“You don’t seem too delighted to see me,” she said, smiling as she put down her things, obviously planning to stay. Renegade locks were brought back to the original chignon and she resembled a predator when she did that.
I stared at her and didn’t answer.
“I need a place to sleep, walla, c’est tout. Would you do that for me?” She got closer and looked me straight in the eyeball. Her nostrils quivered. Sniff... Hmmm... He smells of women... “Can you do that for me, ya habibi, ya Dirty Teeth?”
Yeah. This is what she calls me. Dirty Teeth. Because... well... because I never brush my teeth and they really look horrible, because the quality of your words and the intention behind every phrase you utter apparently affects your gum. There is a certain negativity that one spews as he cusses and badmouths, and it makes our teeth rot faster. So I eared anyway. In any case, you should take one eye at my teeth and you can immediately tell that I am not one to be trusted.
So yeah, Dirty Teeth. But then again, baby boys, what’s in a name? No, really, what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, no?
“Fine. But I can’t hang. I need sleepage. I’m fucked really bloody tonight. Sorry.”
“Do you have any left?”
Oh good cunt almighty! It would have taken me two decades of shame and stuttering and finger civil wars to utter a request as such. Oh God, this intolerable boldness! This savage carpe diem dressed with the robe of total need.
I didn’t answer. I took off my pants, searched my pockets, and took out the last remaining brown I had, leaving nothing for myself. Having drunk this much I won’t be taking that tonight anyway, this goes without saying.
And she deserves the whole stash for the way she asked me for it.
And if you’ve gone in and out of brown, me broder, you surely know that giving your whole stash to someone can only mean one of two things: ONE, you want a specific something from the person you are giving your stash to, and he surely and of coursely knows what it is; or TWO, something that goes along this line: Here, take it, you have it, no please, take it all. Happy? Good! Now, I don’t want to eye your fuckin’ face ever again. The most vicious of gifts, a white Pandora’s box grinded. Walla.
“Here, take it.”
“I’ll leave you some.”
“No need to, Eesh. Really. No need to. Goodie nacht and the like.”
“Goodie nacht, Dirty Teeth.”
My knees gave in. And as I was crumbling I aimed at the mattress and collapsed on ground zero. Yes. Floor mattress. No bed. Takes too much space.
One fleeting thought, and then another, then I multiplied Z by a trillion and they spread in my room.
6:02
Go child. Go child, they said to me. So I went, naturally. You always do in dreams, there is no notion of good sense there, you just go anywhere you’re told to go and nothing feels like it is your decision, so I did and I ended up walking on clouds and I realized at that point that clouds were naught but the white fingerprints of God as He tries to caress our world. And then I followed my Allah like a hunter hunting a haunted wounded deer in the desert. Then the deer turned mewards and swooshed just like that into a beautiful woman and swooshed again into a gigantic old man who just stared at me with loving hatred in his eyes. I was instantly burned like a Cathar in a spontaneous combustion, burned for all the mischief I had made and caused, and I accepted my punishment, ya akhi, though painless it was surely not. I was then redeemed for all I have done, and I was caressed by a figure in the heights which was bright as bright can be. It was probably the sun itself, can’t really vision it now.
Then, out of nowhere, god savagely attacked me and filled my neck with love bites, and my neck was as mistreated as the necks of the likes of Moe, Jesus, Akhenaton, and such as, combined. I screamed: Enough! But all I wanted was: more, more, embrace my torso with your strong legs and squeeze the life out of me.
I knelt and I eared an eerie voice telling me: Oh Renzin, ya Sheikh Renzin, you’re forgiven. And I fell down from heaven in slow-motion like a Prometheus on fire, burning like a gigantic zeppelin, and thousands and thousands of little ones were crying and going bouhouhou, I don’t believe it, bouhouhou, Renzin is down, children, Sheikh Renzin is going down!
And all throughout, Eesh was looking at me squirm like a worm, all tattooed and riddled with wounds, skinny and hairy, revolting in everything and in every way, and she was crying. And who could possibly blame her? Look at me, what kind of father could I possibly be?
Originally written in English.
The Boxes
by Mazen Maarouf
Caracas
1.
When I was very young, twenty-one years before this moment, my name was Yamen. I loved little boxes and I know that they loved me too. We agreed that we were just the same. In everything. In our smells, our way of walking, how we closed our eyes, those things. I used to see boxes as six closed eyes connected to each other. I had only two eyes, like all people, animals, and birds. But I practiced closing them like boxes did. Completely vertical. And I still practice. I never manage it completely — when I close my eyes and touch my drooping eyelids, I find that they aren’t completely vertical. How can I describe this to you all? I don’t know. They just aren’t vertical, they aren’t straight like a ruler. And so I practice. And the boxes know that and wait for me to succeed so they can be happy like me. Because practice will make us resemble each other, even if it takes a number of years. The important thing is to get there. And this is what helps me to sleep better every night.
My mother doesn’t wake me up because there’s no reason to wake me up. Schools are closed because it’s summer vacation. Or because the war is about to start. Or both. The important thing is that I’m sleeping more and that even while asleep I am practicing tightening my eyelids so that they come down completely vertical.
But I also practice another thing. Each and every day, I practice rolling like a box. On the carpet. I bend my knees and ball myself up so that my arms are at a right angle to my chest. I then try to push myself up. This exercise is also difficult. Especially the stage when you have to turn yourself upside down and balance on just your head and knees. If our house were positioned on a slope like our building is, then this would surely be much easier. I wouldn’t have minded rolling myself down the slope had there not been so many cars there, as well as the residents of our building and the building next to ours who greeted passersby, even strangers, by throwing things at them — potatoes, empty cans of sardines, bottle tops, balloons filled with dirty water, and other things.
I came to an agreement with the boxes I made that we’d change every day. And they accepted it. In reality, that’s because I wasn’t able to make boxes of the same size every day. Indeed, what I made weren’t exactly boxes, but rather forms very much like boxes, so much so that if you saw them you couldn’t call them anything other than boxes, unless you were a math professor or a carpenter. But the boxes didn’t think about all this. All they cared about was being closed on all sides. And empty. I valued that a lot because everything around me was getting bigger, increasing in size. Even the cities being destroyed had something in them that was expanding and filling them up. I don’t know what to call it, but when I look in a history book at two pictures of this city before the war and during the war, a feeling inside me tells me that something in the city had grown and expanded in the second picture.