Ahmed Adam
Shamma
The
Feast
it
started at the epilogue
when
the scavengers sniffed the quiet air
and the
lukewarm blood was their invitation
they
came in packs and swarms
the
jackals, the worms, the roaches, the
crabs
to the
charnel paradise that awaited them
in the
streets of every town and city
now the
flies are fat but always hungry
and the
sidewalks teem
with
the writhing of maggots
the
rats make their homes
anywhere they please
in this
vast buffet of viscera
and
above it all
vultures dry their
wings
atop
the hollow buildings
looking
down like
judges
of the dead
no guns
fire
no
engines roar
the
radio screams silent static
all
that is left
is the
shrieking of crows
and the
laughter
of hyenas and
god
sometimes it glares
back
sometimes it glares back at
us
the
madness beyond the peel
when we
are within ourselves the loss of
purpose
and the
going-under that comes with it
it is
the unknown
it is
death
it is
infinite void
and it
is the blurring
of the
lines that separate
these
and all
things
like
fingernails stuck in the walls
of the
Auschwitz showers,
when
our screams turn to a gurgling of bile
all we
have made will become
a part
of the endless absurd
and/or
nothing
The City
Augur
The city augur sees more in the faces
on
trains and buses than the seers
of old ever
learned from the stars and tea
leaves.
She can read the writing on the
asphalt and
understands the wisdom in the
flight of
pigeons and the entrails of road
kill.
Solitude is her snake oil balm, and
she
startles at footsteps, the jangle
of keys or the
snicker-snack of a door that
opens without a
chime or recorded
warning.
She can imagine no greater heaven
than the
promise of a beer back home, and
no greater
hell than the intrusion of other
people upon
her lonely meditation.
She might not notice if
everyone’s skin were
covered in poison; she cannot
remember the
last time she touched another
without
apologizing.
She
knows the only sane response to such a
boring, depressing world as this
one they
have built is to live perpetually
bored and
depressed.
There are little cures for this,
little white and
little green pills, and these the
City Prophet
fears more than anything else for
they are
essentially a cure for
sanity.
Certainty is a gift reserved only to
the
perfectly lucid and to the
utterly insane, a
common trait that blurs the
distinction
between the two opposites, and on
the
coldest and darkest of nights
when sleep
won’t come, the city augur
wonders as she
shivers whether there are really
any
differences at
all.
She appreciates ugliness, almost to
the
extent that she is
beautiful.
She hates the company of other
people,
almost to the extent that she
needs it to
survive.
She
considers sex and happiness both utterly
unnecessary and overrated,
constantly
craving both.
The night sky should be an inky and
infinite
abyss, the blackness between the
stars a
reminder of the extent of our
purpose, but
when the city augur looks up, she
sees a
vulgar purple veil bleached by
sodium
streetlights and stained by neon,
appearing
close enough to touch from the
tallest office
building.
She knows a secret so great that if she
even
tried to whisper it, it would
tumble out as a
howl loud enough to burst your
eardrums.
She sometimes feels the secret
crawling
along the back of her teeth, and,
by biting
her lips until she tastes blood
and scrunching
her eyes until purple and green
dragons twist
beneath the lids, she can, just
barely, keep it
contained.
The
secret tastes like a shaggy beard crusted
in stale sugar, looks like an
ambulance’s
flashing lights, sounds halfway
between a
scream of agony and your father’s
name.
She laughs to keep from crying, and
when
she can no longer laugh she will
cry to keep
from screaming, and when her
tears have
run dry, she screams to keep from
shutting
down
completely.
When her throat is in bloody tatters and
she
can no longer scream louder than
a hoarse
whisper, she will do the only
thing left in
this world for her to
do
Each person, with no exceptions, has
enough
blood in their body to write
their last and
greatest secrets, and not one
drop more or
less than that.
One day she will dip a fountain pen in
her
own blood and write down her
secret for the
world to know.
The world will find her, white
and fragile as
porcelain, a book sitting in
front of her open
to the first page, its letters
scabbing brown.
It will begin: “Humankind wasn’t
meant to
live this way…”
Ahmed
Adam Shamma, 21, is a United States sailor currently
stationed in Charleston, SC. His work has been previously
been accepted by Danse Macabre du Jour.
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