May 19, 2017
Punishment
“Buy milk. Pay bills. Sever arm. Water fern.”
“It’s not that we don’t remember what it was like before the sound. If you asked us, we could tell you.”
“Don’t get pimply before a trial. It’s a sign of stress. They’ll think you’re lying.”
“I do not tell him that sometimes when he touches my breasts I feel very sad.”
“We want you to write something for our anthology, the Malignant One explained.”
She drank a bottle of poison. It must have been household cleaner. His poem doesn’t specify.
“Someday he’ll meet a fate I didn’t think of, and that will be my fault, too.”
“We called the paper to place an ad asking if anyone had lost a wallet, an earring, and a cash wad.”
Everything seemed like a metaphor, as if I was a teenager or a poet.
He was never nice, yet I let him move in. This, I thought, was experience.
In Cairo, teenagers—literal and figurative—were in control of everything.
The classified ad said only PHONE WORK and a number. “Look,” he said. “It’s not what anybody’d call honest work.”
