Dilruba Ahmed

They staunched the wound with a stone. They drew blue venom from his blood until there was none. When his veins ran true his face remained lifeless and all the mothers of the village wept and pounded their chests until the sky had little choice but to grant their supplications. God made the boy breathe again. God breathes life into us, it is said, only once. But this case was an exception. God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless. It was true: the boy lived. He lived for a very long time. The toxins were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned. But just as soon as the women kissed redness back into his cheeks the boy began to die again. He continued to die for the rest of   his life. The dying took place slowly, sweetly. The dying took a very long time.

So grateful the process is clean and faithful. Does not cheat like a disenchanted spouse dozing on a haggard couch. Take heart: the process is always right — is automatic, phlegmatic. Clean, cold, and always refreshing. Brewed to perfection some say. Guaranteed to satisfy you might say. Give thanks the process is organized. Synchronized and sterilized. Optimized but not disguised, like the grown man at my door long after trick-or-treaters have gone, hand outstretched, mask covering his eyes. Thankful, too, for the oversight: no boogeyman standing over the drain pipe, clogging it with debris when no one sees so he can charge you your life for the cleaning; name your price. And how shall we praise the instruments of investigation? So shiny, so new, gleaming with silver and glass? No traces of fingerprints or funders. No whispered voices softly requesting, of the results, a first glance. There’s no need to come clean. We know the process won’t fall prey to steak and wine and then slink upstairs to spend some time, just a little. The process doesn’t. The process wouldn’t. The process isn’t that kind.

What god will catch me when I’m down, when I’ve taken sufficient drink to reveal myself, when my words are little more than a blurring of consonant and vowel? I’m drunk on spring: branches of waxy leaves that greet me at my driveway, a family clutching trays of sweets. How can I sing of this? If I cannot sing, then make me mute. Or lend me words, send me the taste of another’s prayer, cool as a coin newly minted on the tongue.

Last night something tunneled through the elms. But at sunrise, I found just white light biting my eyelids, salt rubbed on a wound. Batons of ice fell from power lines, soundless but still emphatic. Then the rain churned the snow to soap scum, waxing cars with winter’s lichen, patchy in the strange uneven fur of newborns. And still, I was childless. One cardinal lodged on a branch: a blood-drop striking water before the slow dispersion.

Can’t occupy the same space at the same time unless, of course, you land in Dhaka, rickshaws five or six abreast. They are all here: studded metal backboards ablaze with red flowers, Heineken boxes, a Bangladeshi star with blue eyes, peacocks, pink fans of filigree. The drivers sweat and strain in the plaid lungis, and each face seems to say Allah takes and Allah gives. A woman breathes into her green shawl against the dust on the road’s median. A man with a plaid scarf (surplus from The Gap) slaps the rump of a passing gray car as though it’s a horse or a dog. You are there, too, your maroon sleeves begin to stick despite your deodorant. Under your orna, a laminated map and digital camera cradled in your lap. One strand of silver wiry by your ear. Bits of children’s songs snag in your windpipe. Other words surface: sweatshop and abject poverty, and you let them. They mix with the low rumbling that began on the plane,ms and bs tumbling, amplified in the streets: the rickshaw bells’ light metal, the nasal peal of horns. On this continent, the ocean’s giant tongue has swept away miles of coastline, and bodies flood the water. Dust sifts into your lungs and sinks—feline, black, to remain long after you leave.