The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

He looked down at his body and realised that his hands were only his hands, and that his eyes were only his to look out from. It was peculiar, provoked only by the barrier the door made keeping the water in and the other boys out.

He slotted the blade into the edge, and the back of the disc swung open on an invisible hinge. Inside, a series of corrugated

wheels were fastened with screwed silver plates, all motionless except for two: one spinning in a fury, and pushing a smaller adjacent wheel, which turned at regular intervals. The smaller wheel was clicking. Click, click, click. “Thank you. Father, thank you.” “God keep you, habibi. Keep it safe.”

“Yes. But well the problem now, it seems to me, is there is starting to be too much knowledge. It cannot be contained by a single brain. Before, we could—more or less, I mean—hold it all in. But now, practically speaking, we are all more or less brains floating in a sea of knowledge.”

Laurent’s confession that he still loved Jeannette implied that Jeannette had not responded in the first instance, he remained helplessly jealous all the same, not only because someone had usurped him by desiring Jeannette first, but also because Laurent was French,

Stories of longing were the only stories. To desire was as good as to possess.

It seemed to him that he desired her herself, not her imprint; he wanted to hear her voice again, to see her eyes again—

Even to remain in the house made him ache, because she was also in the house, in another room, choosing not to speak to him. At the same time, he resisted going out because then he might miss an opportunity to encounter her.

He consulted an alarm clock he had borrowed from the Docteur so frequently that he barely saw the hands change their angles, but instead felt he was moving with them, pushing into the night in one continuous movement.

her hands holding a book, and his anger fell away, overcome by that Arab impulse to encourage strangers over thresholds. Jeannette looked taken aback.

But mostly they delighted in the agony of resisted desire, which being resisted was sustained, and in this mutual abnegation they colluded like thieves.