Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Mostly what Cyrus felt was empty. A crushing hollowness, which governed him. He should have died on the plane with his mother, but he’d been left home. With his father now dead, Cyrus had no parents left to worry over him. What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

“Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?” asked Roya. “We read that story in Miss Hoover’s class,” said Lisa, a little too eagerly. “Ray Bradbury.” “Right. When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

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

The moon was bright in the sky now, nearly full. It felt like it was pulling all my blood to the surface of my skin, like it wanted to rip my eyes and ears out through my face.

They sat there for a few seconds, then a full minute, each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them. A

The cigarette smoke felt to Cyrus like a beloved ghost returning after a long absence, filling him with warmth, making his fingertips tingle.

The trees dropped their flowers, then their branches, to the ground—slowly, almost delicately, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time.