887 words
She was eleven. He pushed his hand into her face and removed the blade, twisting it, and let her drop. It was nothing. Soon enough he was arrested, but in reality he felt he was still in the room. The loud heathen music chirping, the young palefaces dancing like sluts in a manner that his own father would consider intolerable. Well, he had put a stop to that. Now there would be a mark on that area of this island, his mark, that would forbid people from that kind of feral behaviour, to which his own might be allowable. Almost in a perverse act of respect he had found himself removing his shoes before entering the room. So many balloons outside, and he wasn’t going to pop them but their representatives, and that would take a lot more effort than a simple needle. Why this reverence? Why this worship? Was it because he was going to commit an act of God?
He found himself smiling under his hoodie. But even if they saw the palefaces wouldn’t care. Those without tribal loyalty, ashabiya, are defeated on the battlefield. This was an ancient principle. Those that failed to understand it deserved to be conquered. Initially, he was thinking of putting a pair of headphones on and listening to some track by one of his favourite rappers. But on considering that this was something a delusional paleface might do in his situation, some white school shooter, he reconsidered. The act had been clumsy. First, a tone of inquiry, ‘What are you doing here?’, followed by the usual meaningless paleface apologetics. As he marched in, he barely had to hide the knife in his coat. The worst mockery was that they treated him like someone in need of help. Inexplicably, he found himself thinking back to the African slaves that the relatives of these same palefaces, the same girls that she would grow into that rejected him at school, doubtless owned. Would you rather that your slave master beat you violently to death, as of course happened, or teach you, tame you, and educate you, like you weren’t still the violent beast that he supposed you were?
Certainly he was a brute. A revolutionary he might be, but he himself acknowledged he had brutish sensibilities. He had plunged through the balloons with an erection as long as a spear. He had been so overwhelmed by happiness during it all. Now, in the quiet hours in his holding cell, he wondered if he had committed some kind of unpronounceable sin. Sure enough, the gangs had saluted him as he passed them when he entered.
As he left, he was filled with woe. He looked as much of a drip as they would portray him in his court photograph, when he wanted to be terrifying, he wanted to be the enemy of the heathen, and they wouldn’t let him! The dream would go on forever, he decided, and forever I, or my followers, for I have become great, will punish the evil all around us as stringently as possible. For the paleface is evil, who seduces us and rejects us, who enslaves us and civilises us, who torments us and befriends us, you who want our daughters to unfurl their lovely hair! It is you who must die; it is you who are not reproducing due to your own poison; it is we, we the freedom fighters, who will win!
But no sooner had he realised that he had said many of these words out loud did a doubt set in. Nothing serious, though it was growing, growing into something. For all the world, he didn’t care whether he was on camera saying it or not. Palefaces don’t care. Everyone knew that. They triumph over your lands with a helicopter and then you come to theirs and they are clueless. Palefaces don’t care. You can do anything to them, and he had, and they would do nothing to him. Maybe the bankers would do something to him, but they would do nothing to him. Was he also saying this out loud?
In the room of his mind, the door opened and there she was. She was eleven. Her skin was paler than the sun. Her wound formed a bright red cross in her forehead and her eyes were bright blue. They stared not into him but into the heart of his people. Evil eye, al-ʽayn. There was hatred there, a hatred too terrible to be realised in the life of the girl. It was the kind of hatred that created ghosts. For some reason, he wasn’t waking up. He wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t in the cell.
Unfurling her arms, there were thousands, thousands of girls in a deep wood of oak, and ash, and thorn. Was he quivering? He couldn’t be quivering from the sight of a paleface. She did not speak. There were the sounds of choirs in the wood and many shrieks. Ropes were put up in tune with the sounds of an organ. Was there a faun playing, a djinn, at the heart of the wood? He looked down on himself as Urdu left his mouth like a vomited scroll. She tightly pulled on his skin. They were just as tall.
She said to him: Hwanan eart þū?
3 comments
Hanging is too quick and painless for this character; I would opt for flaying and flensing! What does Hwanan eart þū mean?
It seems to be Old English and probably means “where are you from?”
We don’t even have the balls to hang criminals anymore. As he said “they would do nothing to him”, and he’s right. He’ll get put in a cozy cell, with careful attention to respecting his human rights and dignity…
The invisible man who called himself No One sat with his cold coffee watching the scuttling drones beneath his hoodie this particularly chill October morning. Not quite a Paleface at first glance, he was an entity from the south of Europe. He’d heard what happened an hour earlier to the poor child. Before him, the swarms moved like tidal waves. These things had long ruined his childhood home and the cancer never ceasing following. Perhaps, because he knew too well, the twisted mysteries of fate decreed that such misfortune follow him everywhere without a single moment’s peace. Knowing had cost him the one forgettable survival job he ever had. And family. Not that either was worth remembering but people he admired had cherished the latter and he trusted them extolling the family as sacred, as a social cell of prime importance. A loud clamor from down the street and around the corner marched a group with intifada signs accompanied by squawks and squeals and a faintly unpleasant odor. The invisible man noticed most were indisputably palefaced and sworn enemies of everything he knew to be true. Soon enough, the other ones and that repulsive star would clash with the counter-protest. Police sirens blared in the distance. He’d been here before when rabble rousers and the most repulsive skins of divergent and pathetic causes except the Only One That Mattered assaulted the petulant throng. The invisible man mouthed a silent prayer of the darkest maledictions upon them all. He ignored the coalblack with the shopping cart who approached him for money. That poor child. He could sense the stirrings of a ferocious storm of violence as he gazed upon these creatures whose conditioned obliviousness to completion was why it stayed the way it was. Why millions like that White child never had a chance. Further ruminations on the matter risked awakening his condition he successfully hid from the world. Frank Lyons? A new addition always pleased him. Pleased him that it was growing and would soon take the world. Wait…Is that that rabbi over there…? That Schmuelly something? Doesn’t it and its daughter sell…? The invisible man spat into the suddenly foul-tasting coffee, left it on the ledge, and walked away into the fog.
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