The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
like a tiger in a cage, roaring with your loneliness. I rush in front of the closed shops, heading to my favourite hiding place behind the dumpsters at the corner of the streets, where a public staircase protects me from the eyes of passersby and the cold wind of the night. I pass the time counting cars and stars, waiting for your latest episode to be over.
Tucked away there, I break into a loud cry. I feel like I’m locked in a freefall, pushed from an edge into a hungry abyss. You’re a goddess, and I’m betrayed by my faith. Your heart was supposed to produce love for your children, the way your breasts were supposed to produce milk for them.
Between the buildings on both sides of our narrow street, leaning on each other like old friends, I must have fallen asleep. It wouldn’t have been the first time. In the morning, I gather myself and walk back home, avoiding the eyes of curious neighbours and shop owners. I bring my tired body up the stairs. I eavesdrop at our gate, hoping to hear your snores filling up the house. When I’m assured you’re fast asleep, I slip through the door to my bedroom.
I remind your ghost, as you stand there in the corner of my bedroom, stealing my fleeting moments and final nights with my lover, that it wasn’t the last time I took that walk of shame.
Like a moon rising from the darkness she appears in front of me, in a photo taken four minutes after she met her end. I try to ignore Evelyn McHale, but she is haunting me. She lies there like the daughter of a goddess who sacrificed herself for the sins of others. “Tell my father,” she said in her suicide note, “I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.” She feared for her lover and her own offspring, and she atoned with a blood sacrifice. She calls my name, wondering if I needed a hug, a kiss or a bedtime story. Her closed eyelids, her hair, her dress, which I assume is the colour of red wine, are all printed on my brain cells; they glow, leaving a negative of her image in the back of my mind.
Like the men gathering around the dead body of McHale, I’m alert. I can smell the smoke coming from outside my room in the late morning hours. What now? I ask myself and I open the door, only fearing that my well-studied exit route might be blocked with fire. I slowly walk into the house, sniffing air through my nose, trying to find the direction of the fire. I go to the kitchen. Maybe you forgot another failed attempt at cooking in the oven. The kitchen is deserted, the sink is filled to the brim with eggshells I left there alongside dirty dishes from an endless number of omelettes I made for myself. A rotten banana cluster is in the corner with flies roaming around it, and the potatoes in the plastic basket grew long, twisty roots. The smell of burning oil fills the ceiling. The fridge’s door is forgotten open, but the fridge is empty.
My heart beats faster. I wonder if you’re burning the front door. The thought of death suffocates me like ash.
The smoke is coming from the balcony. You stand in a corner, in front of you a huge tank; I see flames of fire reaching out from within it. The flames reflect in your eyes; they never blink. On your face, a smile grows; you’re amused, like a child repeatedly hitting his sister’s doll on the wall, smashing its face in.
I decide to investigate. I move closer. I take a step toward you and cough loudly, hoping to break you out of your trance. You don’t recognize my existence. I finally cross the door and I join you on the dusty old balcony. I always imagined this balcony as an escape; I wished it was wide enough for me to build a swing.
Deep within the fire, dozens of photos are burning slowly. I gasp as I realize that those are my photos: photos I took at camp when I was twelve; a school photo I looked utterly sick in; a photo of you, a rose in your hair, the sea glowing behind you; a photo of me and my cousins in our Eid clothes; a photo of me laughing my heart out while playing a game of jump rope with another boy. My little face in that photo is burning. The fire is eating the sides of the photo, burning the rope, destroying the features of the other boy, reaching my body, burning off my arms, my ears, my hair, my forehead and my eyes, and finally reaching my laughing mouth, hushing a painful scream.
Across the narrow street, from the balcony of an old building, a neighbour is curiously gazing at us as we stand quietly for an hour. The fire takes you into a land within your own imagination; your eyes are following its flames. There goes #ThrowBackThursday and the endearing photos of my childhood.
Fuck it, I’m not giving you a reason to slap me across the face. I will remain silent; you can burn down the house for all I care. At least the smoke masked the rotten smell of our kitchen.
The neighbour, however, isn’t as wise as me. “Is there a problem?” he asks from his balcony across the street. Two people look up from the street and wonder. You don’t respond. You calmly go back inside and pick a book from my room—the Arabic translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’m happy that I’ve already read it.
You aim and throw the book across the street; your weak hand doesn’t help you, but the theatrical act scares the neighbour into minding his own business. “Fuck off,” you whisper to yourself. The book hits the building across two floors down, and then continues its descent to the street, waving its pages like a frightened bird.
“All photos are haram, they are all sinful,” you say. “They are gateways to hell and will bring ghosts and demons across.”
I stare for a second at my book, all the way down in the street. A man steps on it, another kicks it, until it disappears.
Jumping off the Empire State Building immortalized her forever. She jumped to be forgotten. Her final portrait tells only of her struggle, her relief to end a longing to belong. She looks as if she has been walking a long walk in a jungle of hay and decided to rest on the grass, kicking her high heels away and enjoying the sunlight with closed eyes, touching her chin lightly with a daisy she picked on her long journey. Except the grass is a bed of metal, the body is dead and the daisy is a sharp piece of glass.
When did I decide to run away? I honestly can’t remember. It came like an unexpected spring after a long winter. The idea got hotter like the heat of the sun in April, breaking through the storms of your screams. It shone into the dark haze of your abandonment and isolation.
That final moment, with its urgency, will forever travel around with me. You tell me that you’re leaving for a walk. You go for a long walk every day; you disappear for hours. No one knows where, and no one seems to care.
You put on your makeup, bright green mists of colour across your eyes, a touch of red on the lips and a white scarf, and you walk down the stairs step by step, your high heels knocking on the floor, creating a hypnotic rhythm. As soon as it disappears, I rush to the balcony; I see you walking down the road, your famous blue jacket, your favourite stockings, your white handbag. My nose is filled with the smell of my burned memories, their ashes still resting in the bottom of that barrel. You take your steady steps down our street and you’re gone. My sun is shining. I’m leaving.
My books are disposable. I only keep my favourite. My clothes are not many; I only pick the ones without a stain of blood or a stain of memory. The bag, which used to be my school bag, is filling up fast with my stuff. In my pocket, there is money. My shoes are waiting for me by the door.
I take a final look at my room with its single bed, the blue mattress, my wooden windows, my shelves of books—some broken, some intact. The small white sofa and the small fireplace. I say my goodbyes, and I never see them again.
As a final joke, I close the outside door behind me and I turn the key, breaking it inside the lock. I smile wickedly.
Ten years have passed since I saw you last, mother. I avoided you at every corner of my life; my escape continues for what seems to be an eternity. How to escape your own DNA? How do you look back and think to yourself “fuck this shit!” and move on?
At the top of three steps leading to a small restaurant in a corner of Damascus, I was reunited with you on an early spring day in the late 2000s. I wondered if you would walk down to me, or if I should come up to you. Conscious of my surroundings like a street cat, in the back of my head, I couldn’t stop myself from studying the area around me looking for possible escape routes.
You hugged me and I shivered. You