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akillysheel · 4 years ago

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TENUOUS. ❜ ( 12 )

Summary: Things aren’t better, but they aren’t worse either. Warnings: Slight suicidal ideation/generally depressive thoughts. A/N: Y’know, this story’s really close to being done. This is a major milestone for me.

“Oh, thank Raku,” Jack said with a grateful exhale as Kuro passed through the door, followed by Cthugha-- the latter of which was deathly quiet. Jack frowned, not prepared for such a cold reception; he knew the rifter preferred to keep people at arm’s length, but not even a hello? “... uh. Is he--”

“I’m gonna go take the kayags back,” Cthugha interrupted, snagging the keys from Kuro’s belt before he could think to argue. By the time he was prepared to say anything, he’d walked away with both canines in tow. A deep sigh left him, a hand cupping his jaw and squeezing either side of it harshly.

“What happened out there?” Jack asked with a frown.

“... we, uh...” Already, Kuro knew that he didn’t want to talk about it. Habitually, his hand began to scratch at the underside of his chin, blunt nails digging into his skin uncomfortably. Why did I even get so defensive? Why did I look at him like that? “It’s nothin’. We just-- clashed.”

“...oh,” Jack said, eyes averting awkwardly. He wasn’t sure what the right thing to say was; whether he should attempt to offer the sheriff some gentle words of compassion, or whether it was better to stay out of his business. He’d never been good on an emotional front. Perhaps that was part of why he and Cthugha had clicked so well in the first place: they were just two emotionally-constipated idiots that were trying their best. “I’m… sorry?”

“Forget it. Just-- wha’d’y’have?”

There was an uncomfortable lull in the conversation before Jack led him to his table, picking up his phone. His fingers moved quickly-- far more quickly than Kuro could comprehend, for he couldn't even use a typewriter that fast-- before he found himself face to face with a curious headline.

“Subway closure due t’... mulch?” Kuro read slowly, one eyebrow arching dubiously. “... did y’seriously call me back here t’tell me the subway’s screwed up again? I swear to the Gods--”

“Not just any mulch,” the officer cut in, scrolling down until he found the bulletin point he was looking for. “Look. “The source was identified as a mixture of excess leaves and soil, and will take several days to clean.””

That gave the sheriff some pause. There was a tense silence, one in which the cogs in his head began to move, before he grabbed Jack’s arm and ushered him into the closest office that was unoccupied. He wasn’t sure where the compulsion had come from. It wasn’t as if their objective was a secret. Still, he felt like such a statement being overheard by the wrong officer could lead to one hell of a clean-up duty.

The office was dark, reminiscent of a cupboard with its blinds drawn and its seat empty, and neither of the men reached for the lightswitch.

“What’re y’sayin’...?” Kuro asked bluntly.

“It’s a one-way tunnel. How’d leaves get down there?”

“The wind?!” he whisper-shouted, almost exasperated. “It’s Fall! They probably just-- blew down there!”

“Kuro.” Jack paused to pinch the bridge of his nose, frustrated. “Huron has leaf-pickers. You know they’re not from your streets--”

“They’re only huros, they could’a missed some easy. ‘n’ what about Vide’s?”

“Vide’s trees don’t shed,” he said patiently. “Our trees blossom in the Fall. Besides, our plant life? A lot of it’s artificial, and the real stuff? Purple. Blue. Look at this.” He raised his phone again, showing him a close-up picture of the rail. It looked largely normal, save for the dirty mustard sheen gleaming in the flash of the camera. “There’s no way that’s from our trees either way.”

Kuro waited, assessing the new information carefully. Surely the grime could have had other causes, like dirt, dust or even roadkill… or perhaps he was torturing himself on purpose. A potential lead was hovering right in front of him, yet he wouldn't let himself grasp it, wouldn't let it take root in his mind, because did he really deserve easy after giving Cthugha such a hard time? “So, yer theory is…?”

“Someone’s going down there, tracking them in,” Jack replied insistently, his usually chilly gaze alight with a vague sense of excitement. “And whatever they’re going down there for, it’s bad. Think about it! Leaves on the platform? Sure. But leaves on the tracks, reportedly only from a certain distance within the tunnel? The damn train almost crashed when it reached Vide Station! That’s suspicious!”

"It could be the people who're going in t'solve things," Kuro pointed out. Playing devil's advocate was something he was good at. He often played it alone.

Jack groaned. "Look, that's not impossible but if you're sent down to clean things up, you're telling me that you yourself wouldn't know how to keep things tidy? I highly doubt professionals hired to do that job would make such a careless mistake. Plus, I know most of those workers are Viders. We have more technical know-how than you guys."

He couldn’t deny that much. Hesitantly, he leaned against the door, his mind leaping into overdrive. Suppose somebody was going down there… what for? And wasn’t that incredibly dangerous? As far as he knew, it was a very primitive, bare-boned structure; a simple concrete tunnel with only enough room for the train to pass through, and a stop on either end. A linear, uncomplicated journey, much like a plane that passed overseas in a straight line. A train passed through every hour, on the hour, meaning each district’s services were two hours apart. Even at top speed, there was no way a person could run through the entire length of the tunnel in the time it took for the train to return. They'd be flattened, become mulch themselves.

What business would somebody have down there anyway?

Maybe they were like you, his mind echoed back, and Kuro shook his head hard to rid himself of the thought. Stop it. They’d have found a body if that was the case. No bodies. Only leaf-mulch.

"... our kayags, they stopped outside'a the No-Man's. That ain't fer nothin'." He couldn't lie about that much. No matter his opinions about heading in there, he couldn't knowingly lie to his squadmates. "But y’convinced me. This needs investigatin'. Even if just t’upturn every damn stone possible. 's weird. Too weird."

"Well, everyone knows you don't wanna go in there." The assessment made Kuro wince, if only because of his fight with Cthugha. "We could do the tunnel first and if it turns up nothing, then we can go in there. We have a week or so. That's enough time to do both, if we crunch it."

That's awfully optimistic of y', Sheriff Braav thought almost sourly. Still, he was right, and he'd said it plainly himself-- he'd make any excuse to not have to go in there.

"... do’y’believe what Cthugha's told y'?" He paused, almost tactfully, his boots shuffling against the floor. "Honestly?"

Jack frowned, turned it over in his mind for the umpteenth time. "Dunno. It all seems a little out-there to me. But I can't explain him either. I've never met anyone like him." He remembered sharing space with him-- how weak he'd felt in comparison, like a tiny star steadily being sucked into a black hole. He seemed to have that effect on most people. "... can't say. But I do know one thing: he talks about this world like it's his baby. He'd give anything to 'save it' - whether it means the same thing to us as it does to him. It's important to him - and I don't think it's important to a lot of people. I think that counts for something."

The sheriff cast his mind back to their sudden friction in the woods, frowning deeply. If he thought hard, he could feel the pound of the pendulum against his temple-- could feel the hateful heat radiating from the icy depths of his partner's eyes. Even now, if he allowed himself to drop his pride, he could admit that the thought of being glared at by that man sent a bolt of electric fear straight through him, touching ground in a borderline unreal sort of way; as if he was barely tethered to the earth.

But would he truly have become so emotional if he didn't care? Perhaps part of it was selfish - most people didn’t want to die - but was that really so evil? Without the smoky void staring at him from a mere few feet away, it was a lot easier to think clearly. He'd let fear propel him into rage, scathing and ugly in the way that fighting for one's life often was.

"I think…" Jack started tentatively, dragging him from his thoughts without much effort. "... you need to apologise to him. I mean, I doubt you'll be able to do this without him, and it's clear you feel guilty."

"I ain't feel guilty," Kuro muttered petulantly, annoyed that that fact had been so easy to discern. Oftentimes, working with officers meant that there were no secrets. "... alright, I do," he admitted, his eyes narrowing slightly. "But not fer not wantin' t'go in the No-Man's. Fer somethin' I said." He caught the watchful eye of his subordinate, felt the probing magnetism dragging the words up and onto his tongue. A dry swallow did nothing to stifle them. "... that I couldn't help him. That's what 'm sorry fer."

Wordlessly, Jack nodded. It was a gradual movement, as if he was only able to parse the gravity of such a statement in bits. I can understand why that would hurt him; he admitted to me that he thought highly of you. "... yeah. You'd better correct that."

"Well fuck. I'll try."

God loves a trier, he thought wryly. That's probably why things never stay good for me: he likes watching me flail against the current.

Not knowing whether Cthugha was going to be there had his innards feeling like a poorly kept tub of jello, the walk to the kayag enclosure more akin to a brazen attempt to mount the merciless tip of Everest while dressed in naught but shorts and flip-flops.

‘So yer… above Raku?’

‘I’d argue yes. That little chump’s only got a district to look after.’

Did that mean that Cthugha would be unaffected by the dangers of the deep dark? He had no means of knowing whether it was true or not, but the legend went that Raku resided within that place too. Surely God didn’t fear his own domain? By that logic, didn’t that mean that somebody of equal-- or near enough-- standing was also safe?

In retrospect, he knew he’d jumped the gun, but it was starting to feel like he’d hurdled over the damn thing.

His hand hovered over the doorknob leading to the enclosure, his free fingers rubbing gently at the underside of his chin. This wound was still fresh, but a couple hours old… did he really want to go digging his fingers in yet?

If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it. Go and apologise.

When he first went in and gave the land a resigned sweep, he didn’t see him anywhere. Discomfort found a home in his throat, sitting patiently beside his half-rehearsed attempt at earning absolution, as he desperately scanned the grassland. He could be anywhere, he found himself thinking, his ability to teleport appearing in his mind just as abruptly as Cthugha did in Huron. He could be fuckin’ anywhere.

Then he caught sight of his boots.

In the farthest corner of the pen, he noticed a few kayags in an uncharacteristic huddle, mousy tails whipping back and forth like tripwires in the wind. The soles of Cthugha’s heavy-duty boots poked out from under them - and that was all that could be seen of him. With an incredulous look, the sheriff moved until he was standing over him, over them, not quite sure what to make of the scene.

Before he could speak, the rifter broke the silence. “You’re blocking my sun.”

The deadpan look that Kuro shot Ace, who was curled around Cthugha’s head like a taco shell, was silent and unappreciative. “Looks like yer friends’re doin’ a pre-tty good job’a that.”

“Your fat head is much more obstructive.”

The sheriff grit his teeth, rolled his eyes so hard that he feared folding in half.“What’re y’doin’?”

“Resting,” said Cthugha, his voice monotone and tired. “I got tired from our scout.”

“More like y’got tired from usin’ yer powers t’manipulate yer surroundin’s when y’were upset.”

“That’s not something I have to intentionally do. It just happens,” he muttered, before waving him off with a dismissive hand. “Go away. Ya don’t have anything for me and I’m tired of being antagonised by ya. I’m gonna go back to that place just as soon as I feel like I can stand up without feeling faint.”

Yup, Kuro thought bitterly, squinting hard at the rifter’s shoes. Definitely still mad.

“... listen. About what happened--”

“Don’t bother,” Cthugha interjected cleanly, finally bringing himself to sit up. The kayags shuffled and whined, lounging around him as if he was their pack leader. “You were right. I’ve been getting too comfortable.” He stood then, shooing excess grass from his pants. “I put too much faith in ya, ‘n’ then I was surprised that ya disappointed me. That was stupid of me. That was my fault.”

“I ain’t a traitor, Cthugha,” Kuro said sharply, hating how much his words were affecting him. If he hadn’t had that void in his head opened up, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so susceptible to mental scarring, but it just so happened that he had. His self-esteem was rickety at best anyway, but it felt raw in the presence of such dismissal. “Y’can’t hate me just because I wasn’t willin’ t’cast myself into a bear-trap. Maybe it’s a little easy fer y’t’forget because yer always servicin’ gods ‘n’ higher powers, but me? I’m just a fuckin’ guy from a humble district in the middle’a nowhere. I ain’t got any powers ‘n’ I ain’t got any sensitive knowledge at my disposal like you do. I also can’t just undo it if I do somethin’ wrong. If I screw up? That shit’s fer life - if it doesn’t kill me.” He paused, trying to toe the line between appeasement and denunciation, a hint of venom rising to his tongue like bile. “Y’d do well t’remember that my life ain’t as infinite as yers.”

“... mm. Lucky you.”

It felt as if he was talking to a wall - a wall with enough sentience to purposefully block his way. I really fucked it up, huh?

“What does that mean?”

“Kuro.” There was a terse pause, one that vibrated with truths unspoken. Instead of voicing any of them, Cthugha raised a hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose, an obvious exhaustion on his face. “It means exactly what you think it means. I know you’re used to digging and digging and digging, but you’re on your own in this hole. The truth’s right there. Bluntly. I said it.”

There was a hollow edge to his voice-- one that hurt the sheriff more than he thought it would. Regardless of the quiet resentment they’d forged for one another in the depths of the woods, he knew Cthugha as tirelessly brave, pragmatic and swift. To hear such blatant defeat in his voice didn’t only feel wrong, it felt cursed.

Come t’think of it, now that I’m away from the No-Man’s, my mind feels much clearer… I ain’t feel angry. I just feel sorry fer him.

“... look,” he said slowly, unsure if there was anything left to be salvaged between them. An admission of humanity was not the same as absolving him of guilt, nor did it rocket him back into the rifter’s good graces to acknowledge it. For all he knew, as far as Cthugha was concerned, their relationship was as good as over - and it had barely even begun. “I, uh-- we might have a lead. I was skeptical but I think it’s compellin’, ‘n’... I think y’should come.”

“I don’t know,” Cthugha muttered, adjusting his vest compulsively. “We’ll cover more ground if I go up through the woods on my own.”

“Jack wants y’there,” he attempted, trying not to sound too desperate. “He was… originally lookin’ fer you. But y’didn’t come back, so he talked t’me instead. I think, fer his sake…” It felt like a betrayal to finish the sentence, and so he refrained. He was already toeing the line between truth and fiction, morphing Jack’s concern for the rifter into an explicit desire for his company. The last thing he needed to do was emotionally incriminate his fellow officer. “... I just think y’should come. It’ll only take a day or two. That’s still plenty’a time fer y’t’take a trek through the No-Man’s later on, if yer really dead-set on goin’.”

The hush that befell them was comparable to shark-infested waters; quiet on the surface, though teeming with unspeakable dangers just below. Neither of them quite understood how to navigate the choppy waves, both stranded in a deep pool of doubt. Kuro watched the wheels in Cthugha’s head turn, the mounting worry growing more and more cumbersome.

Why the fuck did I get so defensive? Why the fuck did I look at him like that?

“... okay,” he said eventually, the syllables dull and uninvolved. “I’ll come. But afterwards--”

“Yeah, I know,” Kuro cut in quickly. He watched Cthugha’s shoulders rise and fall, a great weight rolling off of them. “... I know. I’m sure Jack’ll understand.”

The quiet between them stretched uncomfortably, a bitter sense of resignation filling the cracks as Cthugha took in a deep breath, then released it as if it had been physically taxing to do so. Without a word, he began the walk to the door.

“So, where is it?” Cthugha asked sullenly, once they’d made their way out of the pen and back into the station. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, eyes glued to the ground. “This lead, I mean.”

“Jack reckons there’s somethin’ weird happenin’ in the subway tunnel,” the sheriff replied, spying Jack from the office window. After he caught sight of them both in tow, he raised an eyebrow slightly at Kuro. He opted to ignore it; he likely wouldn’t have liked the response. “He’ll give y’the details. Like I said, I thought it was a longshot but he convinced me otherwise; it could hold some water. We’d be stupid not t’look.” His walk came to a gradual stop, and Cthugha, confused by the sudden lack of forward momentum, paused too. The look he gave him was lingering, a mixture of expectant and pensive. “... ‘m sorry fer what I said t’you. Whether y’accept it or not.”

Without waiting for a response, he continued towards his office at the same brisk pace he’d entered with.

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #fandomless oc story #original story #short story #writing #oc story #tenuous #tenuous ;

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apathetic-goblin · 3 years ago

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To peel or not to peel?

I just turned 40. I am a compulsive skin picker and have mild (indented) scarring and textured skin as a result. Thanks to therapy, my skin picking has improved. I have used tretinoin for a year and have seen some improvement in overall texture but I am still bothered by the appearance of my skin.

I am looking into doing a TCA peel (or a series of them) at a dermatologist’s office but am nervous about possible negative outcomes. Would love to hear about others’ experiences.

I’m also thinking about Botox for 11 lines (frown lines) between eyebrows and fillers for nasolabial lines (the lines that go from sides of nose to sides of mouth). I am thin and, in recent years, my face has started to look gaunt.

Would love to hear about people’s experience with these procedures. Thanks!

submitted by /u/autumnpoet [link] [comments] from Skin care for people over 30 https://ift.tt/c9eGJPQ

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weeklyhumorist · 5 years ago

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Other Ways to Describe the Election Right Now Besides “A Real Nail-Biter”

A genuine teeth grinder

A definite stomach churner

A palpable zit erupter

A compulsive AP News refresher

An absolute “pace around your apartment in circles”

A rightful “bang your broom on the ceiling because your neighbor won’t stop pacing around their apartment in circles”

A sure nail polish peeler

A veritable nose picker

An actual need for more cheese

A serious gastrointestinal crisis

A frantic Pepto guzzler

A bona fide catalyst for cleaning out your closet just to feel like you have control over something

A true tear ducts burster

A certain blood pressure raiser (but possibly without any health insurance to manage it, results pending)

An undeniable “will-they-or-won’t-they” have a country tomorrow

A positive reminder to “breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth — no, slower than that, calm down, you’re going to hyperventilate”

An honest-to-goodness reason for cable news anchors to tap smartboards and say “What are we looking at?” when what we’re looking at is actually nothing

An authentic democracy strainer

A good ol’ fashioned hope chomper

A suspenseful cliffhanger but that classic thing where the valley below the cliff is autocracy

A real sensitive spot where my nails used to be

Other Ways to Describe the Election Right Now Besides “A Real Nail-Biter” was originally published on Weekly Humorist

#biden #election #nail biter #politics #results #stress #tense #Trump #USA

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neilthechiseler · 8 years ago

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Super Bowl 2017! ORRRRRRRR...

Okay, folks, I’m gonna level with you.

For the past decade, this has been the part of the day where I say "Super Bowl Sunday! ORRRRR..." and talk about the ways that the other channels are marking time while the world is watching football.

But this year is a little different, because I've been paying waaaaaay too close attention to current events and I'm working through some issues. Things have taken a turn. Everything tastes like the news.

Let's start with the on-the-nose ones:

Bravo is doing Real Housewives of Atlanta, and VH-1 is doing Rock of Love. Just like the Apprentice, these are reality shows I've never had the guts to watch.

TCM is running Casablanca. A movie about escaping the Nazis.

HGTV has Flip or Flop, while DIY has Texas Flip N Move. Reality shows about real estate. You don’t have to be Fellini to figure that one out.

INSP is doing Bonanza, about a rich guy and his family who own everything.

MTV has Friends, because a lot of us wish we were in the 1990s again.

Then we get past those and I start making...connections.

AMC: The Walking Dead (An epic of death and decay.)

A&E: Hoarders (A fundamentally harmful compulsion, usually set into motion by some type of tragedy or other messed-up set of circumstances.)

History: American Pickers (Raking through the detrius of the country's past in hopes of finding something worth holding onto. There usually IS something, but sometimes it takes a lot of repair.)

COMET: The MST3K version of Manos (You know, the one where an innocent family get sucked into a dark void by making one wrong turn.)

TLC: Say Yes To The Dress (Something something smash the patriarchy!)

WE: Snapped (Women driven to do awful things by unbearable circumstances.)

Discovery Life: Untold Stories of the ER (Pain. Pain and pain and pain, served up daily.)

Smithsonian: Air Disasters (The one disaster we haven't seen yet, BUT GIVE IT TIME.)

Nickelodeon: Scooby Doo: the movie. (Cynical cash-in on other people’s nostalgia.)

BET and TNT: MADEA MOVIES. (This doesn’t really match this year’s theme but who the hell runs A Madea Christmas in February?)

And on Animal Planet, the Puppy Bowl. The sweet, impossibly beautiful purity of the Puppy Bowl, which started a few minutes after I clicked the Post button.

There really is only one alternate choice this year. But honestly? That sounds uncomfortably familiar now that I wrote it out.

#Super Bowl #and the alternatives #superbowl

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alienheartattack · 4 years ago

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Hi. Here are my 'obscure questions' for you: 15, 20, 35, and 36.

I am very stoked that people are still sending me asks for this. Thanks, anon!

15. do you prefer space or the ocean?

I like studying space more than I like studying the ocean, but I like looking at both of them equally and would much rather travel to the ocean than space. (As much as I love space, I do not want to go there. So many ways to die horribly. Also, I think I'd get horrible motion sickness like Lana in the space episodes of Archer.)

20. do you believe in god(s)?

Nope. The idea never really clicked with me even though I was raised with religion. I'm Jewish, so we don't have the same conception of god actively working in people's lives the way Christians do. (Which has always bothered me, it feels like they believe the good things you do are from god and the bad things you do are your fault. Idk if that's true, that's just the impression I've gotten.)

There's a joke that Judaism requires you to believe in one god or fewer; most of our commandments (613 total) involve doing good deeds rather than believing in god, and blind faith is discouraged. (We love asking questions and arguing instead.) Judaism isn't about theism vs. atheism because it's a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity, so you can still identify as a Jew and practice Judaism without belief in god. Generally we're about works over faith so you're judged based on your actions, not your beliefs. (I consider someone like Bernie Sanders very Jewish because even though he's not religious, his ideas of justice and service to society are deeply rooted in Jewish philosophy.) I'm not a huge fan of organized religion in general but I do think Judaism is a pretty decent one if you have to choose.

35. when you get angry, how do you show it?

I answered this before in a previous ask, but the tl;dr of it is that I try not to express my anger outwardly if it's a me problem (which it usually is; I can get pretty irritable), but if I'm angry at someone I'll try to confront them calmly about it. I have been through an absolute fuckload of therapy to be able to do this.

36. do you have any impulsive movements? (twitches, ticks, flapping, etc.)

I'm a compulsive skin picker (especially if I have chapped lips), but thankfully I haven't done too much damage to my body from that. I'll also play with my eyebrow hair or pinch my upper lip so my philtrum folds like a taco. (It's weirdly comforting.) I also like touching soft things, so sometimes I'll rub my palms over my thighs when I'm wearing soft pants or pull my t-shirt up so the collar rests between my nose and mouth. If I'm sitting in a desk chair I will swivel back and forth for a long time without realizing it.

I'm a fidgety person in general and it's only in the past few years that I've come to realize that my fidgeting has a lot in common with stimming, and that my parents done fucked up refusing to have me screened for autism back when I was 2. (tl;dr version: I wasn't playing with the other kids in my nursery school and was instead reading or playing alone, but my parents — who both worked with people with intellectual disabilities! — dismissed my teacher's concerns because I didn't flap my hands or rock or do the other kinds of stims that autistic boys typically do.) Meanwhile I tick off a lot of the boxes for ADHD/autism symptoms in girls, but it's very hard to get screened for autism as an adult in the US without spending hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Anyway, I'm not really sure what a diagnosis would actually do to improve my life in any material way aside from me being able to say "I'm autistic" rather than "I'm pretty sure I'm on the spectrum."

Ironically, a while ago I tried flapping my hands to see what that would do and it made me feel very calm. I don't think that's supposed to happen if you're neurotypical.

If you’d like to ask me more questions, here’s the post!

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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AHMED SAADAWI’S extraordinary novel Frankenstein in Baghdad won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It now appears in an earthy and vibrant English edition translated by the experienced Middle East journalist Jonathan Wright. This translation, conveniently released on the bicentenary year of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein in Baghdad, has already garnered praise around the world, been translated into several languages, and reportedly come into the sights of several Hollywood production companies. This interest is deserved: it is one of the best novels to emerge from the catastrophe of the Iraq War.

The premise is brilliantly simple: this time, Frankenstein’s creature is created not from bodies robbed from graves, but from the body parts strewn across Baghdad by the relentless car bombing and improvised explosive devices at the height of the civil war (Saadawi dates the book on the last page as written between 2008 and 2012). The monstrous corpse, stitched together by a cynical and drunken rag-picker, is completed in the opening pages with a severed nose picked up in the street in the wake of yet another street bomb attack. The body is accidentally animated by a lost soul looking for a home when it is blasted out of the physical realm by a gigantic truck bomb.

Saadawi has explained in interviews that the origin of this story came when he was visiting a friend in a Baghdad hospital and witnessed a distraught man told to piece together the body parts of a relative to make up a corpse suitable for a proper burial.

The mission of “Whatitsname,” as the creature comes to be known, will be to avenge the lives of those from which it has been built. This, it turns out, is an unending and fatally complicit task. The bodies pile up, and it becomes impossible to separate the innocent from the guilty, victims from perpetrators. The creature ends up a grotesque mess of moral complicities beyond any possible social realm, an indestructible emblem of unending violence.

Like in Mary Shelley’s novel, the creature is given an agonized selfhood and a chance to confess the origins of its violent impulses to revenge itself on society — this time by recounting its story into a digital dictaphone transcribed by a journalist and then passed on to a shadowy figure called “the writer.” There are striking continuities with the original Shelley novel in this painful moral confession. Shelley’s monster learns to read by perusing, among other things, Count Volney’s The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire, a book that emerged from the fervor of the French Revolution and emulated (as the monster explains) “the declamatory style” of the Eastern authors. Volney’s book begins, too, with a contemplation of the classical ruins of Palmyra, now in Syria and famously targeted for destruction when the area fell to the Islamic State in the course of the nation’s civil war. Volney, like Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, offers a moral lecture over the ruins that line the Mediterranean on the delusions of imperial power. It is ruination that inspires the creature’s rebellion against his master. These little touches bind Frankenstein and Frankenstein in Baghdad together as anti-imperial statements.

As in the original, the novel provides the monster’s voice only once halfway through its narrative, and brackets his voice with a panoply of other characters. Indeed, the novel becomes a portrait of a particular quarter of Baghdad: Bataween. This region bears the historical traces of its long history as a home to Jews and Christians before factional war forced them out, eventually becoming the ramshackle zone of the marginal and the overlooked. Saadawi stayed in Baghdad throughout the period following 2003 and grew up in Sadr City, the location of some of the worst factional violence after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Here he offers a lament for the lost spirit of the dirty, low-down, hybrid, and cosmopolitan city of Baghdad, carved up by successive waves of dictatorship, occupation, and tribal or religious intolerance.

This is why rag-picker Hadi, who lives in a set of dilapidated old buildings known as the Jewish Ruin, serves as a central figure. He hoards the traces of a bewilderingly diverse city. At one point, he peels off a quote from the Qur’an framed on the wall of his house, below which sits a statue of the Virgin Mary, taken from an abandoned Catholic church. When this statue is declared haram (forbidden) and smashed by Hadi’s Iraqi police interrogators, the ruin of Mary reveals an image of a Jewish menorah and a Hebrew legend hidden behind it. Meanwhile, his neighbor, the Assyrian Christian Elishva, refuses to abandon her collapsing house to live in exile with her daughters in Melbourne because she remains stuck in the melancholic hope that her son may return, even after 20 years, from the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War. Whatitsname becomes fused with this lost son, a further accretion in the generations of horrific losses in Iraq (Saadawi lost six uncles in that disastrous war). In the final chapters, a truck bomb destroys these ancient houses and the crater uncovers a wall from Abbasid, the original name of the eighth-century Islamic city. To avoid hassle, however, the authorities hastily cover up this amazing find.

In this evocation of a complex and layered district, Saadawi laments the loss of hybrid, intertwined histories in a city torn apart by factional ideologies of ethnic, religious, or political purification. Instead, he celebrates Bataween’s street traders, drunks, street sellers, journalists, writers, and prostitutes.

No wonder this area becomes the home of the hybrid creature. One of Whatitsname’s followers tells him he is “the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce […] Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds — ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes — I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past.” The narrative frames this assertion as the theory of a complete madman, but it is also Saadawi’s clear rejection of the ethnic cleansing that was allowed to develop in the vacuum of power after the American invasion. In the embrace of the monster as what Stephen Asma calls a “mosaic being” — an impossible composite — Saadawi uses the Frankenstein myth exactly as Shelley Jackson did in her work Patchwork Girl (1995), which evokes Shelley’s original not to promote a holy terror at alterity (as the Universal Frankenstein horror films have tended to do) but to advocate for the impure, the messy, and the compromised.

The slangy and transgressive language of the novel also reveals this attitude. I know (having exchanged emails with the translator) that this has been a very tricky work to translate since it is not composed in formal, literary Arabic but in the local street slang and languages of Baghdad. Even though I have absolutely no ability to read the original, Jonathan Wright manages to impart to the English version a sense of this demotic, cynical, energetic linguistic world that conveys a modern, urban Baghdad. It is no surprise to see this book in translation shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2018.

There are now shelf-loads of American Iraq War vet-fic, which by its nature sees the war in the rear-view mirror, post-occupation, with narratives that are often shattered through the prism of post-traumatic devices. There have been some very good novels, of course, but also a nagging sense that there is something amiss in such established conventions of Iraq War literary prose, fine-tuned in MFA writing programs. Emotional disconnection that fragments narrative concordance, the temporal disordering of story by agitated plot, post-traumatic compulsive behaviors that mask the delayed traumatic revelation — these are familiar, even over-familiar, devices in books by Kevin Powers (The Yellow Birds), Phil Klay (Redeployment), Michael Pitre (Fives and Twenty Fives), and even the poetry of Brian Turner (Here, Bullet). All of these, by the very nature of their composition, focus on aftermaths, the alienated return of military veterans to American society. These narrative devices have been picked up in fictions subsequently inspired by the war, too, from Richard House’s The Kills to Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, to Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life. Not to disrespect these efforts, but there remains, nevertheless, something disquieting about the generic familiarity of this kind of war fiction. Some of these tropes have been roundly criticized by another veteran, writer, and activist, Roy Scranton, whose first novel War Porn appeared in 2016. In film, the conventions have become even more rigid.

Readers with no Arabic have been able to access the other side of this story for many years, in extraordinary fiction focused on the Iraqi experience by Hassan Blasim (also translated by Jonathan Wright) or Sinan Antoon. Iraqi women writers on the war who have been translated include the early blogger “Riverbend” (whose posts were collected in 2005 as Baghdad Burning), and Haifa Zangana in City of Widows. Both Blasim and Antoon have been in long-term exile from Iraq (Blasim in Finland, Antoon in the United States), yet this does not blunt the extraordinary force of their books. Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, translated by the author himself in 2013, is a very good companion piece to Frankenstein in Baghdad, given that it focuses on the ritual role of the mghassilchi, who washes and shrouds the bodies of the dead before burial according to Islamic tradition. Antoon’s unblinking focus on the dead body, the heightened poetic language used to describe the ritual washing, produces a way of restoring respect to the dead, even to those corpses that have been increasingly morcellated by bombs (in one scene, the corpse washer is given only a severed head to prepare). The stylistic contrast of the stately rhythms of Antoon’s prose with the street slang and messy dispersed narrative tactics of Saadawi’s book provides an instructive juxtaposition.

There is an inevitable risk in claiming that Saadawi is somehow more “authentic” — after all, his novel has been composed entirely from within the cauldron of post-invasion Baghdad. As Saadawi declared in a New York Times profile in 2014: “The most important thing that has happened to me is that I am still alive.” He has missed being hit by car bombs by minutes, seconds, by pure luck; but there is also the grim record of the targeting of intellectuals during the civil war. One wonders how the more conservative aspects of religious and civil society in Iraq have received Saadawi’s graphic representations of dissolute drinking and prostitution in the novel.

Yet Saadawi’s use of the conventions of science fiction, the Gothic, and detective fiction in Frankenstein in Baghdad also prevents any simplistic notions of authenticity. By fusing Western genre conventions with the “authentic” evocation of a Baghdad quarter, this narrative constitutes a hybrid fiction. Aside from the framework of Frankenstein, Saadawi’s Baghdad is a place of casual supernaturalism. For example, key character Majid serves as a brigadier in the Iraqi police who runs the Tracking and Pursuit Department: “Its mission was to monitor unusual crimes, urban legends, and superstitious rumors that arose around specific incidents, and then to find out what really happened and, more important, to make predictions about crimes that would take place in the future: car bombings and assassinations.” The team is made up of astrologers who use divination and remote sensing to deliver precise warnings about future attacks — messages that the authorities largely ignore. There is some bitter satire in these passages: a TV shows a government spokesman delighted to announce that only 15 bombs have gone off in a day, because al-Qaeda had planned to detonate over a hundred. They are winning the war!

The subgenre of psychic detective fiction — here refreshed with the lore of Arabic astrology and djinns — is one firmly rooted in urban fantasy, arguably since Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. This subgenre blossoms at moments when the city becomes unreadable, requiring seemingly supernatural apprehension to grasp its mysterious extent or the opaque rhythms of its invisible underworlds. The ability of Whatitsname to navigate the ruined terrain of Baghdad keeps him ahead of the dullards in the police and cuts through murderous territorial divisions: a lethally factionalized city requires a supernatural creature to map it.

Saadawi’s hybrid fusion of genres can be located in an exciting current of writing from the Arab world that uses science fiction and the Gothic in increasingly inventive ways. Hassan Blasim edited the science fiction collection Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion for Comma Press in 2016. There have been English translations of Telepathy by Sudanese author Amir Tag Elsir and the blistering denunciation of the totalitarian Egyptian state in Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik (a physician and prolific author who sadly died in April 2018). A cluster of writers and artists surround Sophia al-Maria, who coined the term “Gulf Futurism” for the weird modernity of the future cities emerging in the Arab world in the last days of the oil economy. Al-Maria’s memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012), insistently uses science fiction to link her childhood between the United States and the deserts of Arabia. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018 went to the Jordanian-Palestinian author Ibrahim Nasrallah for his fifth novel set in an unnamed Arabic city in the future, Dog War II.

Meanwhile, in cinema, the short science fiction films of Larissa Sansour imagine weird futures for Palestine and London-born video artist Shezad Dawood has also insistently mined science fictional tropes in his installation works (Towards the Possible Film used a first contact alien narrative on the dramatic coast of Morocco, for instance). There have also been prominent releases for the American-Iranian vampire film directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), and the rather more impressive Under the Shadow (2016), about a malignant djinn unleashed by bombing in Iran in the early 1980s, co-produced between Britain, Qatar, and Jordan by the Iranian-born director Babak Anvari.

The most marked development of genre fiction in the 21st century has been this global extension and rapid hybridization with local traditions — there are fascinating cross-fertilizations going on across the globe in China, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Saadawi’s monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is a hybrid creature for our times. It is a desperate marker of the brutal violence that has taken countless lives in the wars unleashed in the region, a horrorism so extreme that it requires the register of the Gothic to address it. But Frankenstein in Baghdad is also a sign that the imagination can still survive in these conditions, literary works flowering in the cracks of the rubble.

To follow developments in Arab writing, I would recommend following the blog Arabic Literature (in English) at https://arablit.org and particularly for science fiction in the region, Sindbad Sci Fi at http://sindbadscifi.com.

Roger Luckhurst is professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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