Ring is excerpted from Youssef Rakha’s forthcoming collection of essays, Postmuslim, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in September 2026.

ONE

A mutual friend texts me offering their condolences. I’m having an espresso outdoors on the way to boxing practice, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. “I’m so sorry,” they say. “I thought you knew.” Late afternoon, beautiful weather. It takes a while to register what happened to Mohab last night.

This also happens to be the week after the first ceasefire—Israel has started demolishing Gaza again—kids losing limbs or heads every hour. I had been stupid enough to think it was over. I had also been stupid enough to think I’d see Mohab again, though I hadn’t really thought about him since it started. I know he’s back in Alexandria for good now. He hasn’t told me himself, but I know. There is an unacknowledged fight between us, an upset over something I said in an online video. Mohab had repeatedly made the claim that, unlike its European counterpart, in its entirety Arab intellectual history was a moral sham, an opportunistic performance intended to achieve political and personal gains without having any effect on reality. When it came up in the online discussion in question, I respectfully suggested that, for such a statement to have historical validity or make verifiable sense, it needed to be research-based and confined to specific contexts. That upset him—and I’d been hoping it wouldn’t be long before we acknowledged that and were reconciled. Now the birds are singing and he is dead. 

But I never did see Mohab often. By the time we grew close he was living in Kuwait with his second wife, working as a cultural journalist. I was in love that year. The real reason I was at the literary event that brought me together with Mohab was to spend time with the older writer I loved. She lived far away, said she was coming just to see me, but once there she acted so busy, so uninterested, and so careful that no one notice the two of us were close, I felt spat on. It was hurtful but—even worse—confusing, because after two days of this I really had nothing at all to say to her, this person I’d been thinking of spending my life with against the odds. I had three free days before I flew back to Cairo, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. 

Then Mohab turned up like a savior. He was a conventional-looking intellectual, civil-servant conventional but recognizably intellectual, with a George Costanza-style bald pate and old-fashioned clothes like W. G. Sebald’s, and he cut a strange figure in the canned luxury of the globalized hotel foyer. I’d known him a little from my visits to Alexandria, when he still worked as a schoolteacher while helping to edit an alternative magazine I wrote for. I admired his intelligence, but his seeming conservatism and his tendency to moralize had kept me away. When he mentioned wanting to visit the old harbor of Bur Dubai now I jumped on the opportunity. 

It turns out he was just as alienated by the writerly hustling and schmoozing, though not for personal reasons, and from then till I left the hotel for the airport I spent practically all my time with him. I never said a word about the lover who hurt me, but when I discussed the Egyptian middle class and the moral failure of the Arab intellectual—social criticism is what Mohab and I would always do together—that’s what I was telling him about. 

The amateur slugger on his way to training is not the person I was then, but he still misses that therapy. Being here and doing nothing for the Palestinians has felt unbearably wrong, and the first thing that hits me when I get the text is this is another thing to feel guilty about. Surely I should’ve . . . But I’m not feeling guilty. I’m not feeling anything. Usually, when I’ve heard someone has died, my impulse is to contact people who know them. This time all I can think is I have five minutes to get to boxing practice. I wonder if there’s going to be sparring. I have my mouth guard but I don’t know if I want to get punched now. I put my backpack on my back, the gloves dangling from the straps the way I learned to carry them from my teenage teammates, and I set off. 

As I stride along the world looks a little different from the way it did before I got that text, a little foggier or heavier, it talks to me less and makes less sense when it does, but I’m not convinced this is about Mohab. I’m still feeling nothing as I unzip my backpack, five minutes before the warm-up, and from its dark depths a brand-new pair of hand wraps, bright yellow, pop out at me. I bought them in the lull of that past week, when the world looked relatively habitable and I believed I could understand or be in it. Then the onslaught restarted and I totally forgot about them. 

The first feeling I acknowledge now: beneath my damp amusement at seeing the hand wraps, cloud banks of sorrow like wobbling tofu. I recall that yellow, in Arabic, is the color of fake smiles. Then, tearing them out of plastic, I realize I am scared, I don’t know of what but my hands are shaking, my mouth dry, the ground trembling slightly under my feet. And because of that the mechanical chore of wrapping nylon gauze around one, then the other hand, holding the wrist and thumb in place, padding the knuckles, it all takes on a therapeutic meditativeness. As always at boxing practice, I’m in the groove of panting and sweating before I know it. 

There’s sparring, I’ll be getting punched. To warm up for sessions like this, the coach gets us to jump rope and shadow box by turns. Anxiety slides into exertion as I try to reach fifty counts without tripping, or to add footwork to a longer combo. I’m thinking about neither Gaza nor Mohab but why I chose yellow when I usually choose blue. It’s evocative of the beach—two years since I’ve been anywhere near sea spray—but it’s also evocative of malnourishment, disease, the pale faces of those whose world is rent, their loved ones hacked before their eyes. For just a moment, I imagine talking with Mohab. I remember the solace it gave me.

Not just that time in Dubai but later, when I told him about my love for the writer I met there and he told me about his for the late Student Movement icon Arwa Salih. She was older than him too, and a few years after they broke up, she killed herself. Mohab and I got to talk when we traveled to the same places and when he was on holiday in Egypt, but in between meetings, along with the entire cultural community, we had Facebook. By the time my relationship with that writer ended for real, the 2011 revolution had broken out and, resuming our ongoing social-criticism seminar, Mohab and I would discuss what this new, seemingly ideology-free path could mean for the future. 

I had just published the first big book I wrote, Mohab was writing poems again after a decade’s hiatus, and the historical moment felt generative. “History opening its door can only be a good thing,” I remember him telling me over Facebook chat, “even if at first only monsters and mutants come through.” We both knew who those might be. As a college student Mohab had plunged into and out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and when he lived with Arwa Salih in Cairo he was exposed to the mean-spiritedness of the wannabe autocrats who dominated the left: the Student Movement leaders. He got to see the way they abandoned Arwa to her death, then went on to appropriate it as a loss of their own. 

The Islamists had shown, repeatedly, what conniving populists they were, ready to betray both their fundamentalist principles and the liberal democracy to which they claimed to marry them. Meanwhile, beyond individual meltdowns or demotion to Islamist sidekick in the ranks of the opposition, the Student Movement had imploded without a trace. Mohab and I agreed that, deep down, the status quo had been a kind of synthesis of those two failures, and we embraced the revolution because the new activist community promised a third option. I was working on a new book by then, molding my heartache and the revolution into a Bolañoesque history of the nineties, and talking with Mohab was giving me more than just solace. It was giving me a sympathetic but rigorous readership of one, anecdotes and insights to work with, a sense of political communion.

He was so generous with his emotions that it never occurred to me he could be unsure of himself. But when I failed to secure a publishing contract for the book of essays the two of us thought about writing together, he grew quiet in a way that suggested he took offence. Since you don’t care about collaborating with me—this was the message I eventually got—then I won’t be going out of my way to make it happen. But I did care, and bringing up something important, humbling himself enough to stick with it, should not feel like going out of his way. It was something I’d see him do again and again with his own poetry. Whether in terms of publishing or promoting it, if people didn’t take the initiative—and people almost never do—Mohab wasn’t interested. 

By 2012 the revolution was devolving into a maelstrom. Innocent activists were held without charge while, freshly released from prison, jihadis convicted of terrible atrocities held forth on TV. Protests led to counterprotests, violence to counterviolence. The activists I had trusted to point the way in a new direction turned out to be just as dogmatic, just as illiberal as their Student Movement predecessors. The difference was—whereas members of the Student Movement were Arab nationalist and Marxist, these people were ideologically muddled. They fought for neoliberal reforms in the same breath as they called for world revolution. They insisted on treating the right-wing, rabidly capitalist Muslim Brotherhood as if it was a beacon of Marxist liberation. But they showed the same, no-longer-convincing high-minded hysteria. 

The sense that history’s door could eventually let through something meaningful was fading, though Mohab and I remained virtual comrades in arms. For opposing the Islamists’ rise to power, we both got into fights within revolutionary and intellectual circles. But something in Mohab’s Facebook posts was bothering me. They were getting longer, more pedagogic. They were tending more and more toward abstraction. Whereas before he described the situation as it was, Mohab now spoke with categorical conviction of what it should be. And when he made comparative statements, it was never clear what the yardstick was. Often what he believed were specifically Arab-Muslim problems—that intellectuals turned culture from a way to engage society at large into a form of niche careerism, for example—was equally true of the implied reference, the West. 

His political commentary hadn’t always been that way, or perhaps I just hadn’t noticed? I didn’t disagree with much of what he said, but as soon as I started to respond critically, I could see how badly he took to being argued with. It was then I realized the way he went about publishing and promoting his work reflected the same inability to compromise. In time I tactically withdrew, maintained less intimate contact, and focused on poetry and personal conversation. By the time Mohab showed symptoms of the heart condition that would kill him, I had deleted my Facebook account. When I heard his first heart attack had started literally during a Facebook argument, I laughingly said I told you so. And from then until what I said in that online video, there was a kind of plateau.

For three minutes at a time now, not remembering any of this, I spar with different partners, one after the other. It’s grueling. Training is always tough. With the other things you do, if you stop, you just look bad. But if you’re sparring and you stop you might fall, get hit, you get hurt, you suffer. The only safe way to stop while sparring is to signal I give up, which is humiliating, and even then you might not do it fast enough to avoid your head flying. The anticipation of impact keeps me on my feet however exhausted I am. I block, I parry, I pull back. I try to buy a few seconds in which to think of a sequence of moves. If I have enough energy I dance. And then it’s over—relief, a brief respite before the next round.

It never fails to move me when, at the end of a round or a bout, two people who were just trying to kill each other warmly touch gloves or embrace. The look on their faces moves me: the passionate regard they have for each other. Each knows exactly what the other has been through. 

That’s what makes me think of Mohab during the last round. It makes me think of the poems we wrote to each other. In different ways, we both paraphrased that profane line of Baudelaire’s, famously Catholicized by T S Eliot: Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère. He chastised me for using obscene words and images, and I reminded him of how criminal propriety could be. This was the closest Mohab and I came to blows, and it felt just as warm afterward. 

When I get home that night—my right brow slightly bruised, my chin smarting, my left temple throbbing with a dull pain—I’ll be angry with him. His debilitating sensitivity, his neurotic sense of being in the right. His romanticism—and he might’ve argued with this label, but in the sense of having an idealized view of reality, of measuring everything against an impossible ideal, Mohab was definitely a romantic. But it didn’t have to be that way. There was so much we could’ve said and done if he wasn’t sulking his way to a new embolism. At least he could’ve let his beautiful poems have a wider audience. 

Though there is no connection between them, that anger I feel toward Mohab will dissolve into the rage I’ve been feeling about Gaza, or the rage will dissolve into the anger, till I can no longer tell whether it’s Mohab or the world that is maddening me, the kids being killed or the fact it is no longer possible to drive alongside the Nile at night with him in the passenger seat, laughing and theorizing about the fellahin. He was in that passenger seat when he confessed to the love affair that was to end his marriage, eventually bringing him back from Kuwait even though it was over almost as soon as it started, refusing to tell me who it was. 

Mohab died alone and more isolated, it suddenly seems to me, than ever before in his life. That is the punch. The full terror of his loss will register when I feel it. Then something like shame will start dripping, burning me inside.

TWO

“On the day of his mother’s funeral in 1811,” writes Kasia Boddy in her definitive Boxing: A Cultural History, “Byron called for his page to bring his boxing gloves for his daily exercise rather than follow the coffin to the family vault. The sparring that day, the page recalled, was more violent than usual.”

For Romantic poets, Boddy is saying, sparring is a mourning rite. 

I too sparred hard minutes after getting news of a dear person’s death, a poet friend named Mohab, though it didn’t feel like mourning. Later, I started to wonder about boxing and writing in relation to dying. Poetry had been part of my sense of self for much longer than any sport, and it was a familiar way of dealing with death, a kind of defense against it. 

Whatever else it was, on the other hand, boxing was a form of violence. In the ring, Antonio Monda writes, violence “has found its alibi to become unpunishable.” Boxing, he says, “not only transcends sport, but also ethics. The ring is the only place in the world where a man can kill another without being pursued by the law.” 

Now I could see I was drawn to boxing because it acknowledged a murderous impulse that I understood to be part of me and, however partial or faulty, provided a framework to accommodate it. Its existence belied the notion that being civilized, even being a poet precluded the capacity for physical violence, which considering what modern civilization had wrought in the way of catastrophic destruction had always struck me as hypocritical. Is this the reason that I box? To feel real? 

What I wanted to know was if this mode of being could also serve as a way to mourn the dead—by working as an emotional release, reminding practitioners of the fragility of the human body, the inevitability of its demise . . . The question made me think about my life, about human life in general, as a mourning rite. Then again, writing is not just a defense against death. It’s a defense against violence, both boxing-level and psychopathic violence. Writing, I feel, frees the victim of their victimhood. By giving their subjectivity form, honoring their reality, it liberates them of a space in which, unwritten, they will be confined. 

To speak of Gaza, for example—even as a mere witness—is to render Gaza a reality beyond the facts and figures of so much unnecessary cruelty. And in the absence of the possibility to fight meaningfully on behalf of Gaza, that feels important. It feels like an effective response to a violence that not only metes out suffering and death but also figuratively flattens those who suffer it. Turns them into a blank page.

“At the root of the sympathetic connection between writing and fighting,” writes Josh Rosenblatt, journalist and mixed martial arts practitioner, “lies solitude. . . . The terror of physical destruction and the terror of the blank page are the same thing.” Not because the blank page indicates the same kind of defeat, but because its blankness—like the inability to keep your existence intact in the face of an assault—implies a kind of silence, of preexistent emptiness, gaining the upper hand.  

Summoning all those ghostly opponents to spar with on the page or screen, to write is to confront your terror exactly as you do when you fight. The boxer-poet Geffrey Davis—referencing Li-Young Lee—says martial arts are ultimately an attempt to be safe from harm; and one way this can be achieved is when by sheer force of your presence the person intending to harm you is compelled to show you love. “Perhaps, then,” Davis extrapolates, “writing is the highest form of martial arts because of its ability to embody love.” 

Perhaps the raw romanticism of boxers—their extreme moods, their brittle bravado, their all-or-nothing outlook on the world—ultimately does hold something of poetry’s essence. This is what Roberto Bolaño said when he was asked the question:

I don’t know. I don’t know what poetry is. . . . Poetry for me is an act . . . it’s a gesture more than an act—of adolescence. A fragile, unguarded adolescence that bets what little it has on something it is not known very well what it is. [He almost paused.] And generally loses.

My poet friend was like that—something unbelievably fragile about him. When I reviewed his book my piece couldn’t be published on schedule, and he was petulant as a child waiting for it. If someone said they liked the first half of his poem more than the second, he would ghost them. He spoke constantly of the need for intellectuals to connect with the masses, to be approachable and unpretentious, but the social critique he published was abstruse even to his literary friends. 

I never confronted him about it but sometimes I felt he unwittingly embodied the object of his censure. “There is an extremely fine distinction between the writer creating interactive and critical images of reality as a way to connect with humanity at large,” he once said, “and the writer creating those images to hide behind them, to shield himself against society.” In the end he died hiding—shielded even from me. And, aware of the unresolved violence between us, I didn’t know what to feel. 

My poet friend is one of many Arab writers who remain nonexistent in the West even though their work is of the same caliber as figures like the German writer W. G. Sebald. Something about Sebald’s earnest intellectualism, dry humor, and bookish distance from worldly things reminds me of my poet friend, that’s why he’s the example I think of. 

Mohab’s death says something about the Arabs’ absence from Western consciousness: the fact that, while what happens in our part of the world is always of interest and often in the news, our existence as active agents of our own destinies remains unmentionable. But there is another thing about Sebald that feels relevant to mourning my poet friend: the theme for which he is most vigorously celebrated is never mentioned in his books, not once. 

After his first visit to America—it was some five months before 9/11—Sebald was killed in a car accident almost as soon as he returned to England, where he lived.  “I’ve always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, the vilification of minorities, the attempt well-nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people,” he told Michael Silverblatt while there. “And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it’s practically impossible to do this. To write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible.”

Maybe my initial, blank response to a dear person’s death reflected the same kind of allusive silence. Not that I hadn’t written directly about the terrible things that were happening in the background. But maybe, when I felt I didn’t know how to mourn my poet friend, it was because his death felt like a way to take stock of those things without mentioning them—making Sebaldian sense of them—because a friend’s death is to the demise of whole cities full of people what boxing is to war. It is an image small and bearable, indeed beautiful enough to write about. A kind of emblem. 

“For some commentators,” Kasia Boddy writes, the function of the games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad “is to ‘purify’ combat—that is, to imitate it but conceal its true deadly character.” Likewise Monda: “In every match, even the poorest and most provincial, boxers repeat the challenges of knights and soldiers, ready to do anything for their country, for their honor, and sometimes, for survival.”

Mourning was a major subject of early Arabic verse, and it often involved talk of the enemy’s inferiority as a warrior compared to the greatness of the dead man, the valor of the dead man’s tribe compared to the enemy’s, or the necessity of revenge. James Montgomery, one of the translators of the seventh-century poet al Khansaʾ, the most famous practitioner of the genre, wrote movingly about connecting with her work after a car hit his seventeen-year-old son, immobilizing him and changing both their lives forever. In grief, Montgomery writes:

Experience, memory, artifice and art are confronted by the absence of comfort, and earlier versions of a poet’s selves are rehearsed and re-inscribed. . . . An event like the one I am describing rips to shreds the veil of the commonplace and the mundane, and memory is charged with the task of remembering the future . . . for such events reveal to us that the future is little more than a memory.

That must be what I was doing while wondering what I felt: rehearsing earlier versions of myself that include my poet friend, remembering a future that had already been erased where I spar knowing he’s alive, and where boxing isn’t wondering how to mourn him while feeling unbelievably unsafe. 

Perhaps feeling unsafe is the very core of grief, grief denuded of its usual trappings. It’s the condition of being that impels me to write and to fight, whatever else it is. The more aware of death you are the more your hands shake—even as you actively fend off the feeling by doing what makes you feel safer. In the face of death you realize that activity is but an analgesic, a distraction from fear.

In the emblematic sense, a poem is a priceless thing, but I’ve often been frustrated and offended by the onslaught of poetry-positive statements I’ve encountered online: Poems will save humanity; Poems can change the world; Politicians and military leaders are afraid of poets . . . As if poetry could ever have a concrete footprint in the shifting, deadly terrain of human misery—it’s insulting.

According to the Syrian poet Adonis, the most emphatically modernist figure in contemporary Arabic letters, a poem is an exercise in “the power to dream,” including of a better world, but unless it functions as polemic, propaganda—and then what will be left of its substance?—it cannot be expected to interface with anything wider than an individual consciousness. 

In times of war, a poem emerges sovereign out of the filthy morass of subservience and pain. At best, it can be a testimony, an artifact of subjective power, an incantation that sensitizes and consoles, but has little relevance to consensual reality. Only the worst verse, it seems to me, will step directly into the political ring to aid in—generally futile—activism while the violence of history goes down. 

All known odes by al Khansaʾ, perhaps the most famous of the female pre-Islamic poets, are laments for her two brothers killed on the battlefield, and they almost all open with the poet commanding her eyes to shed tears. But, whether extolling her brothers’ skills or urging their kinsmen to avenge their death, her grief involves as much violence as sorrow. “Offense rippled your heart,” she writes in praise of one brother, “you who like a blazing arrowhead irradiated night.”

A perceived offense made my poet friend stop talking to me. In poetry, he used to say, attitude—tone is everything. Our feud didn’t pretend to be poetry any more than it involved fists or blows, but maybe my tone had the effect of a nasty hook to the head. Yet his refusal to get past that moment was an equally vicious right-hand. It was, if not a violence in its own right, then a terminal blank page, a nonexistence, because there was no way to make contact once he died. Even while he was alive, after offending him, there was no way to break through the estrangement. 

In The Fight, talking about Muhammad Ali’s preparations for The Rumble in the Jungle, Norman Mailer says, “In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. . . . The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.” The boredom to which my poet friend confined himself created a detestation for what might be called success. It created an impatience with the mediocrity, hypocrisy, and easy practicality of his milieu, and a violence to stay clear of it even at the cost of being unseen. I suppose by disappointing or—to his mind—disrespecting him, I became part of that milieu. But where had he gone from there? In “The Cruelest Sport” Joyce Carol Oates describes the ideal conclusion of a fight as “a knockout in the least ambiguous sense—one man collapsed and unconscious, the other leaping about the ring with his gloves raised in victory, the very embodiment of adolescent masculine fantasy.”

This image has come to sum up the end of my relationship with my poet friend, though it is never clear in my mind which of us is on the canvas, which jumping around with his arms raised. It is not clear whose defeat his death marks, whether it was the terminal blow he gave me or an unconscious murder on my part. 

To field a punch in boxing, you either intercept it with your hand or dodge it with your head. Instead of countering, the way you’re supposed to after your adversary makes contact, my poet friend dodged me so deftly I was no longer there for him. As if I’d disappeared.

I think that happened with every one of my poet friend’s fights. The immobilized body of his adversary would disappear while he stood alone, surrounded by the ropes, staring at the empty canvas, wondering where on earth everyone’s gone. Maybe the ring itself vanished. The pain he felt would persist in the form of tremendous poems, memories of the future, but afterward—quietus. Oates doesn’t go so far as to say the knockout should be fatal but she might as well. 

Before his 1947 World Welterweight Championship fight with Jimmy Doyle, Sugar Ray Robinson, is supposed to have dreamt he killed his adversary. Taking it as an omen, the legendary fighter refused to step in the ring until a priest persuaded him it would be okay. That evening in the eighth round, when Robinson knocked him out, the twenty-two-year-old Doyle never got up again. Robinson went through a long legal battle to prove it was not his fault but, when your punch has killed your fellow fighter, how are you supposed to grieve? 

When I heard my poet friend died, I struggled to reconstruct our time together: the camaraderie that enabled us to step into the ring in the first place, the initial exchange of jabs and catches, slips, what I said in that online video turning into the right hand that stopped him, but also his refusal to counter. The only thing that was vivid in my mind was the power of his poetry, which was a different kind of blow. To mourn him, I said to myself, just read him—that’s all you have to do: to read him as if you never met him, accepting that he will be no longer. And that is the way it is.

I’m more and more convinced the real fight is to live with the blows—the lies, the betrayals, the sorrow: all that can happen in the monstrous and unending ring of human relations—knowing that you will inevitably lose. 

“Obviously, victory is often nothing more than an illusion destined to become a bitter disappointment,” Monda says. And Mailer: “For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread.”

Now I’m reading my poet friend again, letting him hurt me as I bear witness to his existence and remember what was happening when he died. Embracing dread.

“I am twenty-four years old when they amputate Baba’s foot.” So begins Mai Serhan’s I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir. She sits by her father’s bedside in a cramped bedroom in Beirut, trying to care for him, but she cannot mend what is broken: he is a man severed from both land and body, his missing foot a brutal, haunting echo of a lost country. 

Then the story takes flight. We follow father and daughter to China, at the cusp of its global economic rise, where he is said to have built an export empire; to Abu Dhabi in 1981, in an expat compound “flanked by Palestinian aunts and cousins left and right;” to salons of turn-of-the-century Cairo; to Beirut’s war-scarred streets, cemeteries, and underground clubs; to Dubai’s dizzying towers and international ad agencies. Yet everywhere, they remain unanchored—except to the one place Serhan has never been, the place her father can never return: Acre, Palestine, before 1948. “Everywhere I go, I go looking for my village in Acre,” Serhan writes, “and when I don’t find it, I close my eyes, I imagine it for us.” 

Bringing this razed village to life is at once an act of radical imagination and meticulous research—the recreation of an origin story. Writing from post-memory, Serhan carries the traces of a home she has never inhabited, while engaging with oral histories and archival accounts. As a poet, she revives this place in language, layering epistolary notes, essayistic vignettes, and lyrical reflection, writing in fragments that echo how generations of Palestinian families are alienated by the rupture of exile. She weaves her family’s historical narrative seamlessly into the story, evoking a cyclical rhythm so that no matter where she travels, the story always returns to Palestine. 

— Olivia Katrandjian for Guernica 

Olivia Katrandjian: This is a deeply personal memoir, but it also speaks to the collective story of Palestine and its diaspora. What motivated you to take on such a task?

Mai Serhan: No one had written a story about two Palestinians in China, which is where my main plot unfolds. It pushed the theme of alienation, that cutting off, to its extreme. I didn’t see myself reflected in much of Palestinian literature either; the olive tree, the key of return, the freedom fighter—these were not metaphors that spoke to my lived experience. I belong to a generation twice removed from the origin home. We navigate different metaphors now; airplanes, transit spaces, international calling codes. We carry Palestine intellectually and emotionally, even as we remain physically cut off from it.

I began writing in 2021, before October 7, at a time when the Palestinian cause was practically forgotten. Palestinians spoke out about their suffering under Israeli occupation, but the world largely ignored it. The siege, apartheid, and settlements were met with silence. One of my goals was to reach the Western reader who had never encountered “Palestine” in their education or media, or who had only seen it through a distorted lens. 

On a personal level, I was still grieving the loss of my father and the way exile had shaped his life. He never found his footing after his expulsion in 1948. He passed away in transit, in a hotel room in Bangkok, far from any place or people he knew. These in-between spaces are not meant to hold memory, and in them, his life seemed to dissolve. His death, in that hotel room, exemplified a vanishing; a person passing through the world without leaving a trace, without acknowledgement. Disappearance, for me, is endemic to the Palestinian experience, not only in the loss of land, but the erosion of continuity, recognition, and trace. I wanted his life, and his death, to be accounted for.

In his poem “Identity Card,” Mahmoud Darwish writes, Put it on record / I am an Arab; I felt the need to put my own account on record as well, to acknowledge, to honor, to remember, and to preserve. 

More than anything, this project was a way to connect with the roughly seven million Palestinians living in the diaspora. My story is specific to me, but it gestures toward a broader Palestinian condition. I hoped it would resonate, make someone across the ocean feel less alone. 

Olivia Katrandjian: At the end of your memoir, you do exactly that—you “put it on record,” as Darwish writes,  with the words, “I am from Acre.” The memoir then breaks into a poem, formatted as a column in the middle of the page to suggest a road, or a roadblock. The sudden switch to poetry coincides with your proclamation of your identity, in a moment of ownership and reclamation. Was this your intention?

Mai Serhan: Yes, that moment marks the point at which I finally take control of a narrative that had, until then, been overwhelmingly chaotic and stripped of agency. It is also the only place in the book where I speak directly about Gaza. The shift to poetry felt necessary because poetry demands a different kind of attention. This change in mode announces a rupture with what came before and signals a step into my own authorial voice. Because the memoir up to that point is full of digressions, placing the poem at the center of the page was a deliberate way of grounding the reader, both visually and formally.

Olivia Katrandjian: Tell me about the creative process behind writing this book. 

Mai Serhan: I had been carrying this story for over twenty years, long enough to reflect and gain perspective. By the time I was ready to write it, it felt like a full-term baby, ready to be born. From the moment I began thinking about its shape, certain things were instinctive. I knew the personal and the political would be inextricably linked; that the main plot would unfold in China, which naturally presented itself as a metaphor for displacement; that the narrative would be fragmented, mirroring the fractured Palestinian experience in the diaspora; that it would resist a linear path in order to remain faithful to the journey; and that it would be a hybrid work—both because the Palestinian experience exists outside the conventions of genre, and because, as a writer, I prefer to draw freely across forms and modes to achieve the most powerful effect.

I worked largely from family narratives that were handed down to me, literature I had read, and whatever research I found about my village, and when the story required me to fill in gaps, I drew on post-memory, dramatic techniques, language, and imagination. To me, post-memory is the space between knowing and imagining. I have never been to my village in Akka and I did not experience Palestine first-hand, but through proximity, careful observation and interaction with family, I inherited a cultural reservoir of images, behaviours, tonalities, and ways of living. Most of all, I inherited an incurable longing, and that emotional weight has shaped my inner landscape and sense of self. That is why you’ll find the story moving through an affective terrain, where the intimate and the geopolitical are completely intertwined. To imagine, then, was a process of bridging the gap, between what I know and feel, and what could be and what is possible. 

Once I realized there were three plotlines, the question became how to create the narrative braid. The braiding itself, however, was largely intuitive, connecting the fragments through associative thought. I was able to jump, temporally and spatially, between pre-1948 Akka, China in 2000, and Cairo in the 1980s, sometimes through an image, at other times through a feeling, an idea, or a word. The structure first came to me as a dramatic arc, with all three plotlines complicating, rising, and resolving in tandem, echoing one another throughout. The traditional dramatic arc was essential because it held the larger narrative together in ways that its inner workings—largely poetic in sensibility—didn’t.

I paid attention to the music of language and how it reflects mood and atmosphere, creating immersion. I worked with vivid, specific, and sensory detail to turn what I imagined of my family history into something concrete, something the mind’s eye can clearly see and feel.

Olivia Katrandjian: You began writing this memoir in 2021 and completed it before October 7, 2023. How did the political situation impact your publication process?

Mai Serhan: I secured representation with one of London’s most esteemed literary agencies in 2023. By October of that year, the manuscript was ready to be pitched. The Frankfurt Book Fair would have been the perfect opportunity to pitch it, but the organizers  chose to spotlight Israeli voices while canceling four Palestinian events, including one for Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. At the London Book Fair the following March, my agent told me publishers were looking for work that sells— self-help, cookbooks, and influencer content—while Palestine remained a “sensitive” topic. By mid 2024, half a year into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the publishing industry abroad, namely in Europe and America, was still catching up to the urgency of the moment, and I did not want to wait. So I pivoted toward the regional market, seeking publication in the Arab world.

When I pitched the manuscript to the American University in Cairo Press, it received an instant and unanimous yes, and the publication date was set just nine months later, which is exceptional in the publishing world. It felt like the book had found its home. There was a discussion about how to classify the work and whether labeling it a memoir might make it harder to sell, but I wanted ownership of the story, and my publisher agreed it was compelling enough to stand on its own, even though I was not a public figure.

Olivia Katrandjian: Palestinians are expected to be perfect victims: they must endure the injustice of occupation without resisting in order to gain sympathy from the international community, an approach which leaves out the everyday complexities and contradictions that make Palestinian lives fully human. In stories, the best characters are often the most complicated ones. How did you navigate this tension while writing your memoir?

Mai Serhan: I agree. The literature that has stayed with me most is always filled with conflicted characters who carry both light and shadow. They come alive when we explore their fears, vulnerabilities, motives, and contradictions. My relationship with my father was deeply conflicted as well; it was tender and anguished at once. He was a victim of a great historical injustice, yes, but he never allowed it to define him. Even after his foot was amputated, he didn’t give in. He went back to China and worked just as hard. This resilience is what makes him so compelling to me, both as a daughter and as a writer. He loved us, without question, but his capacity to love was constrained by his own trauma. That kind of love will end up hurting the people closest to you. 

My father didn’t just lose a home, he lost his sense of orientation, both geographically and emotionally. He came from a long lineage of landowners, so his connection to Akka ran profoundly deep, and haunted him wherever he went. The Serhan family were prominent leaders; oral histories, literature, and family accounts all attest to this. For this name to be rendered weightless and without currency meant that every attempt at reinvention, wherever he went, ultimately failed—including his effort to build a home for his own family. This is why the origin home in Akka is at the heart of the story. It makes sense of the scars. This is also why the narrative weave is so important, to juxtapose these events and in doing so, allow you to draw your own conclusions. 

To write this story from within was, for me, to free it, to affirm that we are allowed to define ourselves on our own terms, not through an external gaze or in reaction to a dominant narrative. Agency and authorship reside there.

But beyond the political considerations, the decision to write is always prompted by a question. Mine was, how do I reconcile? I wanted to offer grace, to humanize my father by looking at who he was through what he’s endured, and the coping mechanisms he built to survive. His violent dislocation in 1948 shaped him, and in turn, shaped me.

Olivia Katrandjian: As you try to reconcile with not only the different sides of your father, but with your shared history, the memoir moves restlessly across time and place, evoking a sense of running. Decades after being exiled from his Palestinian village, your father was still trying to outrun his ghosts, and you seem to inherit these ghosts from him, this need to run. At one point, you write, “Baba, I know you don’t want to look back at tapered leaves or torched homes, but it is all in you, there is nowhere to hide. Time is about to stop, so stop running, hear me out.” Did writing this memoir allow you to confront your past in a way that your father was unable to do? 

Mai Serhan: Yes, absolutely. My father showed me what I did not want to be. He was a chronic escapist who paid a terribly high price for always running, for never confronting the past and its enduring effect. I ran in the opposite direction, backwards, toward that wound, to process what he could not. Writing the memoir became a way of facing what he had always suppressed, of telling the story to heal him, even after his death.

Reading Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun was a turning point. The idea that one can stay alive through storytelling and recounting the lives of Palestinians one tale at a time, struck me deeply. Writing became my way of restoring what history and exile had scattered, assembling fragments of memory, giving voice to the silence that haunted my family, and carving out a place where we can exist fully, even if on the page. 

Olivia Katrandjian: You carve out a place for your family to exist, together, on the page, and in doing so, you paint a picture of Acre in evocative detail: you describe a spring as “steaming hot in winter, like bubbling honeycomb,” and how “the mountains would fade at sunset and blend in with the colors of the sky, orange and lavender.” What was your research process like?

Mai Serhan: Well, I have never been to Palestine, so I had little material to work with. My father spoke of horse stables and a wine cellar, but rarely elaborated. My aunt, now the only surviving member of my family’s Nakba generation, lives in Beirut. She has dementia and no longer remembers who I am; I have to remind her every few minutes. Yet she remembers Palestine vividly, recounting her life there and her exodus again and again. I never saw her fading memory as a limitation. On the contrary, I came to understand it as a living testament to the systematic erasure of our history. I wanted to embed memory loss into the narrative and explore a path forward for our generation through post-memory. It created an urgent need to gather the fragments before they disappeared.

In 2021, I went to Beirut to interview a few key people. I visited Abu Fadi, my father’s only confidante in south Beirut. I met him near the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp, where ninety-five percent of the refugees come from my village, al-Kabri. He gave me a book written by Badr Eldin al-Jishi, another refugee from al-Kabri, titled al-Kabri: A Heavenly Grove. The cover depicted a lush, hidden garden overflowing with fruit, which to my mind was a vision of paradise. Inside, it documented everything: the village’s families, maps, songs, food, weddings, funerals, and daily life. Through it, I learned that my grandfather had been a widely influential political leader, something I hadn’t fully grasped from family stories. One detail captivated me: al-Kabri had four natural springs that together formed the largest water source in Palestine. It reminded me of the four rivers flowing beneath Man’s feet in the Bible, allowing me to imagine the village as something almost mythical, a paradise lost. Abu Fadi also introduced me to his aunt, Hajjeh Fatmeh, who was 94 at the time. She had worked as a household helper in my grandparents’ home in Acre. She described the house to me, its rooms, rhythm, the day-to-day life within it. She remembered everything about that fateful day in 1948: the panic, the hurried decisions, the moment they climbed onto a truck headed to Saida in Lebanon, the exodus itself.

Olivia Katrandjian: In your memoir, you merge political and historical narratives with your personal story, writing in vignettes that are at times prose and at times poetry. In this way, your inner fragmentation is mirrored on the page. How did you use stylistic choices to convey greater meaning? 

Mai Serhan: From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional memoir. I used the lyrical precision of poetry to reimagine al-Kabri, the epistolary form to address my father intimately, and the essay form to create moments of pause, breathing spaces for reflection when the story needed it.

Genre, for me, is both a guide and a constraint. It offers structure but also limits what can be said. As a Palestinian, my experience lives outside those boundaries, in the margins. I wanted my structural and linguistic choices to reflect that, to inhabit uncertainty, to bring the rupture I feel in life onto the page.

The memoir’s structure mirrors lapses in memory and the digressive paths of family history, destabilizing space and time at every turn, but there is also a solid dramatic arc that holds it all together.  

Language, too, became a site of alienation. My father spoke in the Palestinian dialect while I spoke Egyptian, creating an internal dissonance that plays out in the text. There are Qur’anic references grounding the story in Arab-Islamic identity, while my time in China added another linguistic layer—our translator in China spoke only classical Arabic and Cantonese, unable to grasp my Egyptian vernacular. I weave in classical Arabic and Chinese dialogue intentionally, to make the reader feel a measure of the same linguistic estrangement I lived.

Olivia Katrandjian: Your prose is incredibly lyrical. How did being a poet influence your prose writing, and are there other writers who blend poetry and prose who have inspired you?

Mai Serhan: Poetry taught me how to listen to the heartbeat of words, to pacing, to feel a temperature and see textures; it taught me how to breathe through words. It demands precision and whim at once so that what you deliver is the truest possible experience for the reader.

My memoir is also an act of imagination; lyricism gave me the freedom to envision a village that once was, to capture its abundance, beauty and joy. Infusing the work with sensory detail allowed me to inch closer, to intimate what I’ve never experienced for myself.

Writers who have inspired me in this respect include Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Maggie Nelson, Ariana Harwicz, Anne Carson and Hala Alyan.

Olivia Katrandjian: As the descendent of Armenian Genocide survivors, I feel a deep responsibility to tell the stories of my people. The majority of Armenians live in diaspora, severed from their homeland. As Armenian American author Nancy Kricorian wrote, “Our stories are a homeland.” You, too, are a member of a people scattered by violence and exile—what does that mean to you as a writer, and how have you navigated that responsibility? 

Mai Serhan: Since you’ve drawn the connection between the Armenian genocide and the Palestinian genocide, I want to begin by saying that one of the few lights in these bleak times has been working in solidarity with Armenian writers like Nancy Kricorian, Nancy Agabian, Sophia Armen, Raffi Wartanian, and Gina Srmabekian. I also want to thank you, especially, for the brilliant work you do through the International Armenian Literary Alliance to bring our voices together.

Darwish’s poem “Who Remembers the Armenians?” tells us: I remember them / and I ride the nightmare bus with them / every night. That line has always stayed with me. Solidarity matters because it amplifies struggles that might otherwise go unheard. It brings new eyes, new ears, and new allies, and it challenges the isolation that comes from being scattered, building networks of recognition so that the Palestinian story is not forgotten. It also brings practical support, helping protect activists locally, and inspires me creatively through the exchange of ideas and perspectives.

As a Palestinian writer, I feel an ethical responsibility to write. Writing is how I carry my Palestinian-ness, how I say no, how I bear witness. Literature isn’t a frill or ornament; it’s here to stir, to unsettle, to connect. To remain coherent amid chaos and erasure is, in itself, an act of resistance. Solidarity reminds me that this work isn’t only mine, it’s part of a larger, shared humanity, a recognition that oppression and displacement anywhere matter to all of us. And it validates the emotional and moral weight of the stories I carry, the ones I feel compelled to put on the page.

Olivia Katrandjian: ​In her book, Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza​, Mischa Geracoulis​ writes of ​the violence inflicted on ​Armenians and Palestinians in ​Artsakh and the Gaza Strip, ​respectively, and the attempts to not only erase a people, but to destroy cultural heritage. She writes, “The removal of a targeted group’s cultural heritage removes proof of that group’s existence, ultimately distorting reality.​” In writing and publishing your memoir, you are working against this ​erasure, correcting the historical record. What were some of the misrepresentations you chose to confront in your story?

Mai Serhan: Oh, there are many. The intentional structuring of a steady, false flow of information, meant to deny, rename, smear, and endlessly rewrite the script, has been in the works for over a century. The phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” popularized by Christian restorationists in the 19th century and later adopted by Zionism, is one example. The memoir challenges this claim by transforming the physical homeland into an emotional and psychic terrain, proving, in other words, an intimate knowledge of place.

Another example is the statement attributed to Ben-Gurion: “The old will die and the young will forget.” As a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora, who works from post-memory, I see this memoir as a testament to our generation’s resolve—to remember and to create, across generations, through a growing, deliberate, and sustained effort. Israel has long cemented itself as the archetypal victim, but this memoir refuses to victimize its people. Instead, it excavates the depths of injustice and, as you said, presents imperfect victims. There is no need to perform victimhood, only to be human.

There is also the myth that we were uncivilized, a notion used to justify occupation. Yet the memoir describes a beautiful alternative to the “modern project”: an idyllic village abundant with fruit, where people took root. It had mosques and churches, schools and factories, a currency and a passport, political leaders and families with deep ancestry.

Finally, there is the false claim that we sold our land and left voluntarily. The memoir offers a factual account, naming those involved in the selling of our land: how, in 1935, a company was founded in Beirut specifically to sell land in southern Lebanon and Palestine. Its founders were then Prime Minister Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab, Wasfi al-Din Qadura, Joseph Khadij, Michel Sarji, Mourad Danna, and Elias al-Haj. The company purchased land from wealthy Arabs who vacationed in Palestine, offering extortionate sums, then transferred the titles to the British and, in turn, to the Jewish National Fund. No Palestinian left by choice. We were terrorized and driven out. As Warsan Shire writes in her poem “Home,” no one leaves home unless home chases you / fire under feet. It baffles me how this simple truth is still so difficult to understand.

Olivia Katrandjian: This memoir is addressed to your father. Who is your ideal reader, and what do you hope they take away from your story?

Mai Serhan: I don’t think there’s just one ideal reader. This memoir is an open invitation to anyone willing to read and be moved; to step in and come away changed, even slightly. At its core, the book speaks to Palestinians, especially those in the diaspora who carry a sense of home they’ve never fully known. But it’s also for anyone who has lived between places, who understands displacement in any form.

It’s also for readers who are drawn to experiments in form, voice, and language; those who appreciate lyricism and hybridity.

I see the memoir as a kind of storm, one that unsettles everything so that you might see the world more clearly afterward. My ideal reader is anyone willing to enter that storm, to let it move through them, and to emerge seeing the world, and perhaps themselves, a little differently.

R had practiced contract shepherding as an ancestral livelihood from when he was five. His father had started at that age too, like his father. They say it was passed on for several centuries, from one generation to another. From late spring to early fall each year R lived in high-altitude meadows and pastures with the herd. He spent his entire childhood and early youth in the landscapes mostly veiled behind the soft blanket of mist, under the blue endless sky and unguarded land. The boundaries were blurred between one hill and another, between earth and sky, between land and water. He prized the company of K, his younger brother, over all else. R knew that although K’s desire to climb these high mountains alone never dulled, K loved to walk with him in the large meadows dotted with wild flowers and lie down on the grass for hours. When the rain trickled and the drops fell on their faces and necks, they would sit and wait for the sun to appear from behind the clouds and flood the meadows and mountain tops with its warmth and glow. When the rain ceased and the earth dried up, K would rise, and walk through the meadows nestled between rolling hills and deep forests. He loved the scent of lilies and tulips, followed the butterflies from one flower to another, and watched the eagles making circles into the sky. 

The two brothers had unmatched sensibilities: R would get up at five o’clock in the morning and walk around without being moved by the twitter of birds, or the hum of insects. K would wake up late in the morning, touch the dewdrops sparkling on the leaves, and watch ceaselessly the horizons that separated mountains from sky. He would then chase the clouds that carried him across the streams and the fields until he arrived exhausted to meet R with tea and lunch. Often K carried his camera. R enjoyed using his brother’s camera too. His out of focus blurry landscapes with simple lighting were compelling. R imagined the landscapes rising above the ground, like a heron on slender stilts, ready to take flight and get lost in the clouds. 

On several occasions, out of curiosity, K asked his brother, “Why blurry?”

R always replied, “That is how it was in historical imagination—undefined horizons fused together along the stream of time.”

R tended nearly a hundred sheep every summer. His father would settle the contract with the village farmer and bargain the price. He was accountable if the sheep went missing. The missing sheep translated to theft, no matter how he tried to justify it. In the case of death, dead bodies were offered as evidence. A dead sheep was hung on the wooden staff dug deep in the ground. The birds foraged and fought at carcasses, making merry over carrion. The smell of the rotten flesh whirled across the meadows for days. That odour, that landscape of disgust, choked R. When the silence of the dead enveloped the dark of the night R’s heart would tremble. He suffered from vertigo whenever he watched K photographing the dead sheep, hanging by their tails and heads drooping down. Their eyes popped out, as if scrutinizing the earth curiously to examine what was erased after they vanished from the living world. 

During the full moon nights, the silhouette of the dead sheep and the thousands of maggots feeding on its body camped in the labyrinth of shadows falling on the foliage. R felt the eyes of the dead follow him in his solitude, and he heard the dead whispering in his ears what was within unspoken and outside obliterated. In the daytime, when the sheep grazed, he would lift a lamb onto his shoulders and chase the butterflies until he stumbled, fell, and rolled cheerfully on the grass. 

When the mountains appeared unmoving, the moonlight gleamed down white and silver upon the grass, slithering through the hanging bodies of the dead sheep. From a distance, R watched the head of the dead sheep, its mouth agape and its expression uncanny, and felt dread rise in him. K would take a closer look at their melancholic expressions that chained him to the abyss of uncertainty and reminded him of existence as unreal and imaginary in that landscape. 

“The corpses are hung to clear off any doubts that they exist no more.”

“Death completes the circle and ends all the doubts.”

“Why make a spectacle of the dead though?”

“Maybe as a warning. The contemporary believers have a short-lived memory.”

“It’s irrefutable evidence that the sheep once existed, no matter how insignificant their visibility was!”

“Visibility is enigmatic.” 

“Yet appearance preserves existence that nourishes the sense of continuity. Appearance is almost like a promise—it creates metaphors.”

“But what about the disappeared ones?”

“Disappearance ends all possibilities of narrating stories.”

Once a lamb went missing in the mountains. R turned pale. He was filled with horror. He knew the lamb had disappeared. The sun was hanging on the horns of the cliff, about to settle down. He told K. They both paused for a while, looked everywhere and decided to leave at once. R knew the track to the big mountain, draped with dry flower petals, lured the sheep. He beckoned K to follow the sloppy direction. R dwelled on his memories. The fallen flower petals had faded away. It was painful for R to tread along the way. He remembered how his beloved used to create ephemeral and seductive patterns from the dried flower petals in her love letters. Now here he walked past the memory and remembered how she vanished from his life without a word. Grief descended upon R. His eyes welled up with tears. The split images of the flowers, the grass, and the shadows of pine trees appeared as apparitions. As they began climbing higher, the ground beneath them turned into rocks. The slope sucked in the moonlight. K noticed how their footsteps had altered the muted beauty of the meadow covered with large swathes of daisies. R was growing impatient and irritable with the turmoil of his disillusionment. As the brothers arrived at the end of the mountain, the drops of night rain transformed into icicles that hit their faces hard, melting down their necks. Fading into silence, there was something ominous in the darkness around them. Suddenly, a fierce thunder followed by a flash of lightning unsettled the stillness. 

“K, don’t you think that the beasts are roaring their resentment?”

“I asked you last time what the worst they can get by with is?”

“I have witnessed so many disappear,” said R.

“How agonizing it must be for the witness to live with the memory that envisages only necessary absence!”

The relentless rain began hammering the mountain slope. Streams of water and mud rolling down the hill swallowed the track. The air became heavier with the smell of decaying leaves and moss. It clung to their bodies and clothes. 

“Do you remember how they disappear?” asked K. 

“I imagine that over the years I have protested less. I loathe all my memories and I rarely come this way.”

“The dead may turn into ghosts and wander, but what happens to the disappeared?”

“It used to be a beautiful threshold on the track where we used to walk past. I remember vividly how the horizons would expand as the flowers, the grasslands, and the trees would be engulfed by the steeper cliffs. During the night the fireflies lit the path and there would be no nocturnal sound of footsteps.”

“Eventually the men in boots started appearing, and they knew we had no protectors.”

K was pulled in by the spell of the mountains. An emptiness came over him. He asked R, “Shall we come back tomorrow?”

“We would have to start all over from the beginning and take a different way.”

“I know the story of the disappeared.”

“Do you know the geography?”

“Should we try going backwards?”

“I remember how we crawled and soared high in those mountains! My memory through those steep edges guards my nostalgia.”

“There was an unfinished cliff that overlooked the valleys. Slowly it shifted itself elsewhere. It was a time when one could still embrace the reason to exist in between the lines.”

“It is evident now. We own nothing, not even a flock of sheep.”

There was a long lull. Lavender wafted as the ashen fog floated. Everything disappeared. R and K made their way back.    

The sun was up. After walking for a couple of hours both brothers stopped for a rest in the open land, whose vastness added a sense of freedom for R and boredom for K. They were tired. K ran his fingers through his long hair, now drenched in sweat. He opened the knot of the cloth around his waist and tied it on his forehead. ‘If only you trusted me with my skill with a haircut…’ K laughed out loud before R could complete his sentence. They ate lunch and fell fast asleep. K remembered walking up the mountain while his eyelids drooped and he was climbing with an iron clock hanging by the rusted chain around his neck. He heard R calling him from behind. As K was about to turn back, he slipped into the honeycomb. The earth began disappearing underneath his feet. The threads of rain were let loose. The green border began disintegrating as the moths began slipping from the leaves. An invisible landscape buried in water appeared and began rising upward, slowly, glistening in the sunlight. The hanging cascades spun a cage around K. He took the death ride on the back of a dragonfly that veered upward. With no time to flutter again, it fell off the cliff. K coiled along the tattered rope threaded by the broken time. He was held in the grip of the scream. The white mist submerged the hill, bundled it up, and in a moment the haze trapped K. He became invisible and ubiquitous. Streams of silence descended from the mountains. K lay naked, gliding over the dead bodies. Echoes were chasing him away. A stranger bent over K was examining his face in precise detail until their foreheads touched.     

K then opened his eyes without moving. His heart was racing. The stranger’s wide eyes were digging into his face. As the stranger pulled away, K saw himself rising alive from the deathbed. He became aware of his hands touching the grass, and nudged R who was still fast asleep. Both stood to their feet in no time. Both had to play their roles. R was caught between falling and holding on his feet. K stood firm. The young army colonel was standing alone, confident. The joyful expression he wore on his face while touring in the mountains revealed that he was a fresh recruit. R could not place him, for he was familiar with confrontations, stand-offs, and heated arguments with these men in uniform. However, something unfamiliar about this young colonel was his curiosity to engage in conversation. The colonel was new to the mountains and did not yet know which line separated one mountain from another. 

“Where is this?”

R felt the urge to laugh, but the fear rising up inside stopped him. “Mountains are a place of indivisible existence: imaginary, real, connected, distinct, scattered, invisible, intersecting…”

“The landscape that is visible here is completely different from the landscape that I had imagined.”

“In that sense, nothing said of landscapes is true.”

“Your vocabulary is inflected with proverbial clichés.”

“We are paying the price of surviving.”

“Have you ever thought of doing something else? How obsolete to die for a landscape that doesn’t exist yet.”

And in a hurried move, the captain turned to K. 

“So, young man…Let’s see what you are hiding behind those tresses…Your calmness shows you possess imagination.”

K’s mind was blank. His eyes narrowed, and as he looked down on his chest, he became aware of the graffiti on his t-shirt. He rested his left hand near his heart and drew a long breath. The colonel didn’t take his eyes from the graffiti. 

“don’t you recognize the irony in these symbols of revolution—turning into the vicious cycle of what it stands against?”

“This is an oversimplified perception,” K said. 

“How do you understand these symbols and the song of revolution?”

“It is what defines our existence.”

“Illusions do not define perceptions of reality. Icons manipulate playfully.”

“It is the trade of being in love…witness to the ephemeral and the fragile patterns of life. Without it, we would not be!”

“Ah! The poster boy of revolution is a lovable rogue! It persistently misrepresents your problems. Their dream was seductive. Your struggle is paranoia.”

“Our struggle is best defined by our ability to live with political uncertainty. Some struggles become a way of life only with the passage of time.”

“Sartorial politics do not create nations.”

“There is a rarer privilege to exist in lightness. Imagine a landscape hanging in between the mountains over the void, bound to the crests with the spider web.”

“Is this spider net the foundation of your imagination?”

“There are two: one I can only speak of, and another that exists in the lack.”

“And how long will the net last?”

“There are numerous horizons.”

“Where do you belong?”

“I am a trapeze artist.”

“Do you think a guerrilla can become immortal?”

“A guerrilla scripts his mortality.”

The colonel laughed, and put both his hands on K’s shoulders. “Boy I think you need a haircut. And after that, you may claim your camera.”

The colonel tucked a lock of hair behind K’s ear, picked up the camera and walked away. 

K stomped his foot on the ground where the colonel had been standing. R turned around and rolled his shoulders. He clasped his hands behind his back and shifted from one foot to the other. Clueless, he thrust his fists in the air.

Early fall, the sun made its way between the tiny branches surreptitiously. The shadows of the leaves encased R who was standing in the middle of the room. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The shop he recently set up was already open. He started clearing up, though there was really nothing to be cleared away. He picked up a rag and started scraping the rust from the windowsills. 

R had rented an old space at the edge of the village. The shop was small but clean and affordable. The walls finished with mud plaster had a soft feel. R had worked the walls in deep browns and hay yellow, which gave the room an earthy fragrance and tone. The ends of straw jutting out created an uneven texture that R was trying hard to get rid of. The floor—

a series of stones chipped at the corners and sunken in the middle, uneven and scabrous—

gave an illusion of mountain meadow. The wood ceiling supported by the pine beams was covered with lightweight, translucent rice paper covering up the cracks. A hollowed-out rusted lampshade hung from the ceiling with a withering metal string in the middle of the room. It shielded the dim light from spreading out or from lighting the dark corners of the room. Between the two stained, broken windows, there was a creaking, rickety wooden door, off its hinges. A frayed piece of rope looped through a broken handle was tied tight to a nail hammered into the warped doorframe. The dark wood from the outside splintered and crumbled. The stone steps to the door were green and slippery. Inside the shop, the large looking-glass hanging on the wall stood right in front of the door. Anyone who entered the shop was greeted by their own reflection. 

As the sunlight entered the shop through cracks and holes, the place was flooded with numerous patterns. K was seated on a wooden chair, with adjustable head support, intensely examining the long-awaited haircut. R had almost finished snipping with the scissors. He was happy to have inaugurated his new shop and career. He was trying hard to cheer up K. ‘I shall shave you clean to the skin.’  

K got up from the chair. He loosened the white cloth from his neck, turned around and stood in the middle of the room with the large mirror behind him. The room in the mirror swirled like ripples on a pond – shifting proportions in all directions. Forms swayed from one side to another in a slow dance. The faces elongated, cheeks bulged, eyes blinking slowly, lips melting downward deepened the grieving process and sharpened the grotesque conditions of existence. Under the mirror, the clean wooden shelf covered with combs, scissors, razors, a box of wax, powder puff, a bottle of perfume diluted with water, and a towel hanging from a nail breathed faintly like drifting thoughts. On the left, a wooden bench, fixed for the customers to sit, waiting for their turn, was carrying the weight of emptiness on its curved legs. The soft sunlight filtering through the cracks in the windows made circles on the floor reflected in the mirror, hanging from above by invisible threads. 

The room was drowned in light as the door flung open. The colonel stepped in. A slight tilt of his head set the lampshade into oscillation. R was standing slightly to the right side, yet looking into the mirror. As he stretched out his arm it was drawn into a long, thin branch, struggling to reach the door. The light now entered from the open door that washed the shop in a trembling glow. The shop lost its fixity. The colonel’s gaze in the mirror met an improbable symmetry. His body, hunched forward, appeared to have been carved from a cracked marble. The buttons on his uniform dripped like droplets of mercury. His eyes were flickering in soft chaos. Everything lay beyond his grasp, furthering his sense of detachment. The shadows were floating in the mirror. K stood still in a timeless warp. 

I write this from Beirut, two weeks into a new war, amid another round of airstrikes. A fine dust falls with the rain over the entire city. Still, the streets remain filled. Shops open their doors. Cars and scooters pass by; there is the hum of conversations between people. Life continues in a strange, quiet sobriety. Beirut has always held this contradiction: a city that bustles even as war returns repeatedly. And in the face of violence, something stubborn persists – work, conversation, routine. The self emerges altered, but not broken.

What surfaces across the works gathered in this issue is a shared atmosphere of siege—mirrored not in scale but in texture. From Beirut to Gaza, from the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar to imagined landscapes of Kashmir and Acre, Palestine—places haunted by systemic disappearances and erasure—these pieces inhabit terrains where life continues under assault. They test the tenacity of the self under attack.

The March issue of Guernica opens with a photo essay from Beirut. Anchored by the graffiti line Let Lebanon Live Before I Die, Wartime Beirut, Between Ruin and Routine, by Alex Milan Durie, traces the city during the first weeks of an old war. Drawn from long walks through the city, the photographs capture Beirut suspended between devastation and continuity, where routine itself appears as a form of endurance.

Nonfiction in this issue turns to the question of witness. In Youssef Rakha’s Ring, excerpted from his forthcoming collection of essays, Postmuslim, grief arrives in the space between boxing practice and breaking news: the death of a poet friend, the resumed destruction of Gaza, the unbearable fact of having to continue on. Moving between sparring, literary memory, and political reflection, the essay asks what writing can do in the face of violence that flattens both lives and language. A Month Inside the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, by Jidi Guo, takes us to the Rohingya camps of Cox’s Bazar during Ramadan. Filming inside the world’s largest refugee settlement, the writer lingers on the uneasy texture of daily life under prolonged displacement—its routines, generosities, moral dissonances, and the quiet negotiations required to remain human within systems that control survival.

Fiction in this issue returns to the fragile persistence of the body and imagination. My cousin Sami is still bulking, by the Palestinian writer L.F. Khouri follows a young man in Gaza who continues to train his body amid the wreckage of war, lifting slabs of concrete and twisted iron where a city once stood. As hunger, memory, and loss close in around him, the body becomes his final territory. In Invisible Landscape, by Kashmiri writer Gowhar Yaqoob, two brothers move through mountain pastures haunted by disappearance and death. As the terrain shifts between memory, dream, and political intrusion, the story traces how the self struggles to remain visible when the landscapes that once anchored it begin to dissolve.

In Interviews, Mai Serhan reflects on Palestine, post-memory, and the political work of storytelling. In I Can Imagine It for Us, Serhan speaks with Olivia Katrandjian about writing a homeland she has never seen, blending poetry, archival research, and fragments of family history to reconstruct a place inherited through absence. The conversation explores how narrative becomes a site where memory, imagination, and collective identity meet, and the self learns to speak across displacement.

Our Global Spotlights selection of the month returns us to Beirut on the edge of violence. Mazen Maarouf’s uncanny story The Lion Cub, translated from Arabic by Lina Mounzer and originally published in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, reminds us that war rarely begins with the first explosion, but in the slow reshaping of the self.

Poetry in this issue confronts disappearance directly. In The Emperor Jones, British-born Black Caribbean choreopoet Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa transforms a life shadowed by violence into legend, tracing how bravado, memory, and imagination remake a figure otherwise destined to vanish, and in Siren of the Tropics, Kinshasa turns to a mythic register, retelling the story from the perspective of a hitherto ‘subhuman’ heroine, in which the spectators of the original become the spectacle. Three poems by the Spanish poet David Cruz, presented here in translation by Anthony L. Geist, move through shipwreck, nightmare, and wandering spirits. Ships sink, poets choke on their own language, and souls step briefly outside their bodies. Yet even as defeat threatens to swallow the speaker, something continues speaking—the stubborn self that refuses silence.

With our March issue, we at Guernica hope that from landscapes under siege individual selves continue to emerge, recognizing one another and rising in solidarity against the violence that seeks to break our communities apart.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Jean-Robert Alcindor, Dave Bowers, Javier Iniesta, Samar Hejazi, Ray Hwang, Fahed Shehab, and Camilla Skye.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

In a Beirut neighborhood divided by sectarian lines, a boy called the Lion Cub displays his gleaming bicycle in a glass case meant for a statue of Saint Matanyos, the patron saint of lunatics. Around it gathers a whorl of fear, reverence, and childish desire. When the bicycle disappears one night, the deeper tensions already threading through the streets are slowly revealed.

Originally appearing in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, Mazen Maarouf’s “The Lion Cub,” translated from Arabic by Lina Mounzer, renders the disorienting atmosphere that precedes war — children rehearsing militia rituals, neighbors searching for someone to blame, and the dissolution of boundaries between innocence and brutality. Absurdity sits alongside dread, exposing the fragile social fabric of a city on the brink.

Read today, the story feels uncannily contemporary and serves as a reminder that no war begins with the first explosion.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

We never suspected that the Lion Cub was not, in fact, a lion cub until his bicycle was stolen. He made no attempt to get it back. He only shot a few rounds into the air from his bedroom window, then lay down on the sponge mattress on the ground, tears dripping from his wide-open eyes, staring at the ceiling, longing intensely for his mother. His gun lay by his side.

The bicycle had been a gift from his mother. But we’d only ever seen him riding it a few times. He had it displayed in a rectangular glass case near the school on our street. So that everyone could see it. But no one even ever thought of risking a proper look at it. The Lion Cub would get mad if you did, and would come find you by night and shoot you while you were asleep in your bed. Like he did to his elderly aunt when one night he found her trying to remove his two goldfish from the bathtub so she could take a bath and he shot her with his gun. It was as easy for the Lion Cub to shoot someone as someone cutting their nails, because his gun was outfitted with a silencer. Afterward, he’d get rid of the gun and then get himself another, of a different make and model, like any other very accomplished sixteen-year-old serial killer.

And so no one was ready to sacrifice their life for the sake of a bicycle. Some people would even smile in its direction, or salute it with a nod of their heads like it was a faithful dog guarding the neighborhood. As for me, whenever I saw it, I was overcome with a desire to pounce on it and take a bite out of it. It was a bicycle so stunning, it made you ravenous. A Chopper, orange and white. With two brown wheels that gleamed summer and winter, like they were molded out of yogurt blended with chocolate and cherries. The front wheel was small, and the rear wheel large. I allowed myself to imagine that it was impossible to ride it with any speed, because then it might melt it was so clean. Like it was made of laundry detergent crystals. But it was in fact the opposite of that. A bicycle of utmost might. Made of nickel and lead. So much so that when the first car bomb exploded at the roundabout closest to our neighborhood, the Lion Cub cockily proclaimed that the bicycle could climb the pillar of smoke that all of us stood watching with dread. As if the car bomb was some sort of advertisement testifying to the quality of his bicycle.

The glass case where the Lion Cub had parked his bike was originally set up to display a statue of Saint Matanyos, the patron saint of lunatics. But on the day his mother entered the mental hospital, the Lion Cub removed the saint and replaced it with his bicycle. That was before the first skirmishes that marked the beginning of the war.

The people of our neighborhood weren’t Christians; the glass case and saint had been a gift from the residents of the adjoining neighborhood, those whom the war would force us to cut from entirely. Their kids, now armed, had dared slip into our area by night and lay their hands on the Chopper in its glass case. This was in retaliation for defiling the wax statue of the patron Saint Matanyos, which the Lion Cub had once removed from its case and, with just a nod of his head, compelled me to tie to a huge firework and launch toward the Christian neighborhood. I did this, in full view of everyone. A few hours later, the residents of our neighborhood began erecting barricades.

I knew that the case and the saint had only been placed in our neighborhood on my account. They’d in fact been placed there on my birthday. An expression of the Christians’ pity for me. The barber’s eyes told me this every time I went to him for a haircut. They also told me that I needed to be cured as fast as possible, before the outbreak of the first battles. Because if I were, our people would return the saint and the case safely to the Christians, maybe even with a thank you note, and they’d have a barbecue and slaughter a small sheep for it. And with that, we’d manage to fend the war off entirely from our neighborhood and avoid many battles, limiting ourselves to the number of small fortifications that had been built atop the rooftops of some of the houses in our neighborhood as nests for snipers should the worst case scenario arrive, and on whose walls some thought it would be a good idea to have the children inscribe, with asphalt, accounts of the memories they’d shared with the children of the Christian neighborhood, things like public holidays and festivals, including the dates of each if they could remember them.

But if I failed to comply by the saint’s will and be cured, and the war broke out, the statue would most certainly be destroyed, because it was a Christian one, and that would greatly provoke our neighbors. And its destruction would probably be used as an excuse to invade our neighborhood. So I was under a lot of pressure. I needed to be cured of what ailed me as fast as possible.

Every day, on my way back from my plumbing job, I was aware of everyone’s eyes boring into me. The grocery store owner’s and the mechanic’s and the sporting goods store proprietor’s and the guy’s from the roastery. Children’s, too: one of them once asked me when I was going into the building, “Why aren’t you getting any better?” And when I entered my house, my mother and grandfather and sister’s eyes would all be saying, “We don’t have anywhere to run to. You have to get better. You have no other choice!”

My mother lights incense sticks every day, massaging my head and pressing on that spot between my eyes while murmuring verses from the Koran, concluding with: “Get well!” as I fall asleep.

And when I go watch the Scouts, now in military uniforms, doing their training drills in the empty lot, they all stop their training for a minute to look at me with eyes I can understand, eyes that say: “We’re training because we know you’ll never be cured.” Then they’d go on with what they were doing. In short, as the days marched on and the streets and houses slid ever onward toward the maw of the war’s meat grinder, the statue became a burden on me in particular. I felt pleasure as I tied it to the firework and fired it into the air. Almost as if I were the one flying.

The Lion Cub, though, was exceedingly pragmatic. He was the only one who understood that I’d never be cured. In the arcade, he’d always say, “I’m convinced you’re never going to be cured. That’s why I carry this gun around. Look. This tube here is so it doesn’t make any sound. Like if I were to shoot you, no one would know you’d died. Not even you.” I loved that part of the story. That I’d die without anyone knowing that I was dead. So whenever I saw the Lion Cub, I’d say, “Tell me that story again. About how if I died no one would know.”

And he’d pull the gun out gracefully from behind his back amid the anxiety of the other kids, cock it and say, “This is a gun. And this tube here is so that it doesn’t make any sound. Like if I were to take you out right now to that alley and shoot you, none of these people here would know you’d died. Not even you.”

And I’d feel a pleasure that tingled all the way to the ironed-out scar on my pinkie toe, my scalp shivering the way it did when I peed, and I’d say, “Take me out to that alley and shoot me,” like I was daring him to do it.

Except he’d say, “You’d have to be cured first. I wouldn’t shoot someone who wasn’t in full possession of his mental faculties,” then command me harshly to get out of his face.

It was clear that the Lion Cub wouldn’t shoot me no matter how much I begged. It was a question of pride for him. He even bragged about it in a letter to his girl, a brevet student who lived on the ground floor of his apartment building. She told me about it herself. She came up to me while I was unclogging the kitchen drain in her house, sidling right up behind me while I fiddled with the copper flex and whispered, “Did you know? You’re the reason why. Ever since the Lion Cub wrote and told me he’d never shoot you, I fell in love with him. When he told me he’d never shoot you, I realized that he was really kind and sensitive.”

His girl was slender. Her behind was shaped like a pear and her breasts the size of toilet floats and her eyes were sleepy day and night, and when she talked it was like her head was encased in a plastic bag. She spoke so softly my heart began to pound, and I knew the people of our neighborhood would sooner turn into soap than the Lion Cub would shoot me.

There was no way to enter his house on the fourth floor. The rumor was that the front door was booby-trapped. If you touched it wrong, it would explode. Otherwise, it would have been easy to break into his bathroom and remove the two goldfish from his tub, and then wait naked under the shower for the Lion Cub to come home.

After the Lion Cub’s mother was admitted to the mental hospital, the people in our neighborhood moved on to beating me instead of just contenting themselves with staring. The barber told me it was all because I wouldn’t get better. And that it was my fault that Saint Matanyos no longer bore any goodwill toward our neighborhood. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been the Lion Cub’s mother in particular who went crazy. Soon, my mother also became nervy, crying at the drop of a hat, and my grandfather coughed harder, spitting up more phlegm than necessary.

I knew they blamed me because they couldn’t figure out the reason that would cause the war to break out. I wasn’t happy with that sort of life. But when the Lion Cub put his bike in the case, he gave me an idea bright as lightning. I’d guessed that the only way to get him to shoot me was to go into the case and sit on the Chopper in the full glare of day. I’d leave the house as if I were going to work. At 8:30 in the morning. But instead of heading to the plumber’s, I’d just cross the street and then, in a few paces, find myself inside the glass case, sitting on the Chopper. I’d remain seated there just like that until the Lion Cub spotted me and shot me. Maybe he’d even shoot me from his bedroom window, in his underpants and undershirt. Anyway, the main thing was that when I died, I wouldn’t know it.

I wouldn’t come to any harm.

And I wouldn’t feel any of the beatings I was now getting from the neighbors, and I would be impervious to my mother’s tears or what the people’s eyes said about how my fate and the statue’s were connected. And I’d also be the only one in the entire neighborhood who’d ever ridden the Chopper.

That morning, I kissed my sleeping mother and washed out the pot into which my grandfather spit out his phlegm and put it back in its usual place beside him. But when I left the house, I saw that the bike wasn’t in the case. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was so shocked and upset, it was as if it were my bike that had gone missing. My eyes filled with tears and my chin trembled. I stepped into the case without thinking, looking all around, touching the air, the glass walls, like maybe the Chopper was actually in there but I was unable to see it.

Some of the neighbors had gathered around the case. They just stood there watching me, no one actually daring to set a foot inside to pull me out. Even when they saw the Lion Cub approaching, no one said, “He’s coming. Get out of there quickly,” or anything of the sort. The Lion Cub came up behind me and jerked me back roughly so that I fell out of the case and onto the ground. He was furious — you could tell from his red ears, and he had his gun in his hand. I had no idea the bike had been stolen. I thought he’d put it in another case or taken it home. And so I begged, “Please put the Chopper back in its case.” When he heard that, the Lion Cub went back to his room and shot a few rounds into the air and remembered his mother and cried.

I have to mention that the box and the patron saint hadn’t been gifted to us for no reason, but because the Christian neighbors felt sad and ashamed given that their children were the reason for what had happened to me — specifically, the son of the head of the charity that organized benefits for children with kidney disease. We were at the arcade, which was tucked away in a neutral corner between our two neighborhoods. I was wearing boxing gloves. They weren’t real boxing gloves, not even amateur boxing gloves, but I was really pleased with them. They were a prize from the Ricco biscuit company that I’d gotten in exchange for fifty empty wrappers. They had that ridiculous drawing on them, of a biscuit with two small arms wearing boxing gloves and punching away. But I didn’t care. They were the first gloves I’d ever worn. Back then, I wanted to be a boxing champion more than anything else, saving the world with his punches—without really knowing what one had to punch in this whole wide world in order to save it. A powerful and fearsome boxer, as if fighting with elephant trunks wrapped around his fists instead of gloves. Then the head of the charity organization’s kid turned up. He asked to borrow my gloves. He said he wanted to try them out against the arcade’s boxing machine. They were in his possession less than a minute later. As soon as he slipped his fingers inside and curled his large hands into fists, the gloves ripped open and he refused to give me the price of fifty Ricco biscuit packets in exchange.

When I came home distraught, unable to understand why what had happened had happened, my mother repaired the gloves with needle and thread. Of course, that wasn’t the reason why I began having these brain seizures that left me unable to trust everything I heard or saw. It was actually because, when I went to the house of the charity head’s son the next day, wearing the sewn-up Ricco gloves, waiting for him to open the door so I could sock him in the face and run for it, I saw that all ten of his fingers had been mutilated. He’d suffered an electrical burn while attempting to straighten his little sister’s hair with a hot iron: All the fingers had been melted together so that they curled up into a fist, as if they were still thrust into the torn Ricco gloves. His eyes were so miserable as they looked at the boxing gloves I wore. Like he blamed them. His mother and father, too, looked at the Ricco gloves. And I felt something rip through my brain. Something that had never happened to me before. From that day on, I had seizures. My head would go rigid and freeze up, and my eyes, my lips, my ears, my eyebrows and my dimples too. I’d be unable to see or hear or smell anything around me. At school, I stopped believing the lessons the teachers gave us, and I stopped going to class. And even though the kid ended up having surgery on his fingers so that his hands were almost the same as they’d been before, the seizures never stopped, and I left school and began working as a plumber.

Later they started calling me the patron saint of blocked drains because I was so adept at inserting the spiral flex into the blocked drain and pulling the obstruction out in one go. That’s the gift I’d been granted by the seizures: that sixth sense about blocked drains. But the softhearted Christian neighbors continued to act guilty around me. Some of them would go so far as to block their own sinks and drains with wads of toilet paper or plastic bags or socks so that I’d come and unblock them, ensuring that I had work. On my first birthday after that, they bequeathed our neighborhood with Saint Matanyos and his case.

Should the war break out, I’d be the only one who’d be able to move freely between our neighborhood and the Christian one. That’s because the militiamen there were none other than the son of the head of the charity organization and his friends. And none of them were really concerned with shooting me anymore. That’s because in wartime, you only kill people in order to provoke the other side. And my death would have provoked no one. It didn’t even matter that I’d tied Saint Matanyos up to a fat firework and shot it in the direction of their neighborhood.

That’s the reason why the Lion Cub came to our house and asked me to go to the Christian neighborhood to get his Chopper back. When my mother saw him, her knees went numb and she couldn’t get up anymore. My grandfather fell into a coughing fit. But I was proud, so proud that I left the door open and the three windows too so that everyone could see that the Lion Cub was over at our house. I even flaunted in front of the Lion Cub himself, interrupting him while he talked to go clean my grandfather’s spittoon out. Of course, I said yes right away. On one condition. I whispered it in his ear: “On the condition that you shoot me with the silencer while I’m riding your Chopper.”

The Lion Cub thought long and hard, looking into my eyes, and then said that this would bring shame to him, but he’d do it for the Chopper’s sake, not for mine, and he’d do it somewhere no one could see us: at the kindergarten playground at the nearby school. I needed to be showered though, washed free of any plumber’s odor, and I needed to be wearing a large smock because he didn’t want any blood spattering on his Chopper. Immediately I thought of the barber’s smock and the Lion Cub said he’d get it himself, and I agreed.

The Christian kids wouldn’t hand over the Chopper on the first day. They said I had to go get the statue first, since I’d never be cured, and come back the next day. When I went back to them, on the evening of the next day, the statue was in a bag hanging off my shoulder. It was broken in two, maybe even three pieces, and some of its wax limbs had melted because of the exploding firework. But the Chopper was waiting for me. So clean it looked like it had just come out of the glass case. Sparkling clean, without even a single scratch on it. It was the first time I’d be laying a hand on the Chopper. And I did it brilliantly. I was so excited about it, I got a hard-on. This made the children laugh, ordering me kindly to leave, saying: “Even if you yourself were to turn into Saint Matanyos, you’ll never be cured.”

I made my way to the kindergarten playground at the school. The Lion Cub was waiting for me. He was holding a gun outfitted with a silencer, a gun I’d never seen before. It was silver and lighter than any of his others. “I’ve never used this gun before,” he told me, handing me the smock and looking at the Chopper. “But from now on, I won’t use any other. I promised my mother that. I visited her at the hospital today. She’s getting out soon. We’re going to go to the mountains, she and I, the way we used to before, and she’ll watch me riding around on the Chopper. It’ll be good for her.”

I didn’t feel like any of this had anything to do with me. I was holding the bike, wondering only whether it would be better to sit on the Chopper of my own accord or wait for the Lion Cub’s permission first. But the Lion Cub interrupted my train of thought, taking the bike from me and handing me the smock, which I put on immediately so he’d understand that I was ready to ride. He pulled out a small flashlight and examined every part of the bike, then said, “All right. You can ride it now, but carefully.” And I, who’d never ridden a bike before, kept my feet on the ground, exerting a huge amount of effort so the bike wouldn’t topple over. The Chopper, for the first time, seemed small to me. I was just about to tell this to the Lion Cub. That the Chopper seemed a lot smaller than it had appeared to me in the case. Except he leveled his gun and aimed the silencer at my chest and shot. I felt the pain spread out into all my bones immediately. Like a whole army of cockroaches had risen up from the sewers to gnaw at me. I fell on the ground right way, because that’s what happens to you at times like these. The bike remained upright, still held in the Lion Cub’s hand. He didn’t even glance my way. He turned the Chopper around and mounted it, pedaling slowly across the playground, away from me.

As I watched him, casting a last look at the bike, which still held me in its thrall, I noticed a small object lying next to me. A small, hot object, letting off light wisps of smoke. A bullet. A rubber bullet. A bullet from the Lion Cub’s new gun, which hadn’t penetrated me at all, and there was no trace of blood on the barber’s smock. I felt like the Lion Cub had not only tricked me, but was mocking me. I wanted to get up and run after him, but I couldn’t prevail over the pain in my bones. And just as I began to scream out to get his attention, the Chopper’s handlebars exploded, reducing the bicycle to wreckage and leaving no trace of the Lion Cub behind.

“The Lion Cub,” by Mazen Maarouf (trans. Lina Mounzer), and originally published in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, which describes itself as a “ bilingual journal based in Beirut … both [nurturing] new talent and [highlighting] contemporary literature and art from the Arab & SWANA region and diaspora.”

Over the past two weeks, Lebanon has once again been drawn into a full-scale regional war. The escalation began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, which responded by retaliatory attacks on US bases throughout the Gulf. Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, then entered the confrontation, launching missiles from Lebanon into Israel, or what many in Beirut refer to as Occupied Palestine.

In response, Israeli forces intensified bombing in Southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, issuing mass evacuation orders that forced over 800,000 people–around 14% of the total population–out of their homes.

War, however intolerable, has become a recurrent reality in Lebanon. For a Lebanese person in their early twenties who has never left the country, this would be their third time living through war. They are already all too familiar with the drowning sounds of Israeli military drones and the frequent booms of airstrikes. But familiarity does not soften the sharp edge of fear or outrage.

Lebanon is facing one of its gravest humanitarian crises in decades, as sectarian tensions sharpen and Israeli forces hit not only armed targets but also homes, buildings and neighborhoods carrying decades of lived history. 

Still, life persists. Shops remain open. Bars are busy with people talking politics. Aspiring artists sketch romantic portraits. And cafes and bookshops have morphed into community kitchens, where volunteers prepare meals for the thousands of displaced families.

This photo essay emerges from walks through Beirut during one of its darkest moments. Beneath the devastation–much like the rising phoenix it is stereotypically likened to–the city’s solidarity endures. 

Alex M. Durie for Guernica, March 15, 2026.

13^th June 1937

Today I spoke to the Parisian Times.
I was born from a cawcawbadoop egg,
before Paris I only bathed with a bassy,
my kin used trumpalump trees for light,
we have no need for clocks or kings.
My hips and bananas are glittering,
admirers are overfeeding the tip jar,
there will be roses without thorns waiting,
my admirers will want to know their fate,
Shall I use the roses in a sunrise blood ritual,
or should I eat them, or the roses?

3^rd February 1920

I never had the patience for marbles,
loopdeloop double-dutch was a riot,
no winners only girls slapping rhythm,
Lewis would chant with his loud baritone,
but between him and Ms Alice’s hot cakes
we got by fine, even had a record player,
this is how I learned to swing and flap
from jungle vines to regular pay checks.

14^th June 1937

I was gifted a leopard with its ears open,
frozen in mid-roar laying across the parquet,
no one knows its origins or how it prays,
it’s paw is unexpectedly soft and warm,
my maid suggested paradise plants for its habitat,
somehow this seemed cruel to me,
it deserved to lie next to the chaise lounge,
an unmistakable comedy in well-bred Paris.

His shadow stood where his body was banned. He threw his eyes like he knew he could get away with not calling Death ‘Sir.’

He left town at 19, made a pact with a goat that steals wine.

I assumed he would end up with his bike-riding calvary, shooting dice in the ocean, with the other uncles who refused the furnace. I should have known better, Jones could sell birds a 6-month supply of air and ask for the cash up front. I learned his fate

in the newspaper, where I learned Bryant St claimed 4 more boys. We lose about a dozen a year. Next to that article was Hopper, now named Emperor Jones, of an island trading coffee and cocoa. Last time I saw him he was wearing a baseball cap, now feathers ricochet on his head. It is no use to me lying to God about fighting temptation, when I am ready to trade my belly to reign over an ox-ploughed kingdom. The emperor eats 8 giant chickens a day and barrels of buttered corn. The locals believe him to be a God because he performed a miracle. The article does not mention the miracle he performed, I assume he became one. He did not walk on water, and he made sure he didn’t spread the word when his mama purchased fresh brisket. He arrived on the island with chains on his ankles, looked Death in the eye, called him by his first name, and walked away singing because he believed he had more important things to do. Here, smoke is not always the offspring of retaliation, sometimes it is the scum from a pipe, held by a hand with no ability to make a fist. What is the use of commandments if they do not extend to us? If God’s insurance policy does not cover the areas where hymns are sung out of necessity? ‘This time I’m leaving for good’ I say, and I make extra sandwiches, but then I’m ordered to do another job that I was not originally hired to do, I say ‘yes ma’am,’ bow my head while I speak, then wait for permission to leave.

What images do the words “world’s largest refugee camp” bring to mind? Tarpaulin tents, arranged in tight rows? A bare and bleak terrain exposed to the elements? 

I spent a month filming inside the world’s largest refugee camp, located in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh—during Ramadan. When I came across a call for documentary proposals about the holy month, I thought, how can it be that a documentary like that doesn’t already exist? More than a million Rohingya refugees, stuck in open-air confinement, surviving on minimal aid, still fasting, praying, carrying on. For all the research reports, fundraising campaigns, and officials announcing new high watermarks in the crisis, daily life in the camps remains largely unseen. 

People working in slow media like myself have an increasingly rare luxury: extended time to spend prying inside other people’s worlds. The luxury to enter disoriented, cycle through a rapid-fire onslaught of first impressions, then adjust and recalibrate as we get to know the people and the place. To hold opposing truths long enough to feel okay not picking a side.

This piece isn’t an attempt to explain the Rohingya crisis, or to paint an exhaustive picture of the web of actors in the camps. Nor does it propose solutions. Instead, I offer an account of the quiet background track of moral, emotional, and hyper-practical questions that looped in my mind throughout the month. Working with an all-Rohingya crew, who resided and still reside inside the camp, provided me with the ability to access daily sense checks, firm field support, and answers to my endless questions. 

While I was in the camps, sweeping changes to US foreign aid policy were already in motion, with immediate consequences for food rations: a cut from $12.50 to $6 per person per month was announced—barely enough for two bananas a day. Although later these cuts were mostly reversed, at the time, teams of foreign journalists arrived to document them—followed by visits from UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the former Chief Adviser of Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, to appeal for funding. As soon as these high-profile visitors were gone, the flurry of foreign attention faded, shifting back to Gaza, Sudan, the White House—anywhere else. 

Largely outside the global spotlight, the sprawling Kutapalong settlement—one of several that house the Rohingya who fled from Myanmar’s Rakhine State to Cox’s Bazar in South Bangladesh—has grown enough to earn the unglamorous title of the world’s largest refugee camp. This is what unfolds in a place the world has learned to look past.

*

What strikes you first as you pass Lambashia check point in Cox’s Bazar are the bamboo structures of varying shapes and degrees of sturdiness, tucked into a hilly jungle landscape dotted with lakes, rice fields, and bustling bazaars. Paved roads and bridges cut across valleys, linking one camp to another. 

Shops sell makeup, electronics, and fried snacks. Teashops offer sweetened instant coffee by the packet, cigarettes by the stick, and candies by the piece.

It’s hard to list all the ways the word “camp” fails to capture the scale and complexity of this place. But quickly, a visitor can find themselves thinking, “It’s not as bad as I expected.”

Once I found my bearings, the grounds started to feel familiar. I’d address the teashop owner behind his counter as “boss,” like everyone else, wave at the kids loitering near the shelters where we were filming, and ask the NGO hospital staff if I could use their bathroom (again). The dusty paths became navigable. Our filming days settled into a rhythm. I felt safe—even comfortable.

But all it took to snap me out of it was the rumble of a World Food Programme truck rolling by. Or a glance at my interview notes about slain husbands and conscripted brothers, children who had died on the long walk to the river Naf. Or someone casually mentioning the year of their arrival—as if eight years of confinement, with nowhere else to go, were an incidental detail. The surface-level comfort would crack just enough to remind me where I was.

Despite being erected as a temporary solution, the camp has evolved into a layered ecosystem over the past eight years. More than a million people live here, alongside dozens of NGO structures that keep the wheels turning. Under the strain of forced displacement, men still joke about who has the most handsome facial features. Women still boast about their mastery of iftar dishes served to break each day’s fast. Teenagers still stress about Facebook follower counts and whether a post will get enough engagement. The weight of confinement doesn’t make these micro-dramas inconsequential—it makes them feel more alive

Eight years is a long time to be stuck. But camp life and my crew of Rohingya camp-residents showed me how quickly people can adapt—not because it’s easy, but because survival demands it. And in that daily rhythm of coping—small tasks, familiar faces, managing egos—urgency doesn’t disappear. It just morphs into something quieter. I kept thinking about the privileges I had exercised during that same span of time, some personal, some practical. I had changed careers, moved countries, opened bank accounts. Each action would have been nearly impossible here without documentation, legal status, or mobility. 

*

When filming a documentary, I often have to think in two modes at once. One part of me wants to stay present and go along with what unfolds. The other worries about continuity, logistics, and whether what we’re capturing is authentic.

 We had made it clear to the family we were filming right at the start: please don’t prepare anything for us. We wanted it to be as if we weren’t there. No special treatment, no extra food. It wasn’t just about honesty on camera, but about not adding strain to the already-stretched resources of a single, widowed mother in her mid-twenties caring for three children, sharing a temporary shelter with three other families. She nodded and said she understood.

But on the day of the shoot, the smell of frying chillies started to fill the dark two-by-three-meter backroom where she cooked. She waited for the call to prayer, broke fast—and just a few bites in, she turned to us. Without a word, she began moving plates of food and cups of water toward our crew. The gesture was familiar, warm, and completely against our requests.

I hesitated. My first thought was: this changes the scene. They’ve made more food than they normally would. Moving the plates would create sudden jumps in the visual, disrupting what filmmakers call continuity. But more than that, I wondered what it had cost them to extend this generosity. We politely declined, explaining that we were working, but the mother insisted—especially because our crew was fasting too. We gave in. Each of us took a samosa. We asked her to serve the rest to her kids in the other room.

I felt conflicted. Even before we started filming, I had worried about taking up our subjects’ energy, and now we were taking food from families already rationing for survival. While the camera was still rolling, my mind traced these tangles. I remembered something that brought another pang to my chest. The samosas hadn’t even come from the mother’s kitchen. They were bought by her brother, who had quietly dropped them off earlier. We had spoken to him before—he was suffering from hypertension, and had a large family of his own to support.

Two households had gone out of their way to host us. They’d refused to let us spend iftar with them without sharing what little they had.

As much as I try to be a quiet observer behind the camera, relationships form. You can’t spend a month in someone’s shelter and pretend you’re invisible. The Chinese side of me knows it’s a cultural sin to refuse food—or worse, to eat alone. The instinct to share food runs deep. In many cultures, generosity isn’t conditional on abundance. Even in the harshest conditions, some values are non-negotiable.

* 

As my days went by, I began to understand how much of life in the camps was shaped not just by displacement, but by the systems built to manage it. Geography, authority, and accountability formed a web that wasn’t always easy to navigate. Even pinpointing a shoot location wasn’t straightforward. Every time I wanted to return to a specific spot, I struggled to decode the array of numbers and letters I’d scribbled in my notebook that were supposed to indicate where I was on the map

The camps are divided by numbers—sometimes with a letter or the word “extension” appended. The logic behind the naming reveals more about the scale and expansion of the crisis over time than it does about how to navigate it. For Camps 1E and 1W, and 2E and 2W, the naming still attempts to indicate cardinal directions and the sites’ proximity to each other. Camps 3, 5, 6, and 7 go by number alone. Camp 4 neighbors one called Camp 4 Extension, which sits next to Camp 17, which borders Camp 20 and Camp 20 Extension. Camps 14, 15, and 16 form their own cluster. Camp 21 isn’t connected to any of the others; neither is Camp 22.

Roughly ninety minutes south by road, another cluster known as the Teknaf camps hugs the Myanmar border near the Naf river. And then there’s Bhasan Char—an entirely separate island housing refugees in the Bay of Bengal, three to five hours away by boat, isolated from the rest. I didn’t make it there.

Gradually, I started tracking how power moved through the camps—who made decisions, whose voices carried weight, and where agendas clashed. While each camp had its own intricate system of power brokerage, and some camps were considered more dangerous than others, all of them fit into an overarching hierarchy.

At the top of the camp structure sits the RRRC—Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner—the highest Bangladeshi government authority overseeing the camps in Cox’s Bazar. Anyone seeking access must pass through their permission process. Each camp is managed by a Camp-in-Charge, appointed by the RRRC, responsible for liaising with NGOs and security forces like the Armed Police Battalion and Ansar, a paramilitary auxiliary force. Beneath them are majhis—Rohingya community leaders who oversee a block, pass along information, and help manage day-to-day life across the shelters.

On paper, it’s a system meant to coordinate, protect, and resolve conflict. In practice, it’s far messier. Some majhis have been accused of corruption and favoritism, especially around aid distribution and cooperation with security forces. The Armed Police Battalion has faced repeated allegations from human rights groups, including extortion and abuse. Some Camp-in-Charge Commissioners have drawn criticism for opaque decision-making about which services are allowed in their camps. And the RRRC has come under fire for pushing to repatriate the Rohingya to Myanmar, but without the guarantees on citizenship, rights, dignity, and safety that have been advocated for—seemingly moving the focus, in other words, from helping them to controlling them. 

My own project didn’t involve documenting or investigating this chain of command. But letting the different Camp-in-Charge Commissioners know we’d be filming in their camps was both courteous and good practice in case of any security issues. Some Commissioners rushed through my visit, interrupting my introduction and picking up multiple phone calls mid-conversation. One, though, studied my printed concept document and shot list thoughtfully. When I mentioned my director of photography was Rohingya and lived in the camps, the Commissioner lit up. He asked him to come into the office, praised his work, and offered to help if we needed anything. 

Weeks later, we were filming just after dawn prayer when a group of men standing outside a mosque approached us. They asked if we were “the same volunteers” who had come by a few days before. Earlier that week, a group had come to distribute food and the men were upset that after taking pictures of them, the volunteers had packed everything up and left, taking the food with them.

Appalled, I shared the incident with the Camp-in-Charge Commissioner who had shown interest in our project. He asked for details—the date, the name of the organization, and the block. He messaged back:

If that type of incident happened during my tenure I will definitely take necessary action.

I’m sorry, that was completely humiliating.

We went back to the men to collect more specifics. They gave the name of the donor, the name of the head majhi of the block, and the date the event took place.

We passed the information on. After an hour and a half, the Commissioner texted back. He said both the donor and the majhi had denied all knowledge of the event. “Most of the Rohingyas have the tendency of telling lies,” the Commissioner wrote.

That last line caught me off guard. It felt hostile—and unprofessional coming from an authority figure. It seemed unlikely that a group of men would fabricate a story like this at the crack of dawn. What would they stand to gain?

My crew members weren’t surprised by the Commissioner’s response. They had grown used to the stereotyping and sometimes damaging claims made by those in charge. Only then did they tell me something else: on the day I had introduced our project at that Camp-in-Charge’s office, several members of an armed group had walked in as we were leaving. My team had recognized them.

Suddenly, I questioned my impression of the Commissioner. Why had the armed group visited his office? How did the warmth, compliments and offers of help line up with what my crew had shared? In a place governed by overlapping authorities, everyone seemingly had their own lines to toe, stories to protect, and powers to answer to.

* 

Every evening, as the air cooled and the streets began to stir in preparation to break fast, I’d find myself wading through dense crowds of men. In places like Army Road and Mosora Bazar, the foot traffic grew so thick that pushing our van through became nearly impossible. Faces blurred in the bustle—some wrinkled, with deep-red henna-dyed beards, others with crimson-stained mouths from chewing betel leaf with lime. The men stood in doorways, sat on red plastic chairs, leaned on each other—waiting, watching, mostly doing very little at all.

I’m usually more attuned to the gendered struggles women face. But I feel the need to carve out space for the particular kind of pain I saw in Rohingya men. What happens when traditional masculine roles—protector, provider, dignified figurehead—are stripped away?

This question had been bothering me, but the thoughts were hard to articulate until one long drive from the camps to Cox’s Bazar, three weeks into filming. My crew members and I sat in the car, chatting about iPhones and power banks, when our director of photography asked me to share some observations of the camp. I paused, then said, “It must be difficult to be a man here—to hold on to a sense of masculinity and self-worth as a long-term refugee.”

 They just nodded in response while taking my statement in. Our conversations were usually noisy and overlapping. But this landed somewhere deeper and it was a while before anyone else spoke.

 I tried to explain. From what I’d seen and heard, Rohingya family structures followed a clear patriarchal hierarchy. Back in Myanmar, men were typically the breadwinners, responsible for providing for their families. That role was a point of pride. Men and women had told me that mothers, sisters, and daughters were not expected to earn an income. Providing food, water, shelter, and safety were considered male duties. But the realities of getting violently chased off your lands, witnessing genocide and rape, and accepting refugee status, had forced men in the camp to grapple with their failure to uphold their traditional responsibilities. Even if that failure was due to circumstances entirely outside their control, I imagined it cut deep.

Inside the camp, the expectations set for men remain the same—but the ability to fulfill them has been stripped away. Most young, able-bodied men aren’t allowed to engage in meaningful work, build permanent homes, or labor to secure a future for their families. Instead, they’re packed into overcrowded shelters, assigned a number, and made to live off handouts. Isn’t that both infuriating and deeply humiliating?

I kept wondering: what did this enforced incapacity mean for power dynamics in families, and men’s social standing in their communities? The desire to be respected and valued as a head of a household wouldn’t vanish just because a person was in crisis. But how could they earn that respect if they couldn’t provide even the basics? With the usual avenues blocked, it was easy to see how some might have tried to reassert control wherever they still could—even in ways that were destructive.

It’s obvious why toxic dynamics fester in places like this. Substance abuse, online gambling, and connections to armed groups offer distraction, a sense of agency, and potential payouts. Our producer explained that many young men get drawn into illegal activities gradually. It might start with something small—holding on to a package, making a delivery, earning a few bucks. But that small sense of purpose and accomplishment can give shape to the day. And when bigger, more morally murky requests come in, they’re harder to refuse—especially if your family’s safety is used as leverage.

 During our month of filming, the armed groups were the one subject my crew stayed cagey about. Early one morning, while we were filming preparations for sehri, the last meal before each day’s fast begins, rumors spread that the leader of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)—one of the armed groups active within the camps—had been arrested in Dhaka on charges of murder and militant activity. I wasn’t aware of the news, but noticed men approaching our car, their body language guarded, their voices low. Something felt off. When I asked what was going on, my crew hesitated and said they’d explain later.

 After we drove off, my crew shared the news with me and cautioned that ARSA had many supporters in the camps. Despite their being linked to violence and extortion, many camp inhabitants saw them as the only group actively pushing back against the Myanmar Army. Some even viewed them as charitable or protective of the vulnerable. I could imagine the appeal of supporting a faction that appeared to be doing something, after having faced years of persecution and displacement.

What else could one expect from taking hundreds of thousands of capable men, and prohibiting them from earning a proper living?

Involvement in armed groups and criminal activities is not the only way men respond to the loss of power their circumstances inflict. As history shows us, when men are under strain, the women around them suffer more. There have been reports of rising sexual and gender-based violence against women in the camps—mostly from their intimate partners.

The women I spoke to in the camps often felt the need to highlight when a man did not beat his wife. This would come up unprompted in response to my questions: “What do you and your husband talk about?” “What do you miss about your husband?” If I were asked to describe my partner, it would not have occurred to me to say, “He never beats me.”

Of course, it is immensely challenging for people to deal with hardship and cope with forces beyond their control. But during my month inside the camps, I met incredible men who managed to stay positive and motivated, men who carved out purpose while having very little to work with, men who became quiet role models for the next generation: stallkeepers, photographers, rickshaw drivers, motivational speakers, barbers, human rights advocates. 

Across the camps, boys’ faces lit up when they saw these men working—making time to mentor, to encourage, to show what dignity can look like when you have every reason to check out. I held a deep respect for the grace with which they moved through their difficult realities—and for the way they resisted the dark pull of fleeting control.

*

Filming inside the camps wears on you in a particular way. Even more than the heat that leaves you sweat-soaked before noon, it’s the constant visibility that’s exhausting. As a foreigner, I stood out. Every time I stepped outside, it took less than a minute to draw a crowd. Children, mostly. Sometimes, men. Curious, restless, eager for anything that might break the monotony of the day. It wasn’t threatening, just relentless. Questions, stares, laughter. One kid would spot the camera, then three more would show up, then ten, forming an energetic wall.

I was told that foreign-looking visitors were more common in the early days of the crisis, back in 2017 and 2018—when the world still seemed to care. That kind of attention has faded. But the curiosity of Rohingya children about the world beyond the camp fences still flickers, undimmed by years of waiting.

When crowds thickened while we were waiting, I’d try to be present rather than tune them out. I’d look into the kids’ eyes. So many eyes. Some wide with mischief, some reluctant, others watchful and shy. Some kids beamed at me, proud to be seen. Others just hovered, unsure. Once in a while, someone would break from the circle. Usually a young man, maybe in his late teens. He’d come over and ask, politely, if we could talk.

At first it was small talk. “Where are you from?” “What are you filming?” But quickly, the conversation would shift. Without fail, they’d get to the point: the lack of opportunity. The desire to be seen as more than a refugee. The fear that their ambitions, work ethic, and smarts would mean nothing here. Without exception, they explained how little opportunity there was for someone like them. 

They weren’t just venting. They were making a case; trying to explain what was at stake for them. Each one spoke with passion and urgency about their lack of access to (quality) education, their exclusion from formal work in Bangladesh, and their fading hopes for advancement. I admired them for taking the time to talk to me—but I also wondered how many times they’d made that same pitch. How many foreigners they’d tried to convince to care.

I was born in China’s industrial rust belt, then migrated to Europe in the early ’90s with part of my family. Cue the immigrant experience and a road that eventually led to a university degree. That was the arc I got to follow. These young men had no such path—barely even the illusion of one.

I’d always ask what they dreamed of becoming—not just to make conversation, but to understand what shape dreams take in a place like this. Almost all of them gave the same answer: they wanted to work for an NGO.

Beyond informal work like reselling goods, hauling supplies, repairing phones, and tailoring, there’s barely any employment in the camps. The most stable, best-paying work for Rohingya is “volunteering” for international NGOs, a designation that gets around the prohibition on formal employment. Helping with translation, research, or data collection can bring in between $100 and $200 per month. Payment for the few full-time roles as consultants, interpreters, and researchers can exceed $800, but these opportunities are extremely rare and hard to come by. Now, compare that to the $12.50 in monthly food rations per person—the only consistent support many families rely on. Even the lowest stipends from NGO volunteer roles offer eight to sixteen times more. 

So the Rohingya teenagers’ goal made perfect sense. They were aiming for the best jobs available. But I couldn’t shake the discomfort: that the most realistic ambition here was to build a future off the very crisis you were trapped in.

Long-term confinement can do more than limit your movement—it can reshape what you believe is possible. In prisons, they call it institutionalization. In the camps, I sensed something similar. A slow redefinition of ambition. As if the boundaries of possibility had been redrawn inside the mind.

Some people refused to be shaped by those lines. 

Over the course of the month, I got to know a young woman who wanted to carve out her own path. She had piercing eyes, and her long wavy hair was mostly tucked under her scarf. At just twenty years old, she didn’t mince her words when discussing the complex crisis. Her delivery, especially when addressing injustices, was crisp and exacting. 

“Due to the lack of education access back in Rakhine state, our people became illiterate. Now many men in the camps are engaging in illegal activities because they don’t have better alternatives,” she explained. “I haven’t heard of anyone with an education getting involved in armed groups.”

She told me her goal was to study political science. Not just to understand what had been done to the Rohingya people, but to learn how political systems function, how states are governed, and where power lives—or fails—in international relations and diplomacy.

As much as her determination, it was the scale of her thinking that made her stand out to me. While many others spoke of pursuing NGO work as a way to survive and advocate for their community, her sights were set on the machinery behind it all. In fact, she had quit her paid NGO job to focus on the language exam to qualify for a scholarship. Her vision was clear: if real change were to happen, it would require an intricate understanding of how power moves. She didn’t just want to raise her people’s voice or secure a better future—she wanted to understand the architecture of the world that enabled their erasure in the first place.

Having survived genocide at age twelve and sought refuge in the camps since, she had now lived there for eight years. Her parents—both educated—supported her schooling and allowed her to continue studying into her twenties, unmarried. That alone was rare.

And yet, she was also just a young woman who loved fashion. A serious cook. And a devoted fan of Lisa, the Thai member of the K-pop group BLACKPINK. When I asked if she was nervous about the possibility of earning her scholarship and leaving her family to study in Ontario, Canada, she replied without missing a beat: “I’m mostly worried the food won’t be spicy enough—what am I going to eat?”

*

Life in the camps felt personal, improvised, and human. But the systems of aid and communication there often felt absurd, or confusing at best.

Most Camp-in-Charge offices, for example, displayed a large sign reading: “Feedback and Complaint Mechanisms (CFMs).” A set of words so sterile, it sounds like it was designed to serve the system—not the people living inside it.

At one of the teashops where our crew took breaks between filming, I noticed an HPV vaccination poster tacked to the back wall. It hung upside down, collecting dust. I pointed it out to the shop owner. He laughed. It had been there for years, he said, and I was the first person to notice it.

Many awareness campaigns in the camps utilize English or Burmese script, with English the more prominent language. But the Rohingya language—closely related to Chittagonian, a regional dialect of Bangladesh—has historically been written in multiple scripts: Arabic (mainly for religious contexts), Roman (commonly used online and in NGO settings), and Hanifi (a script developed specifically for Rohingya in the 1980s). A 2018 comprehension study found that only around 32% of Rohingya could understand some simple written Burmese, Bangla or English. I wondered how many people would actually read the NGOs’ messages. 

From the moment you enter the camps, it’s striking how logos, posters, and billboards cover nearly every structure and object. You see them inside shelters, on roadsides, towering above eye level. UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, WFP, BRAC, Save the Children, MSF, WHO—their names and symbols are everywhere, stamped on water jugs, walls, backpacks, toilets, and tarpaulins. One of the more classy minimalist designs I saw consisted of logos embossed into a cement wall at every half-meter. Many of these visual artifacts appeared in various states of decay: sun-bleached, weather-warped, or half-obscured by plants reclaiming space. I thought that I wouldn’t have been surprised if even the trees started sprouting NGO logos. And I kept wondering, not about the aid itself, but about the cost of branding it all so insistently.

One sign in particular lodged itself in my mind—partly because of its bluntness, probably by design:

Child Marriage Means –

Early Pregnancy

Early Death

If you witness child marriage,

STOP and CALL

16670 (TOLL FREE)

It was hard to miss. The message was direct, urgent, and left me with a lot of questions.

 Arranged marriage at a young age is commonplace in Rohingya culture. The practice of dowry payments (outlawed in Bangladesh, but the ban is not enforced in Rohingya camps) contributes to higher rates of child marriage. Families face impossible choices—many mouths to feed, safety concerns, extra financial strain if something goes wrong. Cultural norms may shape the framework, but desperation sharpens its edges.

In fact, an unmarried daughter is sometimes seen as a liability families simply cannot afford. Even the young woman with piercing eyes, who seemed in control of her life trajectory, wasn’t spared from abduction by a crowd of men. Having her family’s support to remain unmarried, and pursue higher education instead, didn’t insulate her from the dangers of camp life. Her brother was only able to bring her back safely because they had earned enough money through NGO work to meet the ransom demand. 

I asked my crew, “Do people actually call that toll-free hotline?” I got eye rolls. Reporting on other families’ and one’s own marital practices wasn’t common, they explained, probably because everyone had grown up in an environment where this was normalized. Besides, the hotline offered a broad range of assistance. People called it to register newborns, to request bamboo, tarpaulin, or rope for their shelter. Also, our producer said he had called the number many times—usually with no answer. “Once they picked up after several attempts,” he told me.  

Were signs and posters really the best delivery system for public messaging here? From what I observed, many people spent a lot more time on Facebook than on staring at faded signage.

One of the content creators we followed was a fifteen-year-old with 72,000 followers on Facebook and Reels, making posts that garnered more than 230,000 views. Most of his reach was within the camp and his content was in Rohingya, so the monetization picture wasn’t great. But his relevance? Undeniable. He was the first rapper in the camp—blending traditional love songs with rap, and was now branching out to conducting interviews and covering camp football tournaments. When I left, he and his friends were filming the first Rohingya action film, complete with dirt road stunts—the impressive results suggested that perhaps they should’ve been hired to design the public health messaging instead of the NGOs.

*

There are no easy takeaways. No tidy solutions. But I still think it matters to pay attention—to notice the quirks, small triumphs, and unfinished thoughts of the individuals behind the statistics. The details that don’t make headlines, but tell everything else. As a documentary maker, it’s the least I can do.

Five days after I left Cox’s Bazar, my crew sent a video from that same teashop where we used to take breaks. I messaged back immediately: They renovated! New prints on the walls. And the HPV vaccination poster is finally right side up.

They sent a close-up of the poster and wrote back: The owner fixed it for your next visit. You seemed obsessed with it.

That’s what he says, grinning as he lifts a chunk of concrete above his head, arms trembling, veins flaring like the cracked roads beneath his feet. There’s no gym anymore—just the skeletal remains of what used to be a neighborhood, and a few iron bars salvaged from the wreckage, warped by fire, bent by force. He deadlifts a car door. He presses a stone slab. He does pull-ups from the frame of a bombed-out window. His gym is Gaza, and every piece carries weight.

He trains in the alley off Al-Wahda Street, near where the Abu Asser bakery once stood. Some mornings, the scent of burnt bread still lingers in the air. Behind him the jagged shell of the Al-Shorouq Building rises, his building—what’s left of it—its top floors sheared away by the missiles. But he keeps a pair of tattered training gloves in his pocket—a gift from our cousin Yusuf before he was killed in an airstrike last winter. The gloves are split at the seams, the leather darkened by sweat. I watched him pull them out a few weeks ago and turn them over, as if inspecting a wound.

Before the war, he had a routine. At twenty, he worked part-time at a hardware shop, hauling sacks of cement, unloading crates—strength built in daylight hours, refined at night. Every morning, eggs sizzling in a battered pan, chicken breasts poaching in salted water, rice fluffed and portioned with the precision of a surgeon. He used to save for months to afford imported protein powder, clutching each tin like treasure. There was a gym not far from the beach, paint peeling, mirrors cracked, but it had everything he needed: a bench press, a squat rack, dumbbells rusted to bite his palms. He’d train until his shirt clung to him like a second skin. His dream wasn’t fame, or escape. His dream was simple: to grow bigger. And to carve himself into something unbreakable.

Now the chicken is gone. The eggs are scarce. The rice, when he finds it, is portioned not by macros but by survival. He eats lentils instead, bread when there’s bread, sardines from dented and dusty cans, fish from the Mediterranean Sea, whatever the sea still spares—like many, when that was still an option. He tells me later, in a voice note that keeps cutting out, that fish had become almost impossible to find after May, when the Israeli navy began firing on small boats near Gaza’s coast. He could go to the aid sites, but he won’t—not after what they’ve become: places where people are gunned down as they reach for flour, where the line between relief and execution has vanished, where hunger turns neighbors into enemies and forces them to fight for scraps.  

He found the sardines in March after days of rationing boiled lentils. He had eaten them until his stomach cramped. He was out searching, weaving through rubble on Omar Mukhtar Street, when he stumbled on the charred remains of Abu Khalil’s Minimarket. Inside, half-collapsed, he found a metal shelf flattened under debris. He clawed through plaster dust, splinters, shattered glass—and there they were: a row of cans, crushed, dented, and some, to his surprise, perfectly fine, labels scorched but still intact. He took them all, stuffed them into a plastic sack, slung it over his shoulder, the way he used to carry his prizes—the battered medals from local lifting contests, the cheap plastic trophies that once sat on the windowsill of his family’s apartment before the missiles tore it open and left it hollow. That haul lasted him two weeks, no more—and then the search began again. 

There’s a rhythm now to his hunger—the old hunger to grow bigger, even as the world crumbles and shrinks around him. In the mornings, he mixes lentils with whatever oil he can scavenge—a dented can of sunflower oil found behind what was left of Abu Nidal’s corner shop, a smear of cloudy olive oil scraped from the bottom of a jar he dug out of a collapsed pantry. Once, desperate, he tried to stretch the oil with water, but it only made the lentils thin and bitter, and left him hungrier. He knows how much fat matters too—the dense fuel his body needs to keep lifting, to keep moving. Without it, he’s convinced, the muscle he’s built will waste away faster than any bomb can destroy it.

On good days, he adds a spoonful of za’atar from a jar he once salvaged from his aunt’s ruined apartment on Al-Nasr Street. Water is harder to find. He walks to the municipal well near the wreckage of Al-Azhar University, queues with others, two battered yellow olive oil jugs at his feet, dust crusting his lips. It feels safer here than at the aid sites. Here, the line holds together like a thread trying to be pulled tight—no pushing, no shouting, no gun barrels watching every move. 

A week ago, standing in line, a mother held her son in front of him—the boy couldn’t be more than seven or eight, his eyes wide with hunger and curiosity. He kept glancing at Sami’s arms, at the rope of muscle beneath his frayed sleeves. Then, shy at first, he reached out, brushing his fingers against Sami’s forearm as if to check if they were real. Sami smiled, flexed just enough to make him smile. From his pocket, Sami pulled out a small Ali Baba chocolate bar—melted, found weeks ago and saved, waiting for a special occasion he couldn’t name. He pressed it into the boy’s hand, and the boy’s face lit up as if he’d been handed a prize.

Some days Sami trains throughout the early light, before the drones hum overhead, before the tanks growl awake. Other days he trains at dusk, the air thick with smoke, the horizon jagged with ruin. He lifts, he pushes, he pulls—each motion a prayer shaped in dust. The body as fortress, the body as machine, the body as a relentless supplication. At night, when he can’t sleep inside his old bedroom, curled on the floor of what’s left of his apartment, the warm wind drifting through the hole where the living room used to be, or the non-stop thud of distant bombing, he remembers the old gym: how he loved the hammer strength incline press, the feel of the cold metal handles in his grip, the burn in his chest as he forced out the last rep. Now he dreams of that burn, wakes with his hands clenched, his body aching not only from lifting, but from the hunger to lift again.

On Fridays, when the shelling quiets down for an hour or two for people to pray Jum’ah, he walks the empty grid of streets that used to be markets. Salah al-Din Road, where vendors once sold meat, chicken, pistachios, olives, dates—and a hundred other things he can no longer name, as if hunger has swallowed even memory. Al-Jalaa Street, lined with broken shopfronts, glass crunching underfoot. He scans for anything: a can, a bottle, a forgotten sack of flour—but everything has been picked clean, as if the city’s bones have already been stripped by other hands, by hunger sharper than his. Once, he found a bag of sugar, split open and hardened to a block by rain—he chipped pieces off it for a week, sucked them before lifting, pretending it was a pre-workout. Another time, in a half-collapsed storage warehouse behind a school, he unearthed a crate of beans—faded, dry, but still edible. On the rare days he could spare the water, he boiled small batches over a fire built from splintered wood, doors, broken chairs and bed frames. He ate them slowly, as if savoring them might stretch them out longer. Beans meant protein—the one thing his body needed most, the thing he obsessed over, searching the same streets again and again, for hours and hours, each time he felt his muscles hollow out beneath his skin.

There’s a boy he sometimes runs into on these walks as he searches for food—Khaled, maybe ten years old, always alone, always barefoot, carrying a stick like a young shepherd. The boy watches him lift, eyes wide. “Why do you still do it?” he keeps asking. Sami grins, hoists a metal beam onto his shoulders. “Because I can,” he says. And also because he must. Because to stop would mean surrender—twice: once to the hunger, and once to the silence that follows. 

But after Khaled walks away, Sami feels something twist in his chest—sharper than hunger, heavier than exhaustion. He wonders what the boy sees when he looks at him. A fool? A man pretending his body can matter when nothing else stands? A ghost, still going through the motions of a world that no longer exists? Sami wipes sweat from his brow and watches Khaled disappear into the ruin, the stick tapping the ground like a drumbeat. It fills him with shame, for a moment—as if lifting is theft, as if the strength he builds is stolen from those who can’t. But then he feels the bar digging deeper into his shoulders, and the shame burns off like fog under the sun. No—this is what he can offer: the sight of someone who hasn’t quit, not yet. If nothing else, he thinks, maybe Khaled will remember that. Maybe that’s worth something. Maybe that’s enough.

Sometimes, after training, Sami sits on what’s left of a low wall near the shell of Al-Shifa Hospital and watches the smoke rise in the distance. He fingers the scar on his forearm—a thin white line from the first time he dropped a barbell in the old gym, years ago, when he was sixteen and too proud to ask for a spot. That scar, he thinks, was the first proof that his body could take the damage and keep going. Now he wonders how much more his body can take, how much more the hunger will hollow out of him.

And so, he tracks it—what’s left, what’s still his. 

In a notebook—tucked into the sole of an old boot hidden in a bombed stairwell—he records numbers: reps, sets, rough guesses at calories. The ink runs from the sweat, but he writes anyway. Each page is a record, a small refusal to let the chaos erase everything. On a WhatsApp video call on June 5, 2025, just after 3 p.m. Gaza time, when the line finally stabilized, he angled the phone so I could read an entry: “Deadlift: 7 reps, 60 kg (I think—maybe more).” The weight was a rusted car axle, its ends jagged where wheels used to be. He gripped it as if it were a barbell, lifted it from the dust and shattered glass—the absurdity of it almost making him laugh. Almost. “Food: 100g lentils.” A fistful, maybe a little more—his best guess, remembering what 100 grams used to look like when he measured it out back in the old kitchen, when there was a scale, clean bowls, and a fridge that was always full.

In the margins of the notebook, he sometimes sketches the outlines of muscles, as if to remind himself of what he’s still building. But sometimes he sketches the outline of a girl—Nisreen, the one he had had a crush on, the one he never spoke to, not really. Just the curve of her hair, the tilt of her chin, drawn from memory in the margins of his numbers. He doesn’t know what happened to her. After the first weeks of bombings last year, she stopped appearing on the street he used to see her on, near her father’s shop in Al-Rimal. Maybe she fled south. Maybe not. She used to steal smiles at him, standing next to her father behind the register, sometimes when he came in and walked the aisles, pretending he might buy something just to stay near her a little longer. He wonders if she’d even recognize him now—leaner, harder, hollowed out. He draws her because it’s the only way he can keep her alive, at least inside of him. Sometimes he imagines spotting her at the end of the alley off Al-Wahda Street where he lifts, watching from the shadows, the way Khaled does. But each time he looks, the alley remains empty.

He tried, once, to leave, back in December when it got very cold and the airstrikes became relentless. He walked south toward Rafah, hoping the border might open. But at Khan Younis he turned back. He saw the line of people, saw their faces—gaunt with hunger, dusted with fear, heavy with waiting—and he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t leave his mother and his father’s grave behind, couldn’t leave the ruins of what he had built, couldn’t leave the boy Khaled who watched him lift.

Khaled, with his stick and his wide eyes, standing silent at the edge of the alley as Sami strained under the weight of metal and stone. That gaze haunted him on the road south—as if the boy had seen in him something solid, something that might last, and to walk away would be to crumble that illusion. Sami had felt it like a hook in his gut. The boy’s belief—or was it just curiosity?—was the last thing that he could not abandon. He kept seeing the way Khaled’s face had lit up, just for a second, when Sami pressed the concrete block overhead. That flash of wonder. And Sami thought: If I leave, I take that from him. 

Sometimes, after the day’s work—the scavenging, the lifting, the endless walks through broken streets—Sami finds a corner of roofless shelter and just stands there, breathing. He watches the light shift over the ruins of Gaza, the way the sun cuts through dust like a blade. His hands are raw, his shoulders burning, his stomach hollow, but he feels—for those moments—like he has filled some space that war tried to empty. He remembers his father’s words from long ago, before his father and mother were taken in the first bombardment of Shuja’iyya back in 2021, visiting a cousin’s house in Jabalya: “A man’s strength is what he does when nothing is left.” 

There is something ancient in it. Like the men in old folktales who lifted stones to prove themselves on wedding days, who wrestled not for sport but for honor. Like the fathers and uncles Sami grew up watching in the markets, men who carried crates on their backs, balanced sacks of grain on their shoulders, strength built not in gyms but in the hard work of survival. Like the fighters in stories whispered at night, whose bodies became both shield and weapon, whose names, like the martyrs, live on in street signs and school walls. Strength, he thinks, is a kind of language—an act of bulking against erasure.

I think of Yukio Mishima, who wrote of the body as art, as a canvas to be perfected, as a way to reclaim meaning in a world sliding toward ruin. Sun and Steel, he called it—the body and the blade, beauty and death intertwined. Like Mishima, Sami carves at himself, though not for ritual or theater, or necessarily a glorified final act, but because it is the only thing left to shape. Where there is no future to plan for, no safety to trust, the body becomes the last domain of control. Flesh and bone: all that remains. Flesh and bone: all that resists. Flesh and bone: all that testifies.

There is tragedy here, yes. But there is also beauty. To bulk, to build, to lift—when the world wants you flattened, erased, forgotten—is its own kind of hope. Or if not hope, then at least refusal. Sami pushes the rock up the hill. It falls. He grips it again.

I keep returning to Albert Camus’s line: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I place it here because I want to believe it—that in some brief moment, even here in Gaza, as he smiles at Khaled through dust and sun and sweat, Sami feels some joy.

And when the boy Khaled appears again—sometimes just watching from the shadows, sometimes offering him a shard of sugar, or dates salvaged from the wreckage—Sami lifts higher, holds the weight of the concrete or the car door longer, as if to say, not just to the boy but to the world watching from behind rubble, wire, and glowing screens:

Look. Look what a body can do, even now. Even here.

Written by Kaori Fujino and translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor, “The Key” opens with a husband’s irrational panic before an elderly woman in red who walks the couple’s street each night. What begins as a minor domestic disturbance soon leads to the wife’s slow recognition of the gendered mechanics of fear, of the future self waiting for her, and of how vigilance becomes a way of life for those who must survive by rehearsing violence long before it confronts them.

Originally published in MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, this story asks what women inherit in their bodies as forms of defence, and what it would mean, inside a marriage, to ask a man to recognize that knowledge instead of merely standing beside it.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Granny Red—that’s what my husband called her. On that first night that he saw her and fled home to our apartment, the name just came to him and flew from his mouth. It was the only thing he could imagine calling her. Not missus, not grandmother, not old lady—“granny.” I was a little surprised that he’d choose such a childish word, but I found it truly endearing when he blurted it out.

My husband always got home around midnight, the same time Granny Red usually appeared. I got home a little earlier. Most nights, by the time he walked through the door, I’d already eaten dinner, had my bath, and was ready for bed; I lounged on the sofa, makeup removed, contacts out, glasses on, idly scrolling on my phone. Granny Red would appear on the dark one-way street that runs in front of our building. She came and went along the seven hundred meters of pavement, which was usually deserted, even though it connected two major boulevards. Just as her nickname implied, she was an old lady who always wore a red T-shirt. I figured she lived in the neighborhood. Maybe even in our building. Maybe she’d always been here, or maybe she’d moved in around the time my husband first spotted her six months ago. We were both white-collar workers, childless, renters with no friends in the neighborhood. Granny Red didn’t appear every night. When I looked for her, she wasn’t there. When I forgot about her, there she was. Granny Red didn’t have a regular schedule. But if she was out, my husband would always complain the moment he walked in the door.

“Again . . . Granny Red was there again,” he’d say uneasily. He seemed jumpy, as if he suspected she was hiding somewhere in our living room.

Sometimes he’d message me: “Granny Red is here.” That was his emergency signal. Immediately my late-night brain fog would clear, and I’d leap from the couch. A cardigan over my pajamas, then as the season changed, a trench coat, and as it changed again, a wool coat, sandals over my bare feet (always barefoot, no matter the season), and out our door I went. Down the hallway I dashed, into the elevator and down to the first floor, where I passed through the building’s automatic door with its automatic lock and emerged onto the street.

No one was there. No—glancing down either side—Granny was always there, somewhere. Just as my husband said. She wore her red T-shirt, her loose culottes, and slip-on sandals almost exactly like mine, and she walked down the very center of the street. Sometimes I found her standing there, fists on her hips, feet set apart, chest puffed out. My husband was usually cowering behind the row of bike racks next to our building.

“Dai-chan,” I’d call, voice low, and out he’d spring to crouch behind me.

“She’s . . . she’s . . .”

“Yes, she’s here,” I’d whisper. “Let’s go home.” I’d take his hand and pull. His palm and fingers were meaty and thick. Like a well-made leather glove. While I absently checked our mailbox, as I did every time I walked into our building, he frantically punched the code into the autolock and chanted “Hurry up, hurry up, she’s coming!” He sounded like he was fighting back a scream. He could sense Granny Red’s inevitable return—sooner or later, she always came back toward us.

He’d ask me to save him whenever he misjudged the distance between him and Granny Red. She was a slow walker, so sometimes he accidentally caught up to her. He tried to keep a prudent distance, but if Granny sensed my husband behind her, she’d suddenly turn on her heel and start walking toward him, or so he claimed. She never left the middle of the road, though. Dai-chan could pass her without incident just by walking along the edge of the street. But the moment he did, she would turn and head toward him. After that first time, even if he was right in front of the apartment, if Dai-chan judged there wasn’t enough space between them, he’d hide behind the bike racks. He imagined she would sneak up behind him while he was punching in the code, and he was terrified that she’d follow him into the apartment, into the elevator, and then he’d be stuck with her—alone, his fear freezing him to the spot.

The first night Dai-chan complained about Granny Red, I didn’t doubt what he told me. I didn’t laugh at him either. That night, he was a changed man. The terror within him moved me. He stood there in his suit, ghastly white, stiff as a board, and I beckoned him to the sofa where I lounged in my pajamas. He approached me woodenly and slowly set himself down beside me.

And then I said something like this: When I walk alone at night down empty streets, I am always seized with dread. There might be a thug crouching somewhere. A thug blessed with stature and strength far greater than my own. That crook, he might hit me. That lowlife, he might sexually assault me. That brute, he might kill me.

“And when I get scared like that, I do this.”

I grabbed my purse from where I’d tossed it beside the couch and pulled out my little Lego keychain. I wrapped my fist around the whole thing—save for the sharp blade of the key, which I arranged so that it poked out between my pointer and middle fingers.

“You see? Like this. I’ve done this ever since high school, any time I walk down a street that makes me nervous. I still do it. If some thug ever does show up, I’ll stab him in the eye with this.

“Touch your eye,” I told him, and then I took his hand and pressed his fingers over his eyelid.

“It’s harder than you’d think, right? You can feel how it resists your finger? But it doesn’t matter. This key is more than enough to ruin an eyeball.

“But there’s one thing,” I added. No, not added—because this was the most important point.

“The key can do its job. It’s me that might fail. I don’t know if I have the courage to actually stab someone with this key. Maybe I’ll lose my nerve, and my hand will go limp. Or maybe I’ll put too much into my swing and miss him entirely.”

My confession was an honest one. Dai-chan had shared his fear with me, and to answer that vulnerability, that rawness, I laid my heart bare. I told him it wasn’t only thugs I worried about, the nights I walked alone through empty streets—I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to answer violence with violence when the time came.

“So, given my own hesitation, maybe I shouldn’t be giving you advice,” I said as I passed the key to my husband, “but something is better than nothing, and this is all I can offer.”

Dai-chan didn’t even try to grip the keychain. I plucked it from his palm and showed him again.

“See? Like this.”

But when I looked up at him, he was back to his old self. The man, the husband, he’d always been. He was twenty centimeters taller than me, almost one hundred eighty centimeters, and though I didn’t know his weight, he was neither too heavy nor too thin—an adult man of average build with enough confidence and strength to back up his height. That was my husband.

He was clearly perplexed. He told me he’d never been nervous to walk alone at night—he’d never once believed someone might attack him with violence. Which meant that he’d also never imagined having to seize the upper hand by attacking that someone.

“Even when it comes to Granny Red?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Even though you’re terrified of her?”

“That’s right,” he said. He began listing the reasons he had no need for violence. Firstly, Granny Red was empty-handed. And given her outfit, he couldn’t imagine she was hiding a weapon either. She was unarmed. Granny Red was even smaller and thinner than me. And she was old. Even if she was coming after him, he didn’t think she’d be able to hurt him.

That was true for him. But what about me? I didn’t think I could be as blasé as Dai-chan, but given her age and stature, I could probably beat Granny Red barehanded.

I said no more.

“But I am terrified. She’s so creepy, creepy just being there, I mean,” Dai-chan said.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I usually spent lunch break on my phone. Whether I ate at a café or in the company cafeteria or at my desk, I would gaze absent-mindedly at lines of text, reading through blogs written by complete strangers. For days on end I’d read the blog posts in sequence. Because I often had to stop in the middle of an entry, when I wasn’t staring at the blog, I couldn’t remember a word of what I’d been reading. But when I sat down and opened the browser on my phone, the entry I’d been reading would appear, and as I started to follow the words again, the contents would come back to me.

Oh, that’s right, now I remember, I’d think. She had her baby. Pretty sure it was a little girl. But now the baby was gone. Or, no, it wasn’t that she was gone, it was that she didn’t yet exist. Because I was reading the blog backwards.

That’s what blogs are like.. You read them in reverse chronological order. All the blogs I read are more or less the same, always beginning with a baby or a toddler who grows smaller day by day until it disappears.

In place of a child, there are go bags for the eventual run to the hospital to give birth. Small suitcases or big totebags. And then, as though baring its innards, the bag’s contents appear. Pajamas, underwear, skin care products, makeup, a digital camera, a laptop so the woman can update her blog. Then an enumeration of all the ways her body is out of sorts. The heaviness of her belly, the terribleness of her swelling, the unsettling of her stomach, the pain in her back. The totebag she just bought for her trip to the hospital arrives. Then she’s considering whether to buy a huge new bag that she can use first to go to the hospital and after as a diaper bag. Then for the newborn, onesies, swaddling blankets, diapers, baby wipes—one by one they disappear. Pain in her thighs, whining about how at this rate she won’t even be able to walk anymore. The empty living room, the TV stand now slightly too far from the sofa, a floor mat for the baby in the middle of it all. Then the mat is gone and the TV and sofa are back in place, and a coffee table appears between them. Her living room looks a lot like ours. We’re getting rid of the coffee table, for the baby, she confesses. Complaints about morning sickness, it seems it will go on for eternity. The couple’s bedroom is unveiled. There, low to the floor, a wooden slat bed for mother and father and a baby-sized bed with a lip of cushioning, small enough that mother can co-sleep with her newborn. The two beds in turn disappear, and a normal full-size mattress and mattress frame take their place. This bedroom, too, resembles ours. We’re throwing it out, for the baby, the woman says again—no, says for the first time. So that when the baby’s a little bigger, we can all crash together, so that the chances of the baby rolling and falling off are zero, that’s why we’re throwing out our bed. Morning sickness begins.

When I’m reading these blogs, I sense the passing of time. Not just my lunch break, but my commute to the office and back home again, the time I spend waiting for my transfer at the train station, or waiting for my husband on the sofa after I’ve bathed. I waste all my free time reading someone else’s memories. Someone else’s joy, her hesitation, her experiences, her finances, her suffering, the things I don’t feel, can’t feel. I abandon the time I have to live my own life and instead validate the lives of others. I come to know that such things are out there.

And as I read, I grow distant, just as distant time passes. Just over a week has passed since our last bi-monthly work meeting, a little less than a week to the next; thirty-five years, several months, and a few days have passed since I was born; eight minutes to walk from our apartment to the nearest station; seventeen minutes from the moment I board the subway to the moment I arrive at the station nearest the office; six months since I started wondering if I should have a kid—no, that’s a lie, in truth two years have passed; it’s been just over six months since my husband first encountered Granny Red. It all shrinks to a single point, but in the next instant, it explodes above me, a universe I’m not entirely capable of sustaining, and it is because of this infinite smallness and infinite largeness and the coming and going between them that I grow so distant.

Or maybe I’m not actually that out of it, I think. Coffee table. Bed. I see, you throw them out. You have to throw them out. I learn that the option of throwing them out exists. I learn that sometimes your pelvis grows unstable, and you can be immobilized, your morning sickness can begin even before your belly has begun to swell, and it can last until the birth.

Yes, this is learning.

I am learning.

On weekdays, Dai-chan and I talk for only a few minutes before we go to sleep. We don’t have time for more. But on Granny Red nights, we offer up that precious time to have the same conversation again and again. We’ve already had it dozens of times—I know what he’ll say, and he knows what I’ll say.

“I think she’s just out for a walk.”

“Who takes a walk this late at night?”

“Maybe she’s a night person.”

“But she’s only wearing a T-shirt. In this weather! It’s been that same T-shirt since she first appeared last summer, and now it’s the middle of winter!”

“You’ve seen those foreign tourists, right? The ones who wear shorts and a T-shirt even in January? Seems like it’s the same for her.”

“But she’s Japanese! And she’s so tiny!”

“But she’s Japanese. And she’s so tiny. So why are you scared of her, Dai-chan?”

“And why is her T-shirt red anyway?”

“Maybe she wants to make sure drivers can see her on the road?”

“Why the hell is she walking in the middle of the road in the first place?”

“Maybe the middle of the road is actually safer, because she’s easier to see.”

“But why—”

“You could try talking to her. Say hi.”

“I don’t want to. Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s just hello.”

“I said I don’t want to.”

I know Dai-chan won’t actually burst into tears, but he sounds like he might. I love this conversation between us—I could have it over and over again.

There is another conversation we’ve had again and again, one where we both already know what the other will say. Recently, our talk about Granny Red has superseded it, but this other conversation came first.

“Dai-chan, do you want kids?”

“Do you?”

“Maybe. I don’t really want them, but I don’t not want them either.”

“I feel the same. I guess I wouldn’t mind having kids.”

“So what should we do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We can’t wait around forever. It might already be too late.”

“What do you want to do, Saya-chan?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re the one who has to give birth, so I’ll stand by your decision. I want to put your feelings on this first.”

“Thank you for that.”

Whenever he tells me this, I think again what a good man my husband is. He must be. He’s probably a really good person.

If he pressed me, told me he wanted me to have our kids, I think I’d completely reject the idea. Because with pregnancy and childbirth, I’d be the one losing something—losing my health, or maybe my job, my time, my freedom. I’d probably say to him, How dare you! How could you say that to me?

My husband can’t force me, and I decide. If I’m the one making the decision, no matter how much I lose, he isn’t the one responsible, it was my call. All he has to do is obey and ejaculate. He waits, powerless, for my decision and my permission. His free time is not spent learning what is necessary for pregnancy and childbirth. All he can do is wait.

In the night, while I was floating in the space between the lives of others and my own life, a call for aid came from my husband, the first in a while.

“Granny Red is here.”

His message pulled me well and truly back into my own life. The season for wool coats had ended, and we were back to trench coat weather. I practically leapt into my coat, pajamas and all, pocketed my phone and keychain, slipped sandals onto my bare feet, and headed out. The key was not for self-defense, not this time. It was just to lock the door behind me, even though I’d be gone only a moment. Of course, it would be naive to assume that a thug lurking in the hallway or the elevator was out of the question. But I knew that my husband was on the street just below, and my mind was racing, so the key stayed in my pocket.

I got out of the elevator and passed through the automatic glass door—it locked again behind me. I took one step out onto the street and looked right and left, assessing the situation.

There she was. Granny Red was about halfway between the corner of our building and the end of the street, facing the point where our road spills onto the main boulevard. She stood in the darkness in the middle of the street, hands on hips, legs braced, back straight. I drew back and called to my husband.

“Dai-chan!”

He emerged from behind the bike racks.

“She’s there, right?”

“She is.”

“Let’s go. Quick.”

“It’s all right, she’s facing the other way,” I said, smiling to calm him. I thought that if I ever had a child, this was the way I would smile at them. I looked up into his eyes and took his hand, feeling his faint resistance, and slowly began to walk backward toward our apartment building. “Why don’t you take a look?”

“It’s not all right, it’s not all right!” In an instant, his resistance became stronger, more befitting an adult man, and I couldn’t go any farther. He looked past me and his voice went from a whisper to nearly a scream.

I looked over my shoulder and there, right behind me, was Granny Red. I had been holding my husband’s hand, but now he reversed us and grabbed hold of me instead. Granny Red stood in the middle of the street, same as always, but now she faced us head-on. Normally I only saw her in profile.

This was the first time I’d seen her this close. To have come from where she had been standing to where she stood now, she had to have moved fast. Maybe I’d underestimated her, thinking I could take her on in a fistfight. I took her in, her face, her body, all of her. But Granny Red wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were raised above me. She was looking at my husband. Dare I say she was glaring at him. I looked back up at Dai-chan. He was holding his breath, trying to offer a smile with the last shred of the civility ingrained in him, but his face was frozen halfway.

I inhaled.

“Hello!” I said, clearly, loudly. “Hello. Out for a walk?”

In that instant, Granny Red’s expression changed, like she’d been called back from elsewhere. Her eyes broke away from my husband and her face relaxed—she looked like she’d just woken up and was a bit surprised about it. She blinked twice, three times, and as she did, her eyes moved slightly, back and forth, back and forth, and then at last, nervously, she looked directly at me.

“Hello!” I said again, smiling.

Granny Red said nothing. Slowly she turned until she was again facing down the street, and she began to walk, her sandal-clad feet dragging across the asphalt.

When we got back to the apartment, my husband removed his suit, hung it up, and spritzed the fabric with a bottle of water to help remove the wrinkles. This routine was not the norm on Granny Red nights. On nights when he encountered Granny Red, my husband was meant to come in and, without even removing his coat, curl up next to me on the sofa, despondent.

“Why the hell did you have to go and talk to her?”

“Well, why didn’t you, Dai-chan?”

“Because you’re not supposed to talk to suspicious people.”

“But she’s not suspicious, right? She lives in this neighborhood.”

“What are you talking about, you can’t trust her, and besides, you don’t know where she lives. What is her family thinking, letting an old lady wander the streets at night.”

Old lady. My shock made me slow to respond. He plowed ahead in the silence.

“But maybe she lives alone. Maybe she’s going senile. You know that old tenement down the way, looks straight out of the 1960s? I’m always surprised it’s even there, nobody makes places like that anymore, and it’s so run-down. Maybe the old lady lives there, maybe she hasn’t got any family left. Makes me a little sad for her, I guess. But even so—”

My mouth was open, trembling a little. Words were coming out, I knew. But not the words I had prepared, the ones I’d wanted to say. These words were conveying information I wasn’t supposed to know. In the same way my husband had instinctively and immediately dubbed her Granny Red, the words whole and complete, a mass of words now flew from my mouth with the same degree of perfection and weight.

“You must be blind! She’s not senile, you’ve got to go to the salon to maintain a short haircut like that, and I think she must’ve been there just this afternoon, she had that fresh-cut look, and sure, her clothes are a bit odd, but that red T-shirt has definitely been washed, and the collar isn’t stretched at all, that outfit’s perfect for a bit of power walking, and maybe she thinks she should wear a T-shirt for power walking even if it’s cold, maybe she’s just stuck in her ways. And besides, the elderly aren’t as able to feel hot and cold anymore, and I remember one time in winter, I passed her and she was wearing long underwear, she’d rolled up the sleeves to hide them under the T-shirt, but I could still tell. And the reason she’s always in red is because she has a bunch of T-shirts that same color, there was a really good T-shirt sale, but nobody wanted the red ones, so they slapped on an even bigger discount and she bought a bunch of them, I mean, don’t you think it’s a little too red? Nobody would wear that color if they could help it. And she walks at night because she’s worried about sunburn, but you don’t have to wear sunscreen at night, right, and if you don’t have to wear sunscreen, you don’t have to go through your whole face-washing routine when you get back, so what I mean is that she’s finished her entire day, washed her face and everything, and once she’s done with her power walk—she’s got to keep her legs and back strong—all she has to do is go to bed. I don’t know where she lives, though you’re right about her not having family, she lives alone, but what’s wrong with that, don’t you go feeling sorry for her, maybe she likes it that way, and you know what else, Dai-chan, I don’t know how you haven’t realized this, but the reason that woman notices you, the reason she turns around, the reason she looks at you, Dai-chan, is because that woman is me. Me decades from now! Me, living alone, in the future! So just talk to her already!”

My husband stood there, shirt half unbuttoned, hands frozen, staring dumbfounded at me—he heard me out, but when I closed my mouth, he rushed over to me.

“Saya-chan, what are you saying, Saya-chan, you’re not going to wind up all alone, you’ll have a family. . . .” I looked down at where he’d gently put his hand over my lower stomach. “You’ll have me, Saya-chan, and this child, too.”

That’s right. I was pregnant. I’d had an exam the other day and they’d found both the amniotic sac and the heartbeat, which meant I was five weeks pregnant. There was apparently a living creature in my stomach.

“But, but you’re going to die before me, Dai-chan.” My words were decisive, and this time, this time I’d spoken of my own accord. “And children, once they grow up, they run off.”

“And why do you get to decide how long I’ll live?”

I’d thought that my tirade before was unprompted, unbidden, but now I began to believe that I had chosen to say those things. All I’d done was observe Granny Red, compile my thoughts, and speak them, all at once. But why in the world did I say that she was me?

“I mean, the average lifespan for a woman is longer than the average lifespan for a man, so there is a high chance you’ll outlive me, Saya-chan, that’s true. But still . . .”

And then it came to me: Ah, I see, I thought, as the penny dropped.

I decided to go on a stakeout. Before my husband came home, I went down to our apartment’s mailboxes and loitered, waiting for Granny Red. I held out until Dai-chan appeared at the end of the street and then hurried back to the apartment so he wouldn’t see me waiting. I whipped off my trench coat and assumed a seat on the sofa, toying with my phone as though nothing was happening.

“You were outside. What were you doing? You shouldn’t be out in the cold,” he scolded. I flushed all over and even felt a bit nauseous. The nausea reminded me of when I was a child, the way I felt when I was overexcited.

Day four of my stakeout, and I at last spot the red-clad figure I’d been waiting for. Granny Red has come. And luckily, my husband won’t be back for a good while yet.

I casually stroll onto the street and begin walking toward her as she approaches me—at first, I walk at the edge of the road, but slowly, casually, I angle myself into the center. Granny Red comes straight toward me, unflinching, eyes blank and fixed forward, like she doesn’t see me at all. But I have no intention of giving way.

At last, we both come to a stop, so close that another step would have had us colliding. I’m taller, but if she could fix her stooped back and bowed legs, I have a feeling we’d be the same height. I square my shoulders, puff out my chest, and look down at Granny Red. She is looking slightly down, toward my chest.

“Hello.” Unlike last time, there’s no need to smile. I greet her calmly. Granny Red does not reply.

But I don’t care.

“I don’t think my husband realized.” I carefully pull my right hand from where it’s been thrust in my coat pocket. It’s clenched in a fist, and between the pointer and middle fingers, the blade of the key juts out. I level the tip at Granny Red’s jaw. “You too, right?”

For a time, Granny Red doesn’t move. She had stopped looking at my chest, gazing instead at my fist. And then, at last, she pulls her clenched right hand from where she’d hidden it behind her thigh, raising it until it’s level with my jaw.

From between her pointer and middle finger, the sharp tip of a key juts.

I nod.

This, this is why I’d thought she was me. I had seen her, had taken in the fact that she faced her late-night power walks with a key clenched in her fist. My husband described Granny Red as unarmed, but he was a fool. He couldn’t see it. The hand she kept at her side was too low for him to notice. But I had seen. It had taken me a while, but I know now what it meant.

I line myself up side by side with Granny Red. And then I jab upward toward the dark.

“Like this,” I say with each jab. “How does this feel?”

Granny Red nods. And then she follows suit, punching her fist out at the dark.

I realize I’ve never actually practiced attacking like this. How stupid of me. I’d been so worried about whether I’d have the guts to strike, but that kind of nerve only comes from practicing. “Like this.” Determined not to be shown up by Granny Red, I punch into the dark, stab it, carve out its eyeballs. The thug’s blood sprays over my glasses.

“Like this.” Somewhere along the line, she starts saying it too. She has turned the tables on her imagined opponent.

We are both out of breath, and even as the ghastly corpses of our foes pile up in the corners of our vision, we strike out with our fists at the new assailants that appear, one after another. I will likely teach this to the child in my belly. Their sex doesn’t matter. Whether boy or girl, any small child needs this skill. I take up their small hand, sticky with sweat, and curl it around a hard key. I teach them how to hold the blade between their chubby pointer and middle fingers. And then, side by side, we train.

I teach them where to aim.

Just as I twist again, I glimpse my husband approaching from behind. In the rhythmic interval between jabs, I raise the left hand I’ve been using to keep my balance and signal him.

“Saya-chan, what are you . . .” My husband stops in his tracks. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Hi, Dai-chan.” Granny Red and I fill the street with the sounds of our ragged breath, our fists cutting through air, the quiet shuffling of our sandals as we step in and out of the attack. “Dai-chan, you should do this, I know, someone like you, probably, isn’t the biggest target, but Dai-chan, you can’t, you just can’t, say that you’ll never become a victim, anyone can be a victim, anytime.” Let’s show these brutes who’s boss, I invite him.

There’s plenty of room next to me and Granny Red. He could come over here any time. Granny Red pays him no mind, she is viciously murdering each and every one of her imagined attackers. I take on my own thugs, but I am still half turned back, left hand extended to my husband.

“Come on,” I say. “Hurry up.” I’m growing frenzied. “Get over here.” If he doesn’t, if half my attention has to be on him, the imagined assailants will cut me down.

He stands frozen in place.

“Come on,” I call again, determined. “Come here.”

“The Key” by Kaori Fujino (trans. Laurel Taylor), and originally published in MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, which describes itself as showcasing “the best of contemporary Japanese literature.”

THERE WAS RELIEF, to Mary-Beth, in planning her only child’s funeral. She felt guilty for the feeling. To plan a funeral meant to admit defeat, Calvin’s defeat and hers too, both of them squashed out at last not only by Tommy but the girls, and the Pigs, and Ronald Lee Book, Unofficial Mayoral Douchebag of Miami, and the teachers and parole officers and correctional officers and social workers and Your Honors, and the system of selective lifeboats (MONEY! It’s always the money!), and the cuntish polo-shirted neighbors who’d kicked Calvin like a Hacky Sack from place to place, who’d painted LUCIFER/AURORA on Mary-Beth’s Burbank Blue door, and Syl’s I told you sos, and Cal’s episode of Cops, and the snitch therapists, the whole world it felt like most usually, and of course, Mary-Beth would not leave out the person who’d run over her son.

Five times, forward and back.

The steps of planning a funeral transformed the taut pain of her chest into something coherent, productive. She remembered Calvin telling her the universe was always expanding, like a strip of dulled elastic, a rubber band at the bottom of her junk drawer. One day, without warning—Calvin had said—it would all snap. That’s how this death pain felt, a rubber band stretched beneath the bones of Mary-Beth’s feet, then secured at the top of her skull where headaches came on. She was an overblown balloon animal, skin thinning, and though her whole life had been spent waiting, she knew now, without Calvin, that annihilating snap might arrive sooner. There was some relief there, too.

Detective Carmen Durham hadn’t called Mary-Beth since she identified the body one week ago. Nobody had called her. There was no police unit left in the town nearest Gateway, the station boarded up for years (only Luckens selling bootleg T-Mobiles outside the station’s old door), so they were outsourcing the investigation to other units now. That’s what Syl said.

Ordering the finger foods, choosing a picture of Calvin for the program, selecting a nice and respectable place for a funeral—these tasks felt easier. Soothing, almost. These tasks were, simply, something Mary-Beth could do. For days Syl brought her the options—Deerfield or Palmetto or Broward, Pastor James or Pastor Finley, how many speeches, what songs—and Mary-Beth would close her eyes and picture it before offering an answer.

Syl had moved into Mary-Beth’s bedroom, Mary-Beth in the living room. This was on Mary-Beth’s insistence. She was more comfortable on her couch, ashtray one reach down, whorls of the TV glow reflecting in her special glass, upside-down little people in there, lulling her to sleep.

In the week since her arrival, Syl had begun to stink up the house, and Mary-Beth told her so. It always smelled like something now, someone else—those Indian meals from the fancy row of the Publix freezer, cloudberry angel wing perfume, lemon bug repellent, the LA Looks hair gel that farted out the bottle and into Syl’s palms. That, and all of Syl’s shoes and clothes smelled like horse shit, no matter how often Syl said that shit was just grass and grain, molasses concentrated, it was still shit. Mary-Beth hated living in grief with those smells.

Syl always hiked the AC way down on account of her hot flashes, which slicked the tile too cold. Mary-Beth had to wear her North Pole elf clothes around the house, those green and red stripes, bundled. When Syl needed formal paperwork signed, Mary-Beth would take the whole operation out the sliding glass doors to the back lawn, remove a few layers of clothing, then scribble her name a million times on the dimpled glass table. She sucked her orange baby food pouches—her toothaches worsening by the day. She wiped Misty ashes from the pages, leaving gray smears and tiny burns on words she could read but not understand. What casket? What wood? What money? The papers crinkle-shrunk in the humid air. July wrapped her body and squeezed. 

Mary-Beth’s yard dipped down to the communal lake. Encircling it: identical condos like a roll of Smarties, and a few gators spread out on the shoreline sunbathing at all hours, iridescent in stillness, even at night. The Lakeness Monster she used to call each gator when Calvin was little. Back then they’d lived in Dade County on a different canal, but still—those goddamn gators. She dreamed constantly of Calvin’s legs and little feet dangling from the open jaw, then disappearing under a body of black water. Never get too close to sitting water, she’d said to Cal. Never make eye contact. And if the monster comes at you, throw your arms up, make yourself big, and run a zigzag fast as you can.

The zigzag thing. Thinking of it now, she wasn’t sure where she’d heard it, if it were ever even true.

The theme of the funeral was Calvin’s favorite things. A funeral doesn’t need a theme, the theme is funeral, Syl had said, but Mary-Beth would make sure people knew more about her son than what they’d read or heard. She wanted them to know there was so much at the core of him, so many things he loved, curiosities, even things he collected. She spent hours outside at her little table, chair wobbling on grass, clipping images from magazines and catalogues and the TV Guide too. With a glue stick, she collaged using sheets of construction paper, swatting mosquitos right onto the pages.

What she could afford in the end was the Bohner and Sons Funeral Parlor in Boynton. She hadn’t expected anyone to come. Mary-Beth had considered holding the funeral at Gateway to Grace so those monitored could attend—but she’d also wanted something nicer than the Gateway chapel with its papier-mâché crosses and hearts. She wanted tasseled embellishments for her son. A pastor in a heavy robe. Real, breakable plates. A carpet. 

Bohner and Sons had one room for the service, and another for food and beverages. Arriving early, Mary-Beth and Syl wedged collages between clip stands they’d found at the Festival Flea, copper coiled hearts that held the images upright in the center of every table. The colorful sheets lit up the parlor, and this small detail will be one of the few things Mary-Beth will remember of this day, a fleeting sliver of beauty, all those glossy cutouts—Will Smith, the solar system, every breed of dog and reptile, Cartman and Chef from South Park, hermit crabs, the gecko from that Geico commercial, Kid Rock, Harrison Ford, bald eagles, Animorphs, French fries, images of surfers, wakeboarders, mountain skiers, waves from the pipeline of Hawai‘i, Sylvester Stallone, the Eye of Providence Illuminati pyramid, and of course, photos of Mary-Beth and Calvin together through the years. 

Mary-Beth hadn’t expected so many people to walk in, find her sitting alone at a table, greeting her early. Ten people, then fifteen. Twenty! Prolonged eye contact as they clamped her hand between their own and said very sorry. She knew from working the gas station that direct eye contact meant two things: aggression or respect. Often, she’d found, it was a little of both.

Thirty people, then forty. Mary-Beth got up and stood near the door of Bohner’s in her black blazer and skirt, shoulder pads sewn in from the ’80s with rhinestones glinting at the seams, doing her best to remember each face. How did they all know her son? Surely, she thought, she’d know every person who’d ever mattered to him—Rhea, the server at Jack in the Box, who sometimes brought the boys food when they lived under the bridge; a few guys released from Dade Correctional; everyone from Gateway without a monitor—but most of these faces were new. After a while, Mary-Beth sat down at the table again, stopped counting.

A gilded mirror hung across from her in the parlor. She could see those entering behind her, and her own reflection, too. Syl had French braided her hair tight for the occasion, and Mary-Beth had carefully shaved her own face and neck, no chin stubble. More people entered. Walter from the pet store. Howie and the twins (ugh) who slow-hugged and regarded Syl as if she were the mother in grief. Then more strangers, whispering. Drinking from water bottles around the doorway. Plucking the collages from their clips, inspecting Mary-Beth’s work. Mary-Beth knew the look of junkies—she always knew—they stood out in the crowd like a comfort, their ill-fitting clothes and jitters, borrowed black suits, one lady still in her coochie-cutters, those who called her Fairy-Beth. But these other strangers were prancy, collared shirts and hair a single color. Who were they to Calvin? Were they undercover investigators, finally doing their job? Mary-Beth gave the third degree to anyone who’d ever stepped into Calvin’s life, asking after their faith, their motivations and intentions, but this was always and only to protect him. At that, her life’s main purpose she’d now failed. So she didn’t ask.

As she looked from person to person, only one question remained: Did one of them do it?

The priest led the way down the aisle, holy smoke rising from his thurible. The censer swung from a chain in his fat chapped hand as the room wafted wood and spice, everyone turning in their seats to watch Mary-Beth follow in her performance of mourning. Because that’s how it felt to her in that moment, like a performance. Her pinkened eyes darted from face to face, because she thought they should, because she wanted everyone to know something of her pain, of the unjustness of the whole terrible ordeal. Then she thought of that road again, the blood of it. The red and black rock of her baby. She wanted to be back at the scene of the crime, or in Calvin’s studio apartment at Gateway, or in the McDonald’s drive-thru, anywhere other than this parlor with its artificial rose scent and shampooed rug; she wanted to be anywhere she might feel him again. She accidentally smiled in all this emotion, a misfire of the mind. She remembered her own gums, her two graying front teeth and wide gaps around them. She pinched her mouth closed.

The priest spoke. Mary-Beth did not.

Instead, Mary-Beth had asked Syl to read from pages she wrote. Syl stepped up to a podium in fancy black nylons and those same stupid shoes. Howie must have brought the nylons down from Ocala specifically for this. Syl made a whole production of wiping a single tear from her eye with an old-lady handkerchief, and already Mary-Beth regretted asking her to read.

Sylvia Packman here, hello, Calvin’s Auntie Syl. I’m going to read on behalf of my sister, Mary-Beth Boyer, she began. The crowd all turned to face Mary-Beth in her seat. Syl tried for her eyes, trying for a special moment, but Mary-Beth stared straight ahead.

Anyway, these here are her words, Syl read.

Life was hard for my boy since the day he was born, and it didn’t get much better from there. He had his health issues as a baby, and they put him in a box of light, to keep him alive and breathing (I was there for that—Syl interrupted—that’s true, that was a hard time. Bless our doctors, Lord, bless them). Calvin held my finger every day just wanting his life, and I did my best to give that to him. I would continue to always give that to him.

Calvin loved to skateboard as a kid and he loved water sports. He loved all animals except mice (I’ll add, Syl said, he was an adequate stable hand), he liked cars and NASCAR, and he talked like he could be a mechanic one day, because he understood engines. There are too many things to list that my son, Calvin, loved, so I encourage you to take time with the collages I made about him. He could have had a lot of different futures if he’d had the chance. 

My son was my best friend, and he overcame so much, more than most people in their whole lives, and he was thirty-five when he got murdered, only just beginning. The government fucked him, excuse my language (Lord, these are my sister’s words, remember, she chuckled), but he dealt with it with the presence of our creator and in keeping good spirits. He had demons like the rest of us (Syl paused here; she looked up and around at the crowd like her sapped face had something to say), but he worked hard to overcome these, too.

He was special, Syl read, toward the end of the speech. And God knows he will be missed, and in time, with the prayers of others, justice will be served for this horrible, horrible tragedy. I promise not to rest until it is.

Syl didn’t move from the podium when she finished reading. She fussed with the paper, which crinkled at the microphone with awkward noise. Then she closed her eyes like she might add a memory or two. Maybe something was coming to her. Say something, Mary-Beth thought. Just one, happy thing.

Syl did not, though she tripped a little as she stepped away from the podium in silence. She’d folded up the speech into a slender, white baton.

Cars trailed the hearse a few blocks to a cemetery, where Mary-Beth stood near the hole a tractor had dug, bouncing her knees. She couldn’t stay still. She looked for birds, planes, sky writing, any sign from Calvin, but there were none. Everyone gathered, looking down into that hole. Mary-Beth stayed looking up.

As the priest recited Scripture, the casket lowering in uneven, harsh jerks, Mary-Beth remembered the first time and then the many times after that Calvin had kicked in her stomach. Before he was born, they’d had their own ways of communication. When she’d asked for a signal, he’d kick, a thud so real, knocks coming in elaborate patterns like a Morse code only she understood. Moving like that, her unborn son reminded her of a dog twisting and shaking in his own dream, running after something no one else could ever know. Stouffer—that was their dog’s name, their old lab mix, Cal’s first dog. He was a good dog. He, too, had been flattened by a car.

Keep us in life and death in Your love, and, by Your grace, lead us to Your kingdom, through Your Son . . . the priest went on. Dirt hit the casket in pebbled smacks, then the three holy palmfuls were done. The dirt smelled blank, originless. The prayers, suddenly over. People moved and hugged Mary-Beth, though she didn’t lift her arms to receive them. Birds cawed, and the sound of a soft rain came on, leaves stinging with drops. Genie or Nicola, she couldn’t be bothered to tell which niece was which, said to one of the strangers: He was a friend to some and an enemy to others. Mary-Beth pocketed this as something to ream Syl about later. Disrespectful little bitches—the girls weren’t even wearing black, not even chinos, they wore jeans, for Christ’s sake! She imagined pushing the talking twin into the hole, but didn’t want her anywhere near Cal.

No Tommy in all this. She’d looked for him at Bohner’s and again here. No flashed badges either, no cuffs suddenly revealed to click behind the proper person, her son’s killer. The disappointments would always keep coming.

Mary-Beth looked down at last. It seemed so shallow, for a grave. Lime rock and sand, not as dark and endless as she’d expected. Cal was right there. From her jacket pocket she pulled a green plastic Citra Sipper plug, the hard straw used to jab citrus, to drink right from an orange—Calvin’s favorite pastime. She tossed it in the hole, and it let out a tiny, unsatisfying plink on the casket before rolling off into the dirt. Mary-Beth said, You keep that, baby.

No more tears. She wouldn’t give that to Syl, or the girls, these strangers, whoever else was watching. You keep that. She held her eyes on the wood shine. She could see dark clouds rolling, stretched and distorted, in the lacquered reflection. It occurred to her that this, this view here, would be the last time she’d ever see her son. Of all the surfaces that had ever divided them—phone receivers, panels of bulletproof glass, brick walls, the chain-link fence between the underbelly of the bridge and the highway, the windows of her car, of police cars, windows upon windows upon windows—this would be the last.

Mary-Beth could not immediately situate the sound. She thought, Oh, even more people, when the crowd came screaming. Fifty now, maybe sixty, rounding a stand of trees. But these new guests had signs, and those signs had photos of her son. She thought, Oh, where have these signs come from, she hadn’t printed any, and what an effort to have made them. It wasn’t until the crowd drew closer that she could make out what was what—the crowd in green wigs and stretched burglar masks, and then she could hear them, too—the prancy strangers around her joining in, the priest asking for silence, robe spinning—then one massive chorus: God Hates Calvin Boyer. All Pedos Fry in Hell. Justice for Survivors. Save Our Children.

Mug shots of Calvin, her boy looking frightened, teeth crossed like pick-up sticks. The signs bobbed up and down.

And on other signs, enlarged yearbook photos of Linzie King. Elastic choker, chapped lips and blunt bangs, Linzie, a little girl then. Red letters stamped over her cheeks, dripping like movie blood. The signs read HER TURN.

What surfaced across the works gathered in Guernica’s inaugural double issue of 2026 is a confrontation with perception itself. Again and again, we meet lives unfolding inside systems that distort vision—political regimes, bureaucracies, gendered instruction, empire, caste, capital. They settle over lived experience like climate. The world appears through fog.

And yet the writers and artists here resist opacity. Across continents and genres, these pieces stage acts of counter-vision. They follow characters forced to read rooms, scan crowds, decipher myths, translate their own bodies, and conjure futures in landscapes designed to erase them.

In fiction, an excerpt from T Kira Māhealani Madden’s forthcoming novel Whidbey enters the theater of public grief. A mother prepares to bury her son while strangers assemble with verdicts already in hand—mourning fractures under scrutiny. In Kevin 2.0 by Kevin Clouther, in a marriage shadowed by planetary disaster, reality belongs to the person willing to name it. Love falters in the widening gap between recognition and denial. In Confessions of Lilith, by Fatima Farheen Mirza, identity shimmers through rehearsal and self-invention. Moving through burnt toast, gossip, consumer ritual, and inheritance, the narrator measures the distance between the woman she is and the woman she has learned to perform. Vision here is refracted, managed, never innocent.

Nonfiction returns us to the politics of what can be seen and by whom. In Who Can I Dance With? the Iranian writer Arash Dabestani writes from the fault line between failing eyesight and a regime long invested in regulating visibility. From the afterlives of dance bans to the vertigo of migration, the essay asks what forms of knowledge emerge when sight itself becomes perilous. In Letting Go, J. Malcolm Garcia moves between intimate mourning and geopolitical aftermath, tracing how the U.S. immigration system discards the very people whose loyalty and labor the US government once relied on. In The Frigging Fuss over a Rotlo, an excerpt from Chandu Maheria’s forthcoming memoir, translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar, and guest-edited by Sarah Malik, a Dalit writer returns to the chawls of his childhood, revealing how food contours belonging and how caste continues to structure memory long after circumstances appear to change.

In conversation, Russell Reed speaks with the Congolese conservation leader and Strong Roots Congo founder, Dominique Bikaba in the opening installment of our new environmental Interviews series, Posthumanitarian. As Western aid infrastructures recede from eastern Congo, another model comes into view: conservation grounded in community governance, where those historically displaced from their lands reclaim the authority to decide how life will be sustained. We also meet the Iranian writer, Salar Abdoh, and the conversation drifts through the life and afterlife of the internet blackout in Iran, the myths regimes circulate, what happens when those myths fray, and the possibility of a literature no longer gazing toward distant capitals.

Our Global Spotlights selection of the month brings perception down to the scale of the intimate. In Kaori Fujino’s uncanny story, The Key, translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor, a husband’s fear of an old woman in red becomes an anatomy of gendered vigilance. 

Poetry in this issue widens the field of witness. From Trinidad, Shivanee Ramlochan conjures a feral inheritance in Witch Industry and Scissoring in the Tropics, where appetite and brutality share a grammar. Writing from Honduras while in dialogue with the world’s museums, scriptures, and genocides, Rolando Kattan maps a poetics of distance in Insomniac’s Cartography and Color Test, where color and memory become a means of survival. In Chinaecherem Obor’s  The Translucence of Mud (after Toni Morrison) an Igbo son in diaspora confronts faith, fatherhood, and desire where the body becomes window, witness, and wound. And in two poems by James Meetze, THE LONG NOW, (EIDYIA), PART IX and (LATE-ORPHIC) PART XIII, myth and digitized afterlight converge, and language is the medium through which time is endured.

What binds these works together is not despair but the attempt at calibration: the ongoing adjustment required to remain coherent inside atmospheres designed to disorient. If power attempts to choreograph perception, the writers and artists in these pages answer with improvisation. They find other vantage points. They refuse to look away.

The fog is real. So is the labor of seeing through it.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Elolo Bosoka, Wolfgang Rempfer, Philipp Eichhorn, and Orlando Boffill Hernandez.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

When Mia learned about the other Kevin, she started calling her husband Kevin 2.0, which she then shortened to 2.0. Although he told her that he didn’t like this name, she persisted. Not to be rude, she made clear, or because it amused her, but because it announced the strangeness of the situation they all inhabited. Mia wasn’t a normalizer. 

Kevin 2.0 admired this in his wife. He accepted the name without liking it. He’d developed a sense over the sixteen years they had been together that she was living in the real world, which made him feel like he was living there too, though it frightened him to consider, as he’d spent the previous twenty-eight years somewhere else. 

Mia was born and raised in New Jersey, which she didn’t romanticize. The swampiest swamp smell cut with something chemical was how she described the walk from her apartment to high school. Later, he went on this walk with her, and something came over her. He couldn’t snap her out of it. He found New Jersey perplexing, simultaneously expensive and not that nice.

Now Mia sorted and re-sorted canned goods. She kept a ledger by hand, but the inventory was just as precise in her mind. Cans were the only currency that mattered, and Mia and Kevin 2.0 were rich. She wouldn’t let him touch them.

“You have the reverse Midas touch,” she said. 

She said it politely. She wasn’t wrong.

“Can I hold the carrots?” he asked.

“No.”

“The beets?”

“No.”

She stepped in front of the cans, arms outstretched, which tightened her shirt—his shirt, once—over her chest, which could still send a bright current through him. Kevin 2.0 followed the feeling as it moved from his chest into his arms and legs. Were such things visible to others? 

“What you can do,” Mia said, “is take the dog outside.”

He dutifully opened the door.

“What he needs,” she continued, “is exercise.”

Together, he and the dog walked down the stairs and into the field, where the fifty acres might have been the entirety of the world. Nobody had left the property since arriving. The kids put on their padded headphones and didn’t complain. Mia committed herself to canning. That left Kevin 2.0 and the dog, who leapt and circled in the driveway, who barked at the invisible birds before sprinting in a maniacal search for one of the many tennis balls scattered across the grass like landmines.

In the distance, between the yellow of prairie grass and green of pines, a shape introduced itself.

“Hold on,” he said to the dog, who ignored him.

The shape was too big to be a person or only a single person. The shape bopped evenly. Had Kevin 2.0 ever seen a person on a horse? 

He thought he must have, but when he searched the history available in his mind, he couldn’t locate an example. Certainly, he’d never boarded a horse.

The dog started barking nervously. When he tried to hush the dog with his hand, the dog barked more loudly.

“I apologize,” the shape called, “for taking so long.”

Kevin 2.0 looked up wordlessly.

“You probably have a lot of questions.” The shape was a man. “I would. I brought you an apple.”

The man tossed the apple to Kevin 2.0. He caught it. Without thinking, he took a bite. It was wonderful.

“Where did you get this?” He was genuinely curious.

“I grew it.”

“Here?”

“On the far side of the creek.”

“You rode the horse over the creek?” 

“He doesn’t mind getting cold.” The man dismounted the horse expertly. “I’m Wayne.” 

“I hope there was no problem with the payment.”

“You haven’t been, have you?”

The creek didn’t interest him, buried as it was in a thicket of old-growth forest, or what he’d decided was old based on the height of the trees. The creek was forgettable: narrow, shallow, slow moving. It didn’t appear to divide anything. The forest itself was the divider: on this side, Kevin 2.0 and his family; on the other, the burning planet.

Wayne brushed the horse’s mane with his yellow fingertips. “I’ll show you.”

“I don’t have a horse.”

“You can ride with me.”

The horror of climbing onto the animal and, what, wrapping his arms around Wayne’s torso? Kevin 2.0 took another bite from the apple.

“I’ll walk,” he said, realizing he hadn’t considered not going.

Wayne looked quickly at the horse, as though they were in on a joke. Kevin 2.0 had no such rapport with his dog. The horse pissed aggressively.

“I like walking,” he lied.

They followed a path of matted grass, and Kevin 2.0 couldn’t remember if this path was one he’d made or one he’d inherited. Probably, it was both. Technically, the latter. But in practice, the former.

He should have said something to Mia. He looked back, but the cabin was already out of sight. The dog trotted beside him. The dog was happy for the adventure. He was strangely uninterested in the horse. Occasionally, the dog looked to Kevin 2.0 to see if he’d produced a tennis ball, but he didn’t have anything beyond his phone, which that morning had stopped working.

It still powered on; it held a charge. But the magic that had once allowed it to make and receive calls from virtually anywhere on earth had vanished. He maintained hope, but Mia was unequivocal: the end was nigh.

“Not necessarily,” he said.

“Necessarily,” she said.

Kevin 2.0 was relieved to learn that horses could walk slowly. They were always going so fast in movies. 

Wayne wanted to know what brought him to this part of the country.

“Besides the end of the world?” Kevin 2.0 asked.

“I have a theory about that.” 

A lot of people did.

“What if it wasn’t gradual,” Wayne said. “It wasn’t like this five years ago.” 

“No.”

“People were talking, but people talk about a lot of things.”

Kevin 2.0 wasn’t interested in this line of thinking, which was common in some of the shallower holes he’d fallen into online. The reasoning didn’t withstand scrutiny. Mia would lose respect for Wayne when Kevin 2.0 told her later, which lifted his mood.

He asked the question Wayne was waiting for: “What do you think happened?”

“I’m not one of the crazies,” he said. “I believe in science.”

“Of course.”

“You haven’t been to the far side of the creek.” It wasn’t a question this time.

“I should let my wife know how long I’ll be gone.”

Kevin 2.0 began to worry, which wasn’t unusual, but he began to worry differently. The background thrum of dread that had accompanied him every day at the cabin was eclipsed—not silenced—by a louder panic. He listened. The panic said: Be ready to run. It said, You might not be faster than a horse, but there are things a horse can’t do, such as climb a tree. He didn’t say anything else, and neither did Wayne, until they reached the creek. Kevin 2.0 looked beyond it into the forest, which was dark, dense, ancient.

The dog sniffed the ground urgently. He looked to Kevin 2.0, as if solicitous of his opinion about the creek. Wayne ignored them.

He said, “The creek was part of the reason I chose this property.”

“Where did you live before?”

“Colombia.”

“What part?” 

“Jungle, mainly.” 

Kevin 2.0 wondered if Wayne was lying. Kevin 2.0 didn’t possess enough information to say. All he knew came from the website, now defunct, he used to reserve the cabin. On that site, Wayne appeared as a cheery face inside a circle. Not that cheery. Most of the warmth emanated from a second face that Kevin 2.0 assumed without thinking was a wife, possibly girlfriend. Where was that face now? 

He said, “On the website for the cabin—”

“Thing of the past.”

“What isn’t?”

Wayne studied Kevin 2.0, as if to determine how much he knew. Then Wayne and the horse crossed the creek. 

When Kevin 2.0 took a step to follow, the dog barked. 

“Some dogs like water,” Wayne said. “Some really don’t.”

“He doesn’t like anything but fetch.”

The word felt small in his mouth. The dog simpered and shook. He pawed at the dirt, which was soft and black along the water. One nice thing about the cabin was that the wooden floors didn’t suffer from mud like carpet did. It was the sort of thought—earnest, pointless—that made him want to shoot himself, though he wasn’t the shooting-himself type. More like the internalizing-until-you-explode type.

“I’ll be back,” Wayne said before disappearing with the horse into the forest.

On the walk to the cabin, Kevin 2.0 blamed the dog for everything. It felt natural and right to do so. The dog was willing to take full responsibility in exchange for his throwing a ball, but he didn’t have a ball, so the dog sulked too. When they got back, Mia wasn’t in the mood.

“I have canning to do,” she said.

He took his grievances to Eddy, who was 11 years old but acted older, closer to forty. Eddy listened with uncommon interest, which Kevin 2.0 wasn’t about to waste. He told his son about the jungle, how it was hard to get there and harder to leave.

“Logistically?” Eddy asked. “Or spiritually.”

It was possible he asked too many questions, though what kind of thing was that to tell a kid? Instead, Kevin 2.0 told Eddy about El Dorado, which wasn’t a mythical place (or wasn’t only this) but an international airport where men walked with machine guns the way people walk with Starbucks cups. 

Eddy raised his hand, as if school hadn’t ended months ago.

“You don’t believe the machine gun part,” Kevin 2.0 said. 

“I don’t object to the machine gun part. How would I know?”

“You object to what?”

“The comparison.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I wasn’t there.”

Men walked with machine guns the way people walk with phones.

“People are always looking at their phones,” Eddy said. “I mean, when they worked.”

“The men weren’t looking at their machine guns.”

“What were they looking at?”

Men walked with machine guns the way people walk with machine guns, menacingly but a little scared themselves. The airport was full of people skilled at ignoring them. The flight from El Dorado into the jungle was short and rocky. The plane landed on a clearing cut out of palms. Jeeps the color of palms were waiting.

When Kevin 2.0 saw Eddy’s interest flagging, he skipped the transition.

There were men with machine guns outside the casino, too. This wasn’t like a casino in Las Vegas. There was nothing grand or glittery about the exterior. It was a windowless rectangle with one door. 

“I’ve never been to Las Vegas,” Eddy reminded his father.

“You’ve seen pictures. Not Vegas now. The way it used to be.”

“Why would there be a casino in the jungle?”

People wanted to bet, even in the jungle. It was like the Wild West. Or how the Wild West appears in movies, where people are always playing cards. Here the croupiers were tastefully bored. The tables were a brighter green than the vegetation outside. The air conditioning was loud. The room smelled like cigarettes and perfume. 

Women stood behind several of the men sitting at the tables. The women ignored the men and talked to each other. Occasionally, a man pushed his chair back from the table and looked behind him. Por supuesto, the women said to every question. 

Kevin 2.0 remembered them. Their purses were small and expensive looking. The women smelled—my God, he could smell their hair, uniformly black, thick, long, past their shoulders, down their back, down, down. Some backs were almost completely bare. It had never occurred to him that this part of the body could paralyze a man. The women’s eyes took in everything. Nothing was lost on them. He felt ignorant beneath their gaze. Their eyes said, We know.

When a man left a table, Kevin 2.0 moved to the vacated chair, which was closest to the croupier, who smelled like baking soda and lime. Kevin 2.0 would have to win early or he would lose all confidence. He was dealt a face card and a nine. The croupier showed a face card. There was nothing to do but wait. Everyone else at the table was in the same position. The croupier regarded the unflipped card coolly. It settled nothing. He drew again. When he bust, the table cheered. It sounded the same in Spanish. 

When a cocktail waitress visited the table, the man next to Kevin 2.0 ordered a glass of milk. This man adopted Kevin 2.0 as the occasion for their turn in luck. He wasn’t 2.0 then. There Kevin was an unusual name. He allowed himself to be the person the men at the table wanted him to be: self-possessed, focused but not overly serious, lucky, rich. It was an intoxicating new state. He bet like a rich person. Why should anyone expect otherwise? Doble, he said. Esplit. It all worked. For the men at the table too. In violation of what he understood to be the laws of gambling, the man next to Kevin touched his chips constantly. 

Kevin’s chips rose in colorful crooked towers. Chips weren’t money. None of it was real. Where did he get the money from? Winning, of course. He learned what rich people had always understood: money is a perpetual motion machine. 

But the casino wouldn’t stay open forever. Eventually, the croupier would have to go home. The men at the table and the women standing behind them would have to go home. Whenever this reality flashed across his mind, he banished it. Rarely had he possessed the skill, and it never returned. But this night he did what the mindfulness apps he would later download told him to do all the time: live in the present. Who could bear such a thing?

Kevin could. Nothing could be better. He tipped the waitress for the drinks that materialized unbidden. For a time, he smoked a cigar. Who gave it to him? Who cut the cigar, lit it? Not every detail remained available. He didn’t want to be greedy. He wanted to recall the night as accurately as possible. He owed that to Eddy, who’d stopped asking questions.

Kevin had money. He had protection. He was free. Who in the long history of the world ever walked away from a table like that?

I let my toast burn. 

I like the sound that a butter knife makes when scraping it off. 

Before I’ve taken my first bite of breakfast, I like throwing bits of it away. 

True or false: smelling burnt toast can be the first sign of a stroke. 

When I am alone, I assume a mask. The mask is named Lilith. 

Lilith is a Garamond girl. 

She parts her hair down the middle. 

She never listens to her voicemails. 

Says no without the thank you. 

Asks for extra whipped cream.

The only scale she owns is for coffee beans. 

The only bags she wears are bowed.

After making a mistake, no matter how consequential, Lilith will just say oopsie daisy!

She wouldn’t be caught dead in polka dot.

Unless the polka dot is red.

A confession: I cheated on my driver’s test.

Another time it had been snowing. After the snow melted, I realized I’d parked on the sidewalk itself. 

And one time I crashed my car into my mother’s car after a fight. I reversed into hers, 15 miles per hour. After missing a string of requests from my dean for a parent-teacher meeting, my mother was surprised to receive a letter suggesting it was time, respectfully, for me to find another school. 

Lilith, of course, doesn’t drive. She lives exclusively in cities where she can lift her right hand and say, “Taxi!”

Like magic, the taxi arrives. 

If it’s a day when she’s reading a particularly good book, she’ll take the underground. 

Once she missed her stop three times in a row. 

Rode to Holborn, then back to Bond Street, then too far to Oxford Circus, until finally to Tottenham Court Road. 

Apparently, the book was that good. 

Another confession: I don’t read books. I only compulsively buy them in hardcover. 

Let them pile up by my bedside table until, one day, I give up, and take the stack to my shelf to organize them by theme: 

FOOD WRITING. WRITER’S DIARIES. THE TROUBLES. WITCHES, ETC. THE INCOMPLETE WORKS OF SUSAN SONTAG. 

Until the next dinner party when someone stares up at it with a glass of champagne bubbling and says, Oh, Gosh yes, the diaries of Sontag.

And I nod, gosh, yes. 

Instead, I’m a magazine junkie. I wish I lived right next to a newsstand. On days where I don’t know what to do with myself, I walk thirteen minutes to the closest newsagents. 

Ali, behind the counter, knew I’d left my boyfriend even before my closest friends. When he’s not speaking to his cousin in Karachi on speakerphone, he clicks the silver tally counter in his right hand. 

I’m in the mood for poems, I’ll say, or carpets, do you have anything on carpets? 

Here, Ali says, The Latest HALI. 

A perfect day, really, is the very day I have in abundance, with monotonous frequency. 

Lilith does not have mundane days. While doing household chores, she often plays games aloud. For example: Talk Show During Sweater Folding. Moss green sweater held up, Lilith says aloud in her American TV voice, “Many people wonder if they should fold or hang their sweaters. If you’re wondering which way to go, ask yourself—how much did I pay for this sweater? How often do I wear it? And most importantly: how prone is this material to losing structure from stretched shoulders?”

But my mundane days go dreamily like this: 

Morning Ali. 

Click.

Morning. 

Click.

What’s the count today?

One thousand three hundred and four.

Mashallah. 

Then I’m off. Flipping glossy pages. Profiles in The Gentlewoman. Turning to the classifieds in The New York Review of Books—apartments for rent in the Riviera. A woman, 60, well-read, looking to see if love might arise in ACT III. And sometimes even, why not? National Geographic. Arctic foxes and their long tails. The underbellies of stingrays, somehow both cartoonish and ghostly. The calming paintings in mindfulness magazines, articles encouraging me to keep a journal of my nightly dreams. Your subconscious is speaking to you: how to listen. 

Seeing who has been photographed by whom, which near-unknown has risen straight to the cover of Vogue after which latest Netflix binge, and what jewelry is she wearing, a signature of pearls?

The latest trend in bathroom renovations, the bathtub like a beached whale in the middle of the bedroom. The return of extravagant floral wallpaper, gingham bedsheets.

And if I’m missing my mother: Women’s Health. Tried-and-tested one week diet plan for effective weight loss. Low-calorie easy to cook weeknight meals. The life-changing age-reversing effects of celery. 

But Lilith doesn’t bother with the latest magazines. 

Instead, she collects vintage ones, happens upon them left out on doorsteps, or buys them by the box from estate sales. Her home is a museum of historical artifacts. 

How did she even get her hands on a Twiggy cover? Or a magazine spread featuring Françoise Hardy, young, boyish, perfect?

Lilith doesn’t have a style icon. (She is a style icon.)

But, if pressed, she’d say, “Françoise on her motorcycle.” 

A bit of gossip: I knew a woman who knew a woman whose son went to the same school as Françoise Hardy’s son. Apparently she was a devoted school parent—never missed a parent-teacher conference, and was active in school board politics—voting passionately to keep hot lunches. 

Does it count as gossip if it’s positive and utterly banal?

If you trace the origins of the word “gossip,” you find yourself at the Old English word “god-sibb,” which was once a term reserved for a woman’s closest female friends. 

According to Silvia Federici, the term “gossip” turned from a term of affection honoring female friendship to its tarnished connotation during the 16th century, when witch-hunts grew feverishly popular.

“Female friendships,” said Federici, “were one of the targets of the witch hunts.”

Another confession: I was kicked out of Stonehenge when I was fourteen. 

We had gathered my mother’s siblings and their children to celebrate my grandfather’s 85th birthday. Mute and inexpressive, we knew he was nearly a goner, so we rallied, driving hours to enjoy a sight of stones that he hadn’t even asked for. The landmark, a perfect backdrop for my mother’s photo op. Happy families. The two of us in hideous matching maroon coats. 

To say I was bored out of my mind while the freckled university student on his summer job described Stonehenge as, “the most architecturally sophisticated surviving stone circle in the world,” would be an understatement. So I ran for it. I touched the smooth surface of the stone like it was someone else’s birthday cake. 

The guards blew their whistles. I could hear their shouting. And my mother, shrieking my full name, both the middle ones. The guards jogged towards me—three of them—and escorted me out, past my mother’s siblings shaking their heads, past their stuffy wide-eyed children, past my mother, flushed and nose flaring, past my grandfather in his wheelchair. 

My grandfather was the only one smiling.

That night, for the first time, I dreamt of Lilith. 

It took me twenty-four years to Google the name. 

In Jewish mythology, Lilith is thought to be the first wife of Adam. Unlike Eve, who was created from Adam’s rib, Lilith was made of the same clay. Angered by Adam’s attempts to dominate her, Lilith left him in the garden.

Some could say gossip is a political act, an act of survival, or rebellion. 

An old wives’ tale: burnt toast contains a charcoal that can whiten teeth. 

My mother read about it in some now-defunct women’s magazine. I’ll never forget her grinding burnt toast into a paste and applying a film over her teeth. Laying there, eyes closed, mouth open, teeth blackened, listening to her records.  

She’d try anything, bless her. Still does.

Lilith doesn’t call it toast. She calls it an extra large crouton.

If I told you I required the world in all its hard violence, would that make me easier to know?

Love, I am leaning into the thrust of things. Not your hips, not the grind of the coffee maker.

Rather say I need the static, the screel of the wild chick hungering to rinse me out by dawn. I

Hunt industries in the rise and fall of farm equipment my grandparents used before I was born. I understand myself through every hand raised against me and every hand I have ever raised. 

You know that if I see a lingering affection, I press my nose into the ground of it as any dog,

Whuffing til I get to the origin point of the fist that winds it up taut, glowing for its release. I

Go between the aisles of good girls’ knees and abortion clinics, gathering dropped stitches. I 

Press them into my mouth. I press you into my mouth. I wander the world with a gag reflex 

Much too voluptuous for everything I want to consume. When they kill kittens, I watch. I see.

Et ustus fortiter.

Goliard Songs

I live far from the great museums. I overlay the din of Tegucigalpa with Guernica. It’s practically impossible to copy a Fragonard, his verdure an undeserved hope. Here, the green rusts out like Neruda’s autograph. Only the traffic light takes aim at me. It’s the sight of an all-knowing sniper.

I live far from the Luxembourg Gardens; the more distant the train landscapes the more the lead hits my pupil. In the Carmina Burana it was an omen: to live removed from the Buddhist temples, from the hallways where a co-conspiring Heraclitus cries. I won’t die near the graveyard by the sea, near the whiteness that begins again in the waves. A watercolor trembles above the Tisa, but fifteen hundred leagues away. So remote Monet’s ponds, Rimbaud’s vowels, the kaleidoscope of the great libraries.  I’m twenty-six years from Klimt’s yellows and in the opposite direction to beauty. I live far from symphonic orchestras, tulip-covered fields, the blue of imperial porcelain, every single windmill.

My colors are different. With them I must uphold my life.