Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

“We have difficulty seeing our present selves in history the same way we view our past and future selves. That’s all I’m getting at.”

Roya, only ten, already knew she wouldn’t have a future like her mother’s. She didn’t know what kind of future she wanted for herself, but when she tried to imagine it, there were no dining tables, no kitchens either. Mostly there was open space, freedom and passion, heat obscuring everything like a candle flame smocking its wick.

It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity. Flour thrown on a ghost.

“This is what writers do. They follow the story. It’s an inflection point. You can keep being the sad sober guy in Indiana who talks about being a writer, or you can go be one.”

My brain felt like a flooded orchard. All the flowers—gold, indigo, white, violet—just floating along the water.

The flooded orchard in my head was a roiling ocean now, the flowers all lost under the fuzz of sea foam.

“But you want to die. And you want for that death to be glorious.

There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

What they gave us was all vegetarian; meat had too many germs.

There is something pathetic about such men, of course, an unforgivable softness, but I’ve secretly always envied them a bit too. The clarity of a physical emotional response. Something to do with the sadness, terror. A way to give it away.

It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear.

Joy withers in the absence of light.

The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.

“Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?”

Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale.

Language could be totally impotent like that.

This overblown moment of self-satisfaction at what was essentially a very, very minor favor.

who was really a foil for Cyrus to feel good about his own goodness, which shamed him doubly now.

That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.” She paused for a moment. “It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

“Of course,” said Orkideh. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.” They both laughed.

But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it.

that charged sort of quiet that feels like sand being poured all around you, up to your throat.

Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.

Certainly the deaths of both his parents inflected everything he wrote, but in what Cyrus had given to the world, in what he shared at the open mic, their deaths never manifested directly in any obvious or explicitly legible way.

Cyrus said something reflexive about fruit on pizza being bad, the sort of uncharacteristic inherited nothing people said just to say something, and to which Zee replied by stating “fruit” was a botanical term, “vegetable” a culinary term, and that such distinctions were meaningless.

His eyes looked like black thorns.

hallway light poured into their darkened room as if to illuminate the cruelty of what had been spoken.

But you see a picture of an angel and a sword and think only of your crazy uncle. The most human thing in the world.

“You’re a young man, Cyrus. Full of life. I understand.” Cyrus winced.

all the old feelings immediately swarmed back in, like lakewater flooding into a sinking car.

meaningless life meant a meaningless death. He wasn’t even sure if he believed that, but his current state had increased his tolerance for despondent generalizing.

Sobriety, writing. What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

“Rivers of honey, eternal sunshine, all that.”

That first kiss between Leila and me was a strange and foreign word, one someone might clumsily translate as “sky” but that actually meant something closer to “heaven.”

That’s when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool.

We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.

“All the art of the world, I mix it together, create new composition. You know curating is its own art, of course.”

But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

The cigarette smoke felt to Cyrus like a beloved ghost returning after a long absence, filling him with warmth, making his fingertips tingle.

“You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?” Sang asked. “Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and corners of coffee tables, fear kept you safe.”

To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

Sobriety meant Cyrus couldn’t help but see himself, eventually.