Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“That’s it, really. The big pathological sad. Whether I’m actually thinking about it or not. It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.”

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

His drunkenness sometimes moved like this, unaccompanied. Eager to keep itself alive.

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

Like boiling water poured into a cup then poured over his head. He felt scorched, confused, suddenly alive.

So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

Hard to describe the shape of a cloud from inside the cloud. Like how I would appreciate gravity more if I’d had trouble floating off in my teens.

It was like asking someone just struck by lightning about the weather.

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?”