Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

“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.”

Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always.

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”