Sleeplessness
I have been awake for nineteen days straight. I counted the pebbles in the Styrofoam cup this morning before I come to the shore and lie down on this smooth slab of limestone and watch the sky with half open eyes.
I have been awake for nineteen days straight. I counted the pebbles in the Styrofoam cup this morning before I come to the shore and lie down on this smooth slab of limestone and watch the sky with half open eyes.
‘Except for a few exceptions,’ he said, ‘people enter this world alone and leave it the same way. Do you see? It shows that at heart we’re solitary creatures. We don’t really want to be with others, yet we’re forced into companionship: friends, spouses, family, all that.’
Gol Alam insisted that Americans’ blood was green. He said his brother had taken him to see the corpse of an American soldier he’d just killed and he, Gol Alam, had seen it with his own eyes. “The man was drenched in green blood. His face, his chest, his hands, all his clothes were green,” he said. “I swear I’m not lying.”
A thunderous roar hurled me from my bed and slammed me hard against the floor. Like a madman, I rushed out of the house in nothing but my underclothes. Dust had blanketed everything. At first glance, nothing could be seen.
There are only five songs saved on his smart phone. One is the one I just mentioned, which plays from his room whenever, according to my mother, “his elephant remembers India.”
have grown almost accustomed to these blasts; the sharp edge of fear has dulled. Yet the sparrows and mynahs never seem to learn.