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.”

For as long as he could remember, Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly. The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing. It was a lie you practiced nightly—or, if not a lie, at least a performance.

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

He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.

Occasionally, sparrows would come into the yard around us to peck at the soil. “Li’l worm gobblers,” Cyrus said idly, which made us both laugh way harder than it should have.

Nearby, a woman was lifting a long blunt to the lips of the copper bust of John F. Kennedy while a friend snapped a picture. Cyrus was trying to be better about noticing these moments, about feeling grateful for the texture and specificity they lent his life.

All Cyrus could hear was ringing in his brain, some ear cell’s final song, a frequency never to be heard again.

“You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently. “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”