Shame
by Faris Kassisieh I woke up yesterday. Confronted by my own filth. Empty coke cans and empty pizza box and empty bags of chips.Yarn—Chunky yarn. Breathing yarn. Shampoo bottles peeking out of unpacked bags—and I was confronted by my own filth. Fermentation. When you mix water and sugar and yeast in a jar and impale the lid with the bent orange knife that’s wiser than you and leave it to grow after you take your sugar cube and go to bed. And your mother (what?), she throws it out the next morning because it made the kitchen smell. Confronted by filth. By snails captured in a fishbowl, perpetually imprisoned under cling wrap until the hole you put there for them to breathe becomes their Messiah (I think he was Jewish. I think.) and they hang onto the ceiling and the walls: Omnipresent trails of slime, the same ones the Tralfamadorians saw in the sky. Rolling under my quilt (what the hell is a quilt) until my sheet was speckled with red dots—a rash maybe—maybe bacne—maybe the Accutane leaving my system. Tiny mysterious ones. I don’t know. Until eyelids are aroused by bloodshot eyes. Until they flutter open. Until they climax in a spectacle of styes. Pupils dilating. Skin oily (oily oily oily). Bubbly thick stagnant. Filth.
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