by Ron Riekki

I Bit My Lip

It was while eating.  It happens.  Or maybe you haven’t done it.  It’s pretty stupid.  Doesn’t even make sense.  Your face should know not to try to eat itself.  But I did it.  I was in a rush.  It was at an Israeli restaurant.  Amazing hummus.  The war was underway.  I got my DNA back, it telling me I’m either part Palestinian or part Jewish.  Only 2% of me.  But I like to think every percent counts.  There’s this weird thing they have on the ancestry testing site where you can move the cursor and as you do it eradicates the parts of your ancestry that are the smallest percentages and only keeps what you are as far as the majority.  It kinda feels racist to me.  Like you find out your 5% Middle Eastern and then slowly move the bar until that disappears and all you’re left with is western Europe.

I started thinking about whether I’m Palestinian or Jewish.  Big difference.  Or maybe not.  We love to think there’s a massive difference between someone from, oh, Iran and Turkey.  Or Spain and France.  But I imagine people living on the border who are such a long mix of the two counties that it’s indecipherable.  And, as an Anishinaabe friend told me: “All borders are fake.”

But I started to feel like my lip wasn’t part of me.  It kept swelling.  One portion.  The pain was intense, then disappeared, but what remained was the memory of the pain.  There was a TV up high on the wall in the restaurant.  It had the news on.  No volume.  A bomb dropping.  So strange, to be living in the future, where we have mastered the art of showing war from thousands of miles away, but brought straight to wherever you live (or eat), in color, all the destruction so cinematographic.  I felt sick.  I got lost in the images.  I bit my lip.

And it won’t go away.  That was months ago.  I get snapped back to that bomb dropping every time I feel that lump on my lip.  I wonder if the 2% of me that is either Palestinian or Jewish is my lip.  It keeps reminding me.  And why would the DNA site not know which I am?  Is it because there’s so much intermarriage that it’s all pretend to think there’s a real difference between Jewish and Palestinian?  Is it what we’ve mastered the pretending of borders?  I think of all the blood rushing to the injury, the turning red, the feeling hot.  I think of the pollution and famine and mental health ramifications and just plain health ramifications of war, of how we fight against people that, if we knew are DNA, were us.  Are us.

I get angry at my lip, the bulge, the embarrassment of it.  My girlfriend goes to kiss me and I pull away.  I’m worried she’ll think it’s cancer.  It’s not.  I went to the doctor twice.  It’s not.  It’s just not healing.  Maybe because I won’t leave it alone.  I keep poking at it.  Things can’t heal until they’re left alone.

           

The landlord put a dumpster in front of my window

There’s a ton of other places he could put it, but he chooses right in front of my window.

I changed my mind.  I don’t want to write about the landlord.  He doesn’t deserve writing, being put into the great infinity that words create, that publication museums.  He deserves to be forgotten.  I won’t describe him.  I’ll leave it up to cliché.  He has a rat face.  He honestly does.  I have to stay away.  I don’t want you to visualize him.

He moved the bus stop so it’s right in front of my window too.  So I have the smell.  And I have the noise.  So my nose and ears will both hate this apartment.

I don’t want to give him any more time, any more paragraphs.  I’d love to put a dumpster in his bedroom.  I’d love to insert a chronic sound of bus engines into his brain.

The thing is the apartment complex is huge.  There’s a building that’s abandoned.  Old apartments where, after the flooding, it never came back.  That building died.  He could put the dumpster there.  Could put the bus stop there.  Instead, he puts it right in the student section.  Maybe because he knows we’re poor.  Can’t afford to move.

A neighbor committed suicide.  I wonder if it’s from the management messing with him.  A kid.  From Pakistan.  Studying automotive engineering.  I’d see him walking at night.  In the parking lot.  Pacing.  He’d walk the same spot where the dumpster is now.  Painted green.  Like it’s supposed to be a part of nature.  This massive dumpster.  I imagine it filled with bodies of suicides from those who have gotten fucked with by the rich.

In the military, when they would haze us,

they’d tie us to fences.

There are so many fences in this world.

So many walls.

I hate walls.

I love nature, because there’s no walls.

The fences in nature seem like such a joke.  I watch squirrels go right through them as if they don’t even exist.

But we’d be tied to them.

We.

Children.

We were teens.  Privates.  Such an odd word choice to call us.

The staff sergeants were in their 30s.  40s.  50s.

For some reason, it feels like it was a hinting at pedophilia to me.  We’d be tied to the fence and the sergeants with the phallic “staff” in their name would duct tape our mouths shut.  Our legs to the fence.  Arms to the fence.  So you couldn’t swat flies.  They’d land on your face.  You’d just have to let them bite you.  I’d stare at the faces of the staff sergeants.  Sergeant comes from Latin for to serve.  They’d pour old food on our heads.  Food that rotted in the sun.  You’d want to vomit, but it would get trapped in your mouth.  It was duct taped shut.  You’d do everything you could not to vomit.

They’d duct tape us everywhere, bodies covered in duct tape, every part of us, mummied.  Every part of us.

And they’d leave us there.  For hours.  The sun in our face.  The jungle there.  The heat like bodies.  The nothingness of waiting.  Pissing ourselves.  Feeling our skin sunburn where we weren’t covered.  Hours of soullessness.  You felt like, in the history of the world, a poem never existed.  The birds would grovel.  This we’ll offend.  Why did they do this?  Because it was done to them?  I never did this to anyone.  I swore I’d kill myself before I ever did this to anyone.  I never did this to anyone.

From all of those times that they did the hazing of us, only one of us died.

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize.  Right now, Riekki’s listening to The Marías’ “Un Millón.”