Ghost Stories: Bachelorette - عازبة by Izdihar Afyouni

Bachelorette - عازبة

When she told you she was born of blood, you thought it was a metaphor, her words conjuring up a fountain of blood. You powered down the laptop and pulled Homogenic out of its sleeve to give it a spin. It had been easier lately to discipline yourself enough to take screen breaks, a welcome reprieve for your bloodshot eyes whose myopia had deteriorated rapidly over the past two years of late-night scrolling through flayed limbs and starved bodies until the early morning light finally lulled you into a fitful sleep. You told yourself that it was ok to look away as long as you were doing everything in your power to help Maha, that it would allow you to be more present instead of a wailing, cracking amphibian, oozing and fusing with the sofa. You let your eyelids fall and waft away on a bed of strings, trying your damndest not to spiral out over our last interaction. She seemed off – by now you were able to decipher the edges of her candour. Sometimes she spoke to us as if we were a lover she had left behind, other times as if we were white reporters to whom she had to appeal her humanity. She had run out of painkillers, and one week of hopeful waiting for a new supply had morphed into a month of excruciation. She said she felt feral like a wounded animal, she said she felt as though she was passing through a sieve in Allah's kitchen. You asked her if the broker had come through, and she said her phone had dissolved. You asked her if she's heard any news of her slain sister's daughter, and she went quiet. You asked her if there was water to drink, and she said I'm surrounded by an undrinkable sea. She said you don't understand irony or how iron keeps the blood pumping, and hung up. Shame passes viscous through my throat. I know you have forgotten the taste. Our phone lights up, and you scramble to reach it from inside the expanding sinkhole in our bedroom. You don't remember when or why you had flung it into its cavernous mouth. The first thing you notice is that her eyes have been replaced by cavities. She assures you that this is normal, to be expected. She says the cell tower moth had migrated north, and she has to pack up her clothes and entrails to make it in time for dusk, and that the cash broker should be waiting for her there. Our piece of shit neighbours decide this is the perfect time to set off fireworks, and we watch her flinch as the pixels glitch and drops of red cloud her phone lens. It sounds strange coming from your end she says. It reverberates inside me differently. I ask her why she's moving now, and she says it's time to settle a score, that she has a mouth to feed, and that the sea will be there to soothe and dissolve her afterwards. She says she has already sufficiently mourned herself, and I feel the clammy warmth of her palm reaching through the screen to slap me on the cheek- don't you dare waste time crying over me when there is still work to do. My mind is firing synapses as the fireworks explode, and I don't register her words before the silence slams into my ears. I lie down by the lip of the crater and convulse. 

Izdihar Afyouni is a Palestinian visual artist, writer, and curator. Her practice encompasses large-format painting, participatory performance, installation, film, and text. Working with blood since 2016, Izdihar’s work is situated at the intersection of necropolitics, occultism, and sexual dissidence. She is the creator of Thicker Than Blood, an ongoing research project and series of participatory concept exhibitions that immerse the audience in an experience of the ethical and psychological implications of racial profiling and is the co-editor of the upcoming publication Needles In The Eye: Refusal and the Necropolitics of Cultural Production.