I WANT TO FIT INSIDE A TINY FUCKING HOLE
Mehrul Bari
On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.
The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to campus. The man was white and wore a hoodie in summer.
I got dirty, dirty looks from my neighbors. They were old, white, and their wrinkles looked like ballsacks.
I won one of them over by the time I left Paris. I held the door open for her and we exchanged bonjours ever since.
Bad people are easy to impress too. They just want to feel appreciated.
Every day and every night I left on foot to a cinema house. I either walked the way or took a metro.
There was a homeless man I passed every day. I saw him regardless of where I went. If I took the right-hand side of the street, he was there. If I took the left-hand side, he was there.
Across the street, too, I’d see him. I once saw him coming up the stairs from a metro. He carried always a plastic cup filled with some sort of liquid. I know it wasn’t piss because I saw him once cross the road and urinate into a garbage bin at midnight.
I vowed to myself that I’d hand him a handsome 50 Euro note on my last day in Paris. I never did. I used the money to call an Uber to the airport.
I looked out the window and I never saw him again.
Around this time I wrote a short story about a man who beats up homeless people every night. And after the beating he takes them to a hospital and pays for all their expenses.
I don’t want you to think I wrote this because I hated my homeless man. I saw many homeless people in my time there, and I thought of this idea not out of hate.
I will say this, though, one time I tried to initiate eye contact with my homeless man. He pretended not to see me. I gathered he was altogether not a very pleasant man.
Around this same time I thought of writing a story called “I Want to Fall Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.” It was about someone finding a hole in the middle of the ground and trying, through several days and with great effort, to fit themself into the hole. After a great deal of time the person manages it, submerged well inside the ground, but then they realize: that a hole isn’t a hole if something fills it.
I never wrote this story. In that same month there was a Kiarostami retrospective and I watched Taste of Cherry. The film follows a man searching for someone to bury him in the dirt after he kills himself. The movie made me cry, and I never felt so seen as a brown, and Muslim, face in the crowd. There was no point anymore in writing “I Want to Fit Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.”
On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.
The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to class.
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
Mehrul Bari S. Chowdhury is the editor of Small World City. He
is a writer, poet, artist, and web designer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received his MA in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Kent in Paris, and
has previously worked as the sub-editor for The Daily Star’s “Daily Star Books.”
His works have appeared in Permafrost, Sortes Magazine, Kitaab, and Blood Orange Review, among others. // instagram
His works have appeared in Permafrost, Sortes Magazine, Kitaab, and Blood Orange Review, among others. // instagram
On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.
The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to campus. The man was white and wore a hoodie in summer.
I got dirty, dirty looks from my neighbors. They were old, white, and their wrinkles looked like ballsacks.
I won one of them over by the time I left Paris. I held the door open for her and we exchanged bonjours ever since.
Bad people are easy to impress too. They just want to feel appreciated.
Every day and every night I left on foot to a cinema house. I either walked the way or took a metro.
There was a homeless man I passed every day. I saw him regardless of where I went. If I took the right-hand side of the street, he was there. If I took the left-hand side, he was there.
Across the street, too, I’d see him. I once saw him coming up the stairs from a metro. He carried always a plastic cup filled with some sort of liquid. I know it wasn’t piss because I saw him once cross the road and urinate into a garbage bin at midnight.
I vowed to myself that I’d hand him a handsome 50 Euro note on my last day in Paris. I never did. I used the money to call an Uber to the airport.
I looked out the window and I never saw him again.
Around this time I wrote a short story about a man who beats up a homeless person every night. And after the beating he takes them to a hospital and pays for all their expenses.
I don’t want you to think I wrote this because I hated my homeless man. I saw many homeless people in my time there, and I thought of this idea not out of hate.
I will say this, though, one time I tried to initiate eye contact with my homeless man. He pretended not to see me. I gathered he was altogether not a very pleasant man.
Around this same time I thought of writing a story called “I Want to Fall Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.” It was about someone finding a hole in the middle of the ground and trying, through several days and with great effort, to fit themself into the hole. After a great deal of time the person manages it, submerged well inside the ground, but then they realize: that a hole isn’t a hole if something fills it.
I never wrote this story. In that same month there was a Kiarostami retrospective and I watched Taste of Cherry. The film follows a man searching for someone to bury him in the dirt after he kills himself. The movie made me cry, and I never felt so seen as a brown, and Muslim, face in the crowd. There was no point anymore in writing “I Want to Fit Inside a Tiny Fucking Hole.”
On my way to class, a drunken man swung his fist at me. He either missed or was aiming for the air in front of me.
The people around me made nothing of it, and I crossed the road to class.
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
Mehrul Bari S. Chowdhury is the editor of Small World City. He
is a writer, poet, artist, and website designer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received his MA in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Kent in Paris, and
has previously worked as the sub-editor for The Daily Star’s “Daily Star Books.” His works have appeared in Permafrost, Sortes Magazine, Kitaab, and Blood Orange Review, among others. // instagram