the river. There were machines; a nurse visited twice a day to check them. His wife read him the paper every morning and watched TV with him in the afternoon.…
...continue reading
They moved house after she came out of hospital. She thought the neighbours knew. Pregnant again, on a new estate at the edge of fields, she was blank here, tabula rasa as the grey cement pouring over the soil and the fields turning to stone.
She couldn’t remember a thing. Perfectly normal, the doctor said after her procedure: a standard series of electric shock treatments. Her memory was gone; they’d given her Valium.
She set herself to her penance, rearing her last child, preparing to meet the next. Her husband worried; they’d come through a nightmare but where was she?
On the first day she went to her kitchen and stayed there. Its window looked onto a green hill mounting to a cloudy horizon. She sat looking out, cigarettes purling smoke from an ashtray, little bottle of tablets never far away.…
...continue reading