Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,”

“Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules. How can anything so limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ‘Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?”

Ali’s anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror.

Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.

“That’s the thing, I don’t really know. For it to mean something? I’ve been working this job and studying all these people who died for what they believed in. Qu Yuan, Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands. Dying. It feels like such a throwaway to just die for no reason. To waste your one good death.”

He’d picked up two coffees along the way, the second as a little offering for Orkideh, a small gift to communicate that he’d been thinking of her before he saw her. This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room. That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle.

All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.

Glassy moans barely audible over the horizon. Dark clouds against a bright sky, like blackberries in a bowl of milk.