Rheim Alkadhi

 
 
[Monolog]

I’ve found refuge in this city now for a year, a month, and seventeen days, worshipping nighttime and praising god for able legs that carry me to deeper corners, leaking and runny with the primal waste I apply second- and third-handedly to a description of my condition. I take intermittent shelter in a cement enclosure formed by the space between buildings, or nestled along neglected urban stairwells, feeling around their surfaces for any hole to put my meager belongings, my tins, pricks, and pins in. Nearly never hungry, this is a capital city for someone like me, where bread grows on trees, in pods of translucent and black plastic bags hung from stiff bare branches, the fruit of staling, molding charity – gracious, we are still not devoid of the miraculous – about whose origins I am content to remain ignorant. Sometimes charity offers its example in a refuse heap consisting of butcher’s bones and offal, and I gladly battle mobs of flies to scoop handfuls, my fingers spread to form a coarse trowel, into my pockets, and I take a moment to remind myself the shape of my genitals, measuring length and texture with the goods I have only now acquired by grace of god. I rise and move swiftly like a global empire guard, anxious with desire, perverting structures of knowledge, power with each silent step while I chew on the stub of an expired American cigarette, a relative of my gold-tipped finger. And as an antidote to boredom, to feed this hunger for control over my profane sanctuary, my mania, I scrape oils from her enfolding skin using a utensil fashioned from pliable metal, and smear my findings like madness, sebum and oil, across the dry planar round of the day’s bread just before demolishing it, thanks be to god or anyone who will listen. My hands excitedly and nervously rummage through layers of clothing until I am well underneath and atop a by-now filthy dermal wall. I am wretched, lousy, desperate for an aperture, and I find one after what seems like an prison sentence; I wrench it wide open and enter, pushing my index and middle fingers inside, searching for something I can collect and carry off with me.