Fatima Zahra

The day I finished burying you, I took myself out for dinner. I wore your skin on me -- your heart beat inside my chest - taking all the time in the world to beat and I leisured in the way I looked once in the mirror before I left.

My heart was yours - but you were gone from me.

The market was closing down. It was difficult, but I found an eatery nestled between clothing stores, warm idlis and melting kulfis sandwiched between vodka and burning linen. Frayed curtains and steel glasses filled to the brim with rasam and waiters who looked like they all were from the same family, the same eyes, and the same thinness of hair.

I pulled back the curtain and seated myself in a corner, swallowing down the rasam, carefully avoiding the chilies, and it cleansed me from the inside. My rasam looked orange from the string lights. My hands were pink from the warm lamps and translucent plastic decorations and I thought - maybe I will paint this new body all different colors of the sunset. Maybe I will be so beautiful people won't be able to erase my ghost from their mind, and they'd think I wonder who that guy was. One of the waitresses (or was it a waiter?) put a little pamphlet onto the table - stained and worn out pages strung together, laminated paper against cool cotton. I forget the name of the restaurant.

I was about to leave, maybe to go bowling with myself, maybe to run into the woods (I was alone) when someone entered the restaurant and sat right in front of me. On the very day I had begun to live my life again, they smoked a Marlboro sitting right in front. The smoke whirled up my nose, rested inside my lungs and boiled around.

"I hope it's not weird, but I followed you here."

Immediately, I looked away from the Garamond descriptions of bottle gourd delicacies to the person in front of me, for the first time noticing them.

For a few seconds we were the only people in the world, not in a romantic sense, but I think if I asked them to hug me, they would've. They offered me the cigarette, their liberty spikes and studded hoodie looking intimidating even to me, but something in their eyes, something in the way they sat, legs draped over the handle of the chair, black denim over cold rusted metal. It made me think; maybe they've buried someone too.

"I wasn't robbing graves."

"It’s okay."

Lightly, they lifted their shirt, just enough for me to see the hem. "I’ll get there soon." they said, letting their shirt go, smiling again. 

"Great." 

I stared, looked at the walls (warm yellow wallpaper, coming off at the sides), the smoke that went up from the cig, a tinge of gray inside a kaleidoscope, and at my hands, the way the veins curled, the way they looked fragile. 

Maybe my life isn't new. I can't help it. 

My feet are still uncomfortably small, my hair is too long and I cried yesterday. (Blocks of silence / crackling thoughts / television static) 

"You want to see a play?" 

This fit my idea of impulsivity and living my life (shiny! sparkling!) in new ways, the idea of finding a part of myself I’d never known before. 

He told me while we walked down the street, while the sky wrinkled and bunched up in places with tinges of purple, while trucks rushed past on the road, while the world was so quiet except for the clatter of shot glasses against bar floors and top 40 songs whisked together in the background, he told me he had lived on a lavender farm and had ducklings for pets, 

I don't think I've ever met anyone else like him, since, he couldn't have been an angel, I’m sure even the fallen ones don't smoke. 

My parents told me strangers were going to hurt me, but after I’d killed the self who'd belonged to them I was free, I could watch and enjoy whatever play this was, I could go home and spend all night painting myself tangerine and the swirling reds of stained glass. 

Ethan (very much of a white boy name for someone like him, but it was ironical and funny in its own way, such a vibrant contrast it almost threw you off, just like his shoes (white sneakers, washed clean, with a tiny Pikachu painted onto them) or his earrings (tiny frogs with red cheeks) served as a sort of cosmic irony.) 

The road we took curled around, but it might as well have been long or short or as straight as the covers of teen magazines because we were enveloped in our bubble of existence, even though i don't remember what we talked about, I remember the way I felt warm even in the cold, submerged with excitement and nervousness and a state of satisfaction.

When we finally did arrive, it was cold, he pointed at a building in the distance, an old movie theater, broken down now, with half-broken dimly flashing lights, with posters from who knows when, pasted over each other, ripping out at the edges. 

"I got these tickets for free, did some promo for them." he said, leading me into the building, through the dimly lit hallway, marble tiles (broken) and light bulbs (fused) where the only light that entered came from orange lamps hanged from the ceiling, and all throughout, I wondered why he even told me that, do people even care? 

The door (leather-covered, patched with flowing silk at parts) creaked and let a rivulet of sharp white light flow out, in ribbons of light that illuminated the hall, allowed me to see the art on the wall. Its crazy how the hall changed so much, art (like your dead body) is breathtaking in the best ways. The tiles were second thoughts now, but quickly, I peeked in. in front of the (ripped) screen, there were upholstered sofas and tables and all sorts of tools (hammers and mallets and axes and some others I hadn't used in your swift murder). Beds and dog kennels and carriages stood to the side of the main 'stage', but my eyes kept hovering over the cast, young-12 something kids in satin costumes, crimson coats and flowing frilled shirts, black cat-ears and green umbrellas, and canes -- so many canes. 

The brightness came from large floodlights that had been put on the floor, they weren't just white, there were violet (lavender lights, he whispered in my ear) and lime green, facing the other way, blotches on the black walls. 

"Come on," we went down to the front seats, and we sat near various people who might have been the kids' parents, or teachers. 

"Ethan! Come on, they're just getting ready." And they looked at me and waved, smiled (in a warm way but not like Ethan) and smiling back, I sat down in my seat, anxious. 

What kind of play was Ethan interested in that was performed by children? But I bit the edges of my fingers, (as of before / stifled breaths / hugging ribs) and i watched as a child placed himself atop the table and I laughed. 

The parents stared at me in horror, but I giggled (like a girl!) and Ethan looked at me and smiled. 

Pinocchio went to school (not really) and he went to Stromboli's theater (a puppet! just like us!) as parent exclaimed and halfway through I needed to use the washroom but I didn't get up and looked at the way Stromboli's puppets (little girls with porcelain faces and sheer stockings and little cardboard carriages that took them to treasure island (or was it called pleasure island??). There were sound effects when the blue fairy came on 

stage (blue silk dress / sparkly eye shadow / gems speckled on her face / glassy blue eyes). Donkeys and Pinocchio dying. Necromancy and gold badges. Children bowing and Ethan clapping them on the back and them telling me they designed the costumes. Laughter and root beer and marlboros and promises of McDonald’s.

"You're brave, truthful and unselfish then." I looked down. 

"Morals do not a man make." Ethan's eyes crinkled when he spoke. "Pinocchio was like us." I whispered. 

"No, no, Pinocchio was like you," he blew out the cigarette "back from the dead."