The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
away from his body. He couldn’t feel it anymore. I became his hurt locker; I became his vessel of sorrow. He started to lose his grip on reality. While I remained behind, taking blows, he slipped into his fantasies.
In his mind, he would call and the clerk would pick up the phone. They would meet again for a coffee somewhere over by the banks of the Nile. He would buy the clerk a rose from a flower girl wearing a dirty scarf. The clerk would take it and press it inside a graphic novel he had bought weeks before. The book would forever smell of flowers, and the rose would become immortal like a rose made of glass.
Every weekend they would go together to the movies and watch a comedy or a drama. They would argue over superhero movies and hold hands in the darkness of the cinema. When they went home, they would kiss goodnight. They would grow old together and one day, while asleep in his lover’s arms, in a bedroom covered in movie posters, he would peacefully slip into his final slumber.
With a final kick that landed on his face, he returned to the dark alleyway. He coughed blood, spat it to the side. “Bas,” he begged, “enough, please.” His cracked rib must have punctured his lung; I felt it root itself there. It grew like a tree within his lung, with parched branches that carried no leaves. It reached the corner of his heart and scratched the inside of his ribcage. He was finally dying. “Bas,” he whispered, but his gasp came out as a hiss, coated with blood.
That night was my first encounter with Death.
He came swiftly, a smile on his skeleton face. He waved his fingers and the world stopped; a drop of blood from the corner of my eye froze on my face, like a red tear that I didn’t cry. The faces became masks of anger; the feet were suspended millimetres from my body. “You can let go now,” Death said. “Just announce yourself gone, and you will be gone.”
Death was wearing a black cartoonish hood; his fingers, touching my face softly, were sticks of ice. He showed me everything that night: he showed me the future I would have, the stories I would tell and the men I would meet. He showed me you, my love, and I saw you. “This is your life,” he told me. “You will be sitting at the bedside of your loved one as he dies, and slowly, you will tell him stories, trying to keep him away from my final touch.”
He asked me, while darkness was coming over me, if I was ready to let all of this go and disappear with him into the unknown. I wasn’t. “You’re not telling the stories to keep him alive,” he told me. “You are telling the stories because you don’t want to face life without him. It will be a selfish, sad act of self-preservation.”
Scheherazade did not love the sultan. She didn’t want to fix him. She murmured her stories to keep her neck away from the hands of the swordsman.
The world around me was dark and I only saw the light in Death’s eyes. I reached with my palm, and I grabbed Death’s face in my hands. I printed a bloody kiss on his white teeth and begged him to let me stay.
That was when Death skinned me from that innocent man. It was a painful moment; it felt as if part of my soul were being removed. Death smiled at me, and from within me, he took a ghostly figure, a man-child who I used to be, and now he is a stranger to me.
That man visits me sometimes, while I’m lying here in bed with you. He reminds me of stories long gone. He whispers poems in my ear as I wait for you to wake up so I’ll know you’re still alive.
“Tell me a story,” you say now. Death peeks his head from behind the cracked door; within his robes, I see that stranger man. He looks happy. He has poured his pain into me and left this world for an innocent heaven. His pain within me cannot be silenced. It rises every now and again. It becomes louder within my own bones. It feels like the scream of a child abandoned by his mother. Sometimes it echoes in my mind. It slams against my broken ribs and bounces against my dislocated shoulder. It pulls me away from you and slips me into dark places I don’t like, yet I keep it to myself.
I smile to you, my love, and I start telling you a story. “Once upon a time, a man told his lover a story called ‘The Most Beautiful Suicide,’ about a woman called Evelyn McHale.”
Evelyn McHale was long gone before she even hit the car. In her calm descent, falling from the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building, her soul departed from her body, swiftly moving upwards, following her white scarf—the one she dropped off the edge of the building before she jumped.
I guess ghosts haunt in flocks. As I tell you the story of Evelyn, another ghost escapes the grasp of Death. She stands in the corner of our bedroom, eavesdropping on my story about a woman who, like her, abandoned the world.
I know the smell of her clothes; I know the deep look in her eyes. The ghost of my mother stands there silently. I hear her voice echoing from under the bed, hiding there like a monster. “I carried you for nine months within my body,” the voice repeats, yet the ghost remains still. “You’re a part of me.”
I was born in Damascus, a lonely child. I was called evil-eyed since even before the day I was born. On one of her good days, my mother told me that when she felt my first kick, an old maiden aunt of mine touched her belly. “He will grow and be a strong boy,” she said, her eyes sparkling with green envy. “You should take good care of him.” Since that day, my mother’s final months of pregnancy were troubled. When I was born, her milk was dry and salty. I grow up weak, easily picked on, lonely.
She looks at me with accusing eyes and I shiver. I remember you far too well, mother. You steal me away from my listening lover, away from my bed, and you throw me into the icy hole of memory. I see you sitting there in the corner of our dusty living room, waiting for my return from school, holding your knitting kit and working on a blue and yellow winter sweater. The sweater is ugly as fuck. Yet, I will have to wear it. The living room is dimly lit, the dust is everywhere and the TV is playing some nonsense Syrian soap opera. I hate the dust, I hate the soap opera, I hate the sweater and most of all, I hate you.
The air has its thickness; the wooden-framed windows haven’t been opened in months and I feel suffocated the moment I walk in the door, carrying my heavy school bag. You look at me from afar, you see the darkness behind my eyes and you know how much I’m afraid of you. You start smiling; your smile cracks into a laugh, as if you’re enjoying all the fear you’re pouring into my insides. Your laugh echoes throughout the house. It hits the schoolbooks in my room, my old tapes and the photos I hide from you.
“Hello, mother,” I tell you.
“Fuck you!” you say.
She didn’t hear the loud noise her body made when it hit the Cadillac limousine parked in front of the building; she didn’t see the people gathering around her dead body. She didn’t see herself, arranged in her usual elegant demeanour, her legs crossed at the ankles, her pearls neatly placed around her neck, her white gloves clean and sparkling. She didn’t feel the metal of the car, folded around her like a cloud in a child’s imagination; she didn’t mourn the loss of her high heels, gone midway through her flight.
Like a green moray eel, you sneak into my room in the middle of the night. Your clothes are dishevelled. There is no elegance to your love. One hand twists the doorknob slowly, while the other holds onto a kitchen knife. My trained senses wake me up, my eyes adjust to the dark in a second and I see you. You’re standing there on top of me, like a statue of poison and piss.
“Your eyes glow in the dark like a demon,” you tell me and I jump out of bed, pushing you away. You fall down, taking with you two shelves of my books, my only friends in the world, and I dive for an escape. Barefoot and in my underwear, I rush to the door.
“Come back here, you little shit!” I jump down the staircase three steps at a time. My fourteen-year-old heart is pumping blood across my young body. My muscles tense in fear, and tears on my face feel like rivers. I’m fearful, scared. You’re a goddess in your child’s eyes and a goddess is capable of anything. You’re a dictator bathing in my blood, and I’m weak, powerless and incapable of defending myself in the face of your knife stabs.
I