
“I mean, he didn’t really die,” I told the policeman, sitting next to him on top of a towel I’d just used to dry off from the shower he’d ordered me to take at gunpoint. I had on a pair of powder-blue underwear I bought at the El Dorado outlet on Hamra Street for $1.50. The policeman loved to tell me to take a shower and then come sit next to him like that, either on the sofa, or sometimes on Kennedy’s bed, while he held his gun.
“Of course he didn’t die,” he said. “I know that.”
“He contacted me a few days ago, Kennedy did.”
“On what premise?”
“He said he wants to get back together with me.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him no.”
“Good. Ignore this person.”
“I’m going to. I can’t go down that road again. Besides, now that you and I are, you know….”
“This has nothing to do with me,” the policeman said. “Don’t pull me into it. How did he make contact with you? You meet him somewhere?”
“He called me on the phone.” It was just easier to tell the policeman it happened in a phone call, rather than explain that early one morning about a week ago, Kennedy had been sitting on his motorcycle across the street from my apartment building and that I’d invited him in and made him some French toast. Kennedy and I ate the French toast together on my balcony like we did almost every day last summer. Nearly five months had passed since I’d last seen him, except once I caught him doing a drive-by of my apartment in the middle of the night.
I really only let him in the house that morning so I could tell him what I’d decided during our separation: that he was the person I never met, that maybe it would have all worked out in another life or in a parallel universe or if Allah weren’t so obstinate or whatever. I also said I had a new boyfriend who was a policeman and that I was madly in love with him. I just threw that in to make it absolutely clear that I’d moved on.
“You told me you blocked him from every way of contacting you,” the policeman continued.
“He called from a number I didn’t recognize,” I said, thinking I should have been better prepared for an interrogation, given the sensitive nature of this subject.
“Where were you when you received the call?”
“In the park, sitting on a bench.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said he was sorry for all the terrible things he did to me and for everything that happened. I’m pretty sure he cheated on me with someone who looked like they’d have very specific pronoun requirements he met on Instagram whose handle was CUTE_WITCH but he swears he didn’t. In the profile, CUTE_WITCH is modeling different outfits of a Gothic nature which I had understood went out of style around 1992, not that I’m old enough to remember what people wore back then.”
“If he cheated once, he’ll do it again.”
“Please let’s not talk about Kennedy anymore.”
“You love to make me talk about him.”
I lit a cigarette and blew a big cloud of smoke into the space above our heads. It turned and rose like a clockwork of blue wheels.
“People who live on Airport Street are all criminals,” he went on. “Isn’t that where he’s from?”
At that moment, I remembered Kennedy’s motorcycle with the license plate affixed to it had been parked in front of my house twice that week. Overnight. “I never told you he lives on Airport Street,” I said.
“I’m just going on your description. I have been trained in making mental sketches of shady people.” The policeman rested his gun on top of his bare leg with the barrel sort of pointed at me.
“Is that thing on safety mode?”
“This is the Glock,” he said, holding it up again and admiring it. “It doesn’t have safety. What else did he tell you in the phone call?”
“Nothing worth mentioning. Eventually I hung up on him. He just kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ and I told him I’d moved on—I didn’t mention you or anything, naturally—and I tried to ask, you know, without provoking him into hysteria, if he’d seen a doctor.”
“I told you he was dangerous.”
“He’s in love with me,” I said. “He’s always been in love with me.”
“And you feel nothing for him?”
“Nothing at all. I just hope he’s not going to do anything stupid. You know, because we can’t be together.”
“What stupid thing are you worried about him doing?”
“I don’t know. Hurt himself. When we first met, he’d lie in that bed over there—that’s Kennedy’s bed—and listen to this song called I Spoke with the Devil in Miami, He Said Everything Would Be Fine over and over again. The feelings he had for me last summer sort of rehabilitated him. When we were together, he was able to function in society.”
“He learned how to function from you. That’s good one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Bro,” the policeman said. “You sleep with a pigeon. You run around Hamra in a kimono. You can fit all your possessions into one suitcase like you’re a transient or something and the only place you ever go is a convenience store or to sit in a garden.”
“It’s a kung-fu jacket,” I said. “And I don’t know why you’re on Pom Pom’s case all the time.”
“Now we met and I train you at the gym—look how much more in shape you are as a result of my coaching—and I take you out at night to the fried chicken place where they have the games. You like to watch me hit the punching bag, right? I have you on a schedule. If anyone’s tried to ‘rehabilitate’ someone, please forgive me for saying it, but I think that’d be me.”
“My ex-boyfriend was El Kennedy,” I said softly, to no one in particular.
“Most criminals don’t give out their real names. ‘Kennedy’s’ song, the one he played all the time and the moping around the house was an act.”
“Your sketch is kinda one dimensional. Please forgive me for saying it.”
“Watch that language.”
The room fell silent for a few moments. Then the policeman stood up, got dressed and gathered his things. He placed his gun inside a zippered pocket of his black police backpack. I walked him to the door. “I don’t want to see you get hurt again,” he said, turning to face me. “The leopard doesn’t change his spots.”
I kissed the policeman on the cheek. “The lion, while hunting, doesn’t roar.”
I laid eyes on the Lebanon for the first time in 2007, back when I was a busy international flight attendant living in London. I’d been assigned airport standby duty at Heathrow Airport, where I was based. Standby duty meant that the airline didn’t have a flight for you to cover so you had to wait in the crew lounge for five hours in case someone called in sick at the last minute. They could throw you on a flight bound for anywhere, so it was necessary to pack for a variety of weather conditions. Other than the ones I was forced to wear with my uniform, I refused to pack any shoes except for a thin pair of leather flip-flops. Or I’d simply wear the hotel slippers from the closet for my outings. I absolutely hate shoes. Nobody knows how much.
Just when the five hours were almost up, the Crew Desk (a.k.a. the “Screw Desk”) paged me and told me to report to Gate 56 for the Beirut flight.
A few hours later, I landed in the Paris of the Middle East. As usual, it took the passengers forever to gather their crap and disembark the aircraft and while they were slowly filing out, I opened one of the food carts and ate three leftover chocolate mousses with some Luxardo cherries on top. The back door of the airplane swung open and the caterer stepped into the galley. He began swapping out the service carts with fresh ones. I gave him a chocolate mousse. The aircraft was returning to London within the hour with a different crew. I’d be laying over in Beirut at the Phoenicia Hotel, which I had heard featured an amazing swimming pool alongside the Mare Nostrum.
I peered out the open aircraft door, past the catering truck where I saw a low mountain, more like a hill, near the runway. Scattered over the hill were crumbling houses with torn sheets for curtains and imperfect rows of tiny shacks with tin roofs. I specifically remember thinking, I hope the rest of Beirut doesn’t look like this.
The caterer noticed me staring at shantytown and said, “That’s the area we call Airport Street. That terrible neighborhood is what people see out the airplane window when they first arrive in my country. Nice, huh? Don’t ever go there.”
If someone back then had told me that in the year 2023 I’d be surrounded by birds from this neighborhood, I wouldn’t have believed them. I wouldn’t have understood.
Shortly after the French toast incident, Kennedy began spending the night at my apartment a couple of nights a week. I was glad to have him near me again, even if things weren’t at all like last summer. The first night, without saying anything, he climbed into bed wearing his black adidas tracksuit with a hood and he didn’t remove his socks. As he slowly lay back, he took both strings of the hoodie and pulled them downwards in the same manner I used to pull the strings of my life vest on board the aircraft as I demonstrated how to inflate it in an emergency by pulling down on the red toggles. Except his hands kept going even after he was flat on the bed, down toward his waist, until only a little wrinkled-up hole was left with his big nose and lips poking through it and a tuft of his beard sticking up like a tiny tree that had died and turned black in the desert.
“Um, everything okay?” I asked, looking down at him from the mezzanine.
“Everything fine.”
“Are you sick?”
“Not need worry.”
“You want me to spray you with some OFF!?”
“No thank you.”
After a few moments, I said “Kennedy?”
“Yes.”
“If the snake comes out of its aquarium during the night, I promise I’ll put it back.”
“Not need. The snake, he stay inside.”
One morning a few days later, after he was down to sleeping in just the warm-up pants of the adidas ensemble, Kennedy sat up in bed and said, “Today we go see pigeon man of Airport Street. Pom Pom, she sad because she not have husband.”
Pom Pom is my pigeon. She’s the only gift Kennedy ever gave me. When I first laid eyes on her, she was cowering at the bottom of a large brown paper Zara bag. It was late one summer afternoon when I heard the motorcycle pull up downstairs. Kennedy walked into my apartment and handed me the bag. “This for you,” he said. In the half-light of the end of the day, I saw what appeared to be an Islamic vase painted in navy blue and white, lying sideways at the bottom. Then Pom Pom looked up at me and the vase turned into a pigeon.
After Kennedy left in September, I started letting Pom Pom sleep under the covers with me every night. This caused an unexpected thing to happen. Pom Pom began laying eggs in my bed. I didn’t know how to stop it. I took her to a famous bird specialist who practiced in a clinic on top of a mountain. He explained that she was suffering from a condition known as Inappropriate Pair Bonding, which basically meant she’d fallen in love with me. Pom Pom wanted a baby more than anything in the world and it just wasn’t ever going to happen with me. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch and it was all my fault.
I’d told Kennedy about the egg drama the day he came back to me. So that morning, when he’d awakened with the solution, off we went on the motorcycle in search of Pom Pom’s mate.
The pigeon man of Airport Street had a shop connected to a gas station. “This where I find for you the Pom Pom,” Kennedy said, as we stepped down from the bike. “Today we fix egg problem.”
“I’m not sure I can have a house full of pigeons. Isn’t that what will eventually happen?”
“Not need worry,” he said. “This part of natural process, as Allah intend.”
We proceeded inside the pigeon store. Within seconds I spotted him: a solid white dove, slightly smaller than the others but very alert. His eyes told me he had waited many moons for me and Kennedy to arrive. “There he is!” I said, pointing him out of a bevy of pigeons inside a large fenced enclosure.
“So cute,” Kennedy said. “He have white heart, like you.”
“But what if Pom Pom doesn’t like him? I told you what the bird doctor said. It’s like an arranged marriage.”
“He strong,” Kennedy said. “He know what he doing.”
Kennedy took out 50,000 lira from his wallet and paid for the white bird. This was approximately $1.75 at the time of purchase. I couldn’t believe how cheap pigeons were in the Lebanon, not that I had any experience with pigeon prices in other cities. Pigeons are more delightful than other birds, such as the Quaker parrot and the love bird and the parakeet and the Pappagallo and the green parrot, to name a few. It astonishes me that nobody knows this. Then again, I didn’t know it until last summer, either.
Around the world, pigeons surround us. They gather shyly beside us in parks and in public squares, they await our kindnesses if there are ever any, they don’t steal things that don’t belong to them, they ask for so little, since forever they’ve delivered secret information and love notes on tiny rolled up papers, they relay messages from beyond—if you’re open to receiving them—ones from a place no human could ever go; pigeons are not invisible, they never have been invisible, they are right there if you choose to see them, or maybe they are invisible and only a few people can see them, like me and Kennedy, like those who see ghosts when nobody else can.
The pigeon man of Airport Street snatched Pom Pom’s new husband out of the air, packed him into a shoebox and taped the lid down. Then he pulled a knife from his back pocket and cut out an air hole in each end of the box. When he handed me the box, I peeked through one of the holes to make sure his little white heart wasn’t bleeding.
“Name Moussa,” Kennedy announced when we arrived home. “This name from Qur’an.”
“This is ‘Moses’ in English,” I said.
We sat on the balcony and took in Pom Pom’s reaction to Moses. She looked up at me as if asking my permission to share her with someone else.
Pom Pom was almost as big as a chicken on account of Kennedy’s sprinkling his bodybuilder protein powder on top of her food over the summer. Moses looked a little freaked out by her Mass Gainer self.
“Go on,” I told Pom Pom. “Say hi to Moses.”
We gazed into the cage as though it were a crystal ball.
Kennedy looked like a faun.
Then I got a text message. The message was a picture. The picture was of my apartment building, taken from somewhere across the street, a point high up, from an angle several stories higher than where we were seated on the third floor. You could see my whole building, complete with Kennedy’s motorcycle parked downstairs like a toy. When I zoomed in, I could make out two small figures, me and Kennedy, sitting side by side, facing the birdcage on the balcony.
“Everything okay?” he asked me.
“Yeah, it’s just… the policeman says he’s nearby.”
“You tell me he coming for you at three. It not even two.”
I texted Mazen:
--Do you want to come inside?
--Absolutely not.
--I thought we were going to the gym at three.
--That’s what I thought, too.
--Well then, I’ll be ready at three. It’s only two.”
--Correct.
--He leaves for work at three.
--I know that.
“Kennedy?” I said, standing up. “I think maybe we better go back inside the house now.”
“You not want see Pom Pom fall in love with Moussa?”
“It’s not right to spy on people in intimate moments.” I looked around discreetly, trying to find the policeman’s lookout post but stopped after a second. I didn’t want to make it obvious and I didn’t want my picture taken when I was looking like I’d been busted doing something I shouldn’t. But really, other than the business with the underwear and the gun on the sofa in the afternoons, Mazen and I were just friends. I mean, as of that date, “just friends” is what would appear in a police report or a history book. That's all anyone would be left with if one of us were to, say, vanish suddenly.
The next morning I woke up later than usual. The bold Mediterranean sun was hammering through the crack in the curtains. After Kennedy left the night before, I’d put Pom Pom and Moses under the covers with me in my bed in the mezzanine. When I opened my eyes and stretched, they began making low, staccato pigeon noises from down near my ankles. I was late in feeding them. When I lifted the covers, they waddled sleepily up onto my pillow, both with looks of immense gratitude, as if they were mindful of what pigeons in places like Trafalgar Square must endure.
As I was climbing down the ladder headed to make my Nescafé, a voice said, “Houssein Khodor Kandar. Birthdate September 25, 1997.”
The policeman lay on Kennedy’s bed, holding his phone in front of his face with both hands. The Glock was positioned beside him on the bedspread which was pushed up against the wall. He was lying on top of an assortment of bath towels he’d covered Kennedy’s bed with—one towel positioned crosswise over the pillow and the rest of them underneath him, the length of his body. He had on his burgundy underwear held on by a safety pin at the waist because the elastic is shot, and that was all. “Sound right?” he said.
“Good morning, Mazen,” I said calmly. “Sleep well?”
“The name mean anything to you?”
“How did you get in here?”
“The door was unlocked. You should check it before you go to bed at night.”
“I should do a lot of things,” I said. “But to be honest, if anyone wants anything of mine, they can just have it.”
“What if they’re after you?”
“Like you, you mean?” I sat down on the bed and twisted my torso around to look at him. Despite the fact that he’d broken and entered into my home while I was asleep, his furrowed brow, the way he refused to look at me and the disdain with which he studied Kennedy’s personal information in his phone made me forgive him everything. “Are you after me?” I placed my hand on his bare thigh.
“Watch that language,” he said. “I have reason to believe that the motorcycle that’s been parked outside your home for the last few nights belongs to this individual. Did you know his real name is Houssein? Or you still believe he’s someone named Kennedy?”
“He borrowed the name Kennedy from his favorite video game, Resident Evil 4. And his birthday is the day before mine. We’re both Libra.”
Mazen sat upright with his back against the headboard, set his phone down next to the gun and met my gaze. “I’ll make you some tea,” I said and went into the kitchen.
Pom Pom flew off my bed in the mezzanine, across the room and landed on my shoulder. The breeze she created on takeoff blew another egg she’d apparently laid in my sheets onto the floor. It shattered on impact.
The policeman looked at me with the bird on my shoulder as I stood filling the tea kettle with water, then down at the broken pigeon egg splattered on the floor. “None of this looks right to me,” he said.
“Then don’t look at it,” I said. “Moses just got here yesterday so that one couldn’t possibly have been an egg with his baby in it.”
He lay back against the towels and stared into space.
“Would you like a bowl of cereal?” I asked him.
“What kind of cereal?”
“Raisin Bran.”
“No thank you,” the policeman said. “Today I’ll have the French toast.”
One afternoon at three o’clock as Kennedy was leaving my apartment to go to his job as personal trainer at Grand Gym and Mazen happened to arrive at the same time to take me to another, much nicer gym called Fitness Zone as he’d begun doing almost every afternoon—the policeman had unofficially assumed the role as my trainer during Kennedy’s long absence—they came into direct contact with one another on the street in front of my building for the first time. I observed this interaction from the balcony with a mixture of curiosity and compassion. Neither one spoke or nodded to the other. Kennedy fired up the motorcycle and revved the engine loudly before speeding off down Jeanne d’Arc street.
Later, I received a text message from him while Mazen and I were at Fitness Zone. It said: The policeman he little.
I didn’t pay any attention to it. The policeman is handsome and well-built and all, just a little on the Lilliputian side.
Mazen is no ordinary policeman, either. He’s an undercover agent in an organization called the Internal Security Forces. It’s like the FBI of Lebanon. Kennedy says I’m Mazen’s job, that he’s paid by the ISF to follow me around on account of me being an American citizen, living in Lebanon for No Good Reason during one of the country’s most corrupted times in history, other than to write a novel I never actually write, the intrigue of which I can, however, recite in detail from beginning to end, as if I’ve lived it all.
“He think you spy,” Kennedy was always telling me. “He not love you.”
I had made the mistake of revealing the plot of my novel when Mazen and I first met after noticing each other in the early mornings while jogging along Beirut’s corniche. This was before he fessed up about his line of work. Over coffee by the sea, I told him the book I was writing was about a boy who finds an ancient cast-iron mask of a satyr with magical powers hidden inside a large, cave-like trunk of a very old yew tree, in accordance with a sort of prophecy. The removal of this artifact from its resting place engenders a complicated plot where the main character, because of his love for an undercover military operative in an unnamed North African country (divided by separate governments in the East and West), joins Islam and accidentally incites an act of sedition. Later, he escapes a kidnapping attempt while attending a bodybuilding championship held in the ballroom of a hotel in Carthage, Tunisia. He ends up a wanted man, pursued alongside his lover in a Land Rover across the Mars-like surface of the Sahara Desert by henchmen of a corrupted government. It’s the most moving story I’ve ever written.
Of course I just made the whole thing up. I mean, what could a person like me possibly know about sedition?
On the way home from the gym, the policeman pulled over onto the side of the road in front of a pet store with rabbits in cages lined up out front. “The cage you have is too small for two pigeons,” he said. “I took note of the situation earlier. Pick out a bigger one. Just keep it under $30.”
“Pom Pom is dying to have a baby,” I said, stepping out of the car.
I chose the same type of metal cage the rabbits on the sidewalk were in. It came folded up in a flat cardboard box and required assembly.
“I’m going to take you home and set up the birdcage,” said the policeman. “While I do that, I want you to take a shower. Then I have to go.”
The daily blackout struck and the electricity was off when we arrived at my apartment building so the elevator was out of commission. He and I carried the cage up the three flights of stairs together along with a toolbox he’d pulled from the trunk of his car.
“I’ll install this on the balcony,” he said. “You go on and get in the shower.”
I did as he asked and when I came out wrapped in a towel around my waist, he was sitting Indian-style on the balcony floor with the cage partially assembled and talking on the phone. He said something in Arabic about “Houssein” and, “I know, I’m working on it.”
He excused himself to the person he was talking to and placed his phone on top of the toolbox. “Now don’t lose these little screws.” He held up a small Ziploc bag full of screws that came with the birdcage. “Let me just take care of what I have to do at work. I’ll come back and finish the cage later tonight.”
“I don’t mind trying to assemble it,” I said. “You just go on home after work and rest. You look so tired. I promise I won’t lose the screws.”
He left my apartment in what appeared to be a state of complete agitation. On his way out he said, “You write anything today?”
“I didn’t have time,” I said. “I had kind of a busy morning.”
“They’re all like that,” he said. “Seems like, anyway.”
I made a few attempts over the course of the evening to assemble the cage. A couple of the screws rolled off the balcony but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t end up needing them. Just the fourth leg of the cage couldn’t be attached so I used Moses’s shoebox to support it on the side where the missing leg should be.
I went ahead and texted Kennedy:
--Hey. Will you stay with me tonight? I feel funny.
--Funny how?
--Dizzy. Racing thoughts. Sick.
--Okay. Drink water. I coming.
Around midnight, I was still on the balcony admiring the birdcage when Kennedy came home from the gym. “Helloooo?” he called out. “Where are you? Why you not sleep if you sick?”
“Out here,” I said.
Kennedy came and found me. “What this?” he asked, looking at the cage.
“The policeman got it for me. Wasn’t that thoughtful? He said the other cage isn’t big enough. Pom Pom’s going to have a baby.”
Kennedy sat down in a chair on the balcony. “Nice,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the cage. “This new cage perfect size to put policeman in.”
“I assembled it myself,” I said.
He leaned forward in the chair to adjust the shoebox-leg. I went inside and retrieved Pom Pom and Moses from where they were perched side by side on top of the flat-screen TV and returned with a pigeon under each arm. Kennedy opened the door of the cage and I placed them inside their new home.
Kennedy stood up, took off his t-shirt, and went into my apartment. He withdrew a book, a pen and a pack of Post-its from his gym bag and sat down at my desk. “I have trouble with memory,” he said. “I not know why.”
“Just don’t ever forget how much I love you,” I said, leaning down and putting my arms around him from behind. “And how sad I am that we can’t be together, seeing as it makes Allah mad.”
“The Qur’an say Allah burn the city of Lot for fucking in the ass,” Kennedy said. “If we do it again like last summer, He set the house on fire. Trust me.”
“You told me.”
“Everyone die in the city of Lot. Everyone sleep in deep coma forever. Therefore, I not gay anymore.”
“Of course you’re not. Nobody in Lebanon is.”
“Exam for personal trainer certificate next week.” He opened his human anatomy textbook.
“Don’t you think you should sleep now? It’s late.”
“If you look at something before you sleep, it stay in the memory.”
He’d taken many notes in the margins and completed most of the exercises in his indecipherable handwriting. He turned to a page with a diagram of the human skeleton with blanks to fill in with the bones. “This one have me worried,” he said, sliding the book closer to me on the desk. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Tibia,” I said. It was the first bone on the list. “Where’s that one?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “And I definitely don’t know where the next one, radius, is. Is there an answer key in here somewhere?”
“No, I check. The coach, he write them on the board in class but I not write it down.”
“Why not?”
“I look at motorcycles in my phone. I chat with owner of Aprilia 750 Dreambike on Instagram. He confirm she travel at 200kmh.”
“I don’t want to hear about anything that goes 200kmh unless it’s an airplane,” I said. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll Google the bones and fill in the blanks in the book. While you memorize them, I will prepare an exercise for us.” I took a package of McVities dark chocolate digestive biscuits out of the refrigerator and handed it to him.
“Good idea,” he said, taking a stack of biscuits from the box. He stuck one in his mouth and got lost in his phone. He watched a YouTube video about how Saddam Houssein was alive and well, living among the Gullah people in South Carolina. The Gullah people video was his favorite one. In it, Saddam is deeply tan and wearing a white t-shirt and cut-offs, living in a shack on a beach with them.
I found almost the exact same skeleton diagram online and filled in the blanks in his workbook. “Put the phone away and stare at the bones for ten minutes without stopping. Then we’re going to play a game.” My bare shoulder was touching his as we sat at the desk. I didn’t move for the longest time and neither did he.
I opened the pack of Post-its and wrote the names of all the bones on them while Kennedy focused his sleepy, goat-like eyes on the diagram. “Okay,” I said, standing up and holding my arms out like Jesus. “Take a Post-it from the pile and stick it on me where it’s supposed to go.”
He closed his eyes and felt around on the desk for a Post-it. “Try to visualize the diagram,” I said.
He opened his eyes, stood in front of me and read: “CLAVICLE.”
“That one’s easy,” I said.
“I think this one go here,” he said, and got it right. We moved on successfully to the radius and the femur. He couldn’t remember where the humerus or the ulna were and said, “I will write these on my arm before the test. That way I remember.”
“You cheat on this test and I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Why you like this?”
“Because these are easy. And you still have a few more days to memorize them.”
He got several more bones right after that, but not the talus.
By the time this exercise was nearing an end, my body was covered in Post-its. He held up the last one and showed it to me: STERNUM. “I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “It protects the most vital organ of the body.”
Kennedy waved the hand with the last Post-it over my body like a metal detector. “Think stern,” I said. “As in hard or unyielding.”
He affixed STERNUM over my heart. “I have better way to remember it,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“This one, sternum, easy to remember,” he said. “Because sound like sperm.”
He held up his phone to take a picture of me with the Post-its covering my body. I removed CRANIUM from my forehead right before he snapped the picture. “Kennedy know your body better than any man,” he said, showing me the pic, his shoulder touching mine again. “Better than any boyfriend you ever have before and I think you have a lot. Remember I said that.”
He helped me remove the Post-its and we raided the refrigerator. We ate some cheddar slices and some grapes and some more McVities dark chocolate digestives while sitting on his bed. Then I climbed the ladder and Kennedy turned out the light and the room fell silent as we lay in the black wreckage of the Lebanon, me in the mezzanine, Kennedy in his bed below me.
“Tomorrow I fix missing leg,” he said. It was his zombie sleepwalker voice. He sounded like summer but it was only March.
Kevin Calder has lived in London, Paris, Havana, Beirut, Sydney, San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles. Currently based in a hidden location, he is a writer of fiction and poetry, often inspired by characters he claims to have met while traveling in areas of the world deemed “unadvisable” according to the US government website: travel.state.gov/traveladvisories. His previous fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, New Stories of the South, Oyster River Pages and is forthcoming in Prairie Fire.
댓글