An excerpt from Noah Cicero’s novel The Insurgent
I’m sitting with Chang in his bathroom. Chang is in the bathtub washing himself. He is scrubbing like he is trying to remove his skin.
We are not gay.
Chang washes himself constantly.
If you go to Chang’s house you will most likely have to talk to him while he is the bathtub. Out of politeness he takes a bubble bath so you don’t have to stare directly at his naked Chang penis. Even his parents have to endure this.
Chang looks at me says, “You know why I’m washing myself, right?”
Chang does this routine about once a week.
”Yes, I know.”
”You know, when I was little. When I was coming over on the boat from China; they stuck my family and me down in a dark black hole to live in. We weren’t allowed out and there was no bathroom. So everyone shit in the corner of the room. It was horrible. The stink of shit was horrible. All you could smell was shit for weeks.”
”That sounds horrible Chang.”
”Yes, it was terrible. But it became worse. My fucking brother Dong, that stupid asshole decides to, out of a joke, to throw me in the fucking shit!” Chang pauses for a second. A look of total anger comes over his face then he goes, “My fucking brother Dong throws me in the shit, then stood there laughing. Of course I was crying and screaming because I was five, and all he did was stand there laughing. Then my mother ran over in the darkness and beat the shit out of Dong; which kind of made me feel better about being covered in shit, but didn’t, and never has.
“My mother picked me up out of the shit and carried me back over to our little corner of the hole we were traveling in. We could not spare any water so my mother took off my clothes and threw them in the shit, then began spitting on me so she could wipe the shit off. I was not only covered in shit, but then covered in spit. It was horrible, fucking horrible,” Chang paused dramatically again and finished with, “I still smell the shit, I still do, that’s why I take these baths, you know, because I still smell the shit.”
”Chang, when my dad threw me over the Berlin Wall I got shot by a fucking Cossack. Getting shot is worse than getting shit on you.”
”I would take the bullet any day, what do you know of being covered in shit?”
”I know my fucking leg hurt like a bitch,” I said.
”It probably did hurt.”
”No shit, it fucking did.”
We sit there for a long time in silence.
We don’t do anything.
Times passes.
We don’t know what to say to each other. But we don’t expect anything to be said.
We know our lives our boring.
About the author:
Noah Cicero blogs at http://noah-cicero.blogspot.com/
