She screams, but her mother can't hear her. She's only inches away. But the soft, floral blanket caked with dust is heavier than the broken concrete that used to be home, than the missiles that stretch out cold metal arms to dismember and destroy, than the guns young men tote in old men's wars. It holds her mother's dead body in a vice-grip, but there is no grip tighter than the girl's on the blanket. She screams harder. She wants nothing else than to lift the veil, between life and death, between her and her mother, but it is too heavy. It is too heavy for a little girl who only wants to be with her mother.
I fear looking into my adult eyes and not recognizing myself.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
I will make up for lost time.
What use is death to a creature like me?
Well, I’ll tell you:
Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;
Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?
A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?
Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,
To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.
A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a
Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.
Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast
Me out to meet her, Lady Death.
In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.
-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk
What happens to memories of broken places? Do they bleed too?
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Please.
Life asked Death:
Have you ever been loved?
She responded:
Unfortunately. Flickering moments of love for me in forlorn men are common. Though they always end the same. In my arms, thinking only of you.
There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.
I’ll figure it out, I always figure it out. Why not now? What’s wrong with me?
Nothing. Maybe this is a problem that can’t be solved. Not even by you.
I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.