The Others

The Others Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Others Read Online Free PDF
Author: Siba al-Harez
see.
    The cigarettes are not the worst of Dai’s legacy to me. She had offered me a cigarette to lighten the heaviness of the physical blockage that had me in its hold. I took that cigarette. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub in the bathroom off her room, trying as hard as I could to keep down the fury I felt toward her, as an alternative to turning the remaining hours we had together into a stupid argument and a series of verbal bombardments that we would launch at each other. I was not yet convinced that I could grant her more than the few centimeters she had revealed by pulling up my shirt, but she wanted more. She always wanted more.
    I incarcerated myself in the bathroom. She followed me in, though. She ran her fingers through my hair, but I pushed her away. She knew how much her touches irritate me when I am angry, but she would not stop. She held out her cigarette toward me. This was not quite the first cigarette I had tried, but in a few seconds, despite the coughing and choking and the cloudiness in my eyes, it calmed my feverish blood. With just a tiny dose of nicotine she bribed my nervous gestures into growing regular and quiet. I found in cigarettes and bathtub a safe place where Dai could not reach me, where the pain she could cause was too remote to cast its hand over me.
    Since I do not enjoy the taste of Faisal’s cigarettes, and in any case it would be too hard to steal from him—this guy who suddenly and for no reason had begun to smoke two cigarettes a week—in the beginning I took all I needed from Dai. Then, I managed to convince Salaam, our driver, to bring me cigarettes along with the beer that he was already smuggling in for me. In my mother’s custom, even beer was unlawful: our religion said so. Drinking it in our home was as bad as drinking a whole bottle of hard stuff. No difference there!
    My addiction, as I claim, is not to the taste of cigarettes or the way they tame my blood. It is to the feeling that suddenly comes over me whenever I toss a cigarette butt into the toilet and then tug the flush cord. With it goes my entire brain; I find myself suddenly unable to think through anything, as I follow the swirl of the water sweeping away the cigarette and my unease with it, the garbage of my murky thoughts, and those nightly phantom birds of mine that arrive constantly to peck from my brain their fill of worry, fear and suspicion.
    I was in the bathroom, overcome by nausea and without a cigarette; all I needed was two fingers jammed into my throat. If we inherit the ways our bodies habitually react to stress, what my genes had given me was a welling nausea whenever things went bad with my mother. I would do better than her, though, by making myself throw up. Aah, the superiority of my inherited traits! This was the only just thing, it appeared, to have gotten mixed into my nucleic acid, from among the interlaced, jumbled obscurity of quirks I inherited, one of which stripped from me the right to eat
ful
beans while another made me liable to break out sobbing at any moment, turning me into a tiny duckling-like creature who had just gotten wet and in the cold could not rid himself of his constant shivering. My parents were kind to me, in any case; I cannot deny it. They did not bestow on me infected blood corpuscles or a faulty pancreas.
    I came out of the bathroom depleted, my vision blurred and my head spinning. I grasped Hiba’s hand and smiled sourly.
    Huuba, dearie, did I tell you that I flunked?
    She was so incredulous that she left her mouth hanging open. How could I fail, for the first time, when I was only a year away from finishing my years of study, and capping a span of time that had been full of certificates of excellence and diplomas and my ranking at 94th percentile in my third year of high school! I knew how violently this news of mine would slap Hiba, who was always keeping after me to focus on my studies, who would phone me after midnight during exams to make sure that
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Albion Dreaming

Andy Roberts

Hour of the Bees

Lindsay Eagar

Wishes in Her Eyes

D.L. Uhlrich

2 CATastrophe

Chloe Kendrick

Severe Clear

Stuart Woods

Derailed

Gina Watson

The Orphan

Robert Stallman