Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

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.

Making things easier for Cyrus, I realized only much later, had begun to take up a lot of my energy.

For all his oscillating between self-loathing and self-pity, Cyrus always seemed sincerely joyful at his friends’ most banal successes. Even then.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

Most people understand not wanting to die for a country you no longer recognize.

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be.

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

whims. I grieved for my lost aloneness.