Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. 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?

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.

Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream, while the partition between our world and his was thinnest.

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

Cyrus tried hard to focus on her eyes, which were the kind of blue many blond people’s eyes are. So common you forget how pretty they are. Like pigeons.

She was gorgeous in that aggressively American way, the kind of woman you might see in an ad for cold medicine.

“It is probably not a good practice to start imagining headlines about your art before you even make it, Cyrus jaan.”

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

The pizza was half pineapple, and 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.

“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.”