fiction

by Zoha Arif

Academy for Information Technology

Fat Chicken Eggs and Boomers

1. Mami used to make a lot of egg stuff for breakfast—scrambled egg pizza, egg casserole, pickled egg, deviled, scalloped, pastrami, biscuit eggs. The woman was a Yusufzai pashtun and knew how to whip eggs and aloo parathas blind, deaf, and anosmic in a bath of electric orange crabs and vegetarian blue-ringed octopus in Borneo. My bro savoured the onslaught of egg stuff; he finished boiled eggs in two quick bites and unfolded the egg tacos so that it had a greater surface area and, consequently, took longer to fork away at. But it’s always been blatantly clear to me that when you eat egg, you’re eating the carcass of an unborn fetus chicken. It’s unfertilized, sure, but it’s still the unborn baby of a chicken. No matter the high promises of the flavor gods stirring the parsley, the garlic, the saffron and khoa into a pool of divine taste, if a dish had the word “egg” attached to its name and, by God, if the scraps of egg in the dish were visible, I kindly opted for some Cup Noodles or honey-nut Cheerios. I used to tousle my bro about his tongue fetish for unborn fetus chicken, and he said, everytime, that he eats it cuz it just tastes good. And I get that somewhat because I used to have a thing for peanut butter—the creamy molasses type, not the chunky organic healthy stuff that has a layer of oil pooled on top and tastes like salted wood shavings. My bro hates peanut butter and would say, the way you hate eggs, the way I hate peanut butter. But there was a difference between our hatred. Peanut butter is just ground roasted peanuts, oil, salt, honey, rapeseed, soybean, butter, milk, and cream fat. Egg is the carcass of an unborn fetus chicken.

2. Sometimes I watch people eat. Mami likes to sit on the staircase besides the kitchen and scoop the scraps of the leftover dinner salan with her naked fingers. Kidney beans, trapezoids of aloo, raw onions, and urad dhaal smush themselves under her nails and paste themselves to the sides of her fingertips. Mami’s shot by Maghrib so her skin sweats teardrops of gloss over her undereye mud beds, and she’s not twenty-eight anymore, and she’s not in Kansas anymore, so her skin has become infatuated with her meat—it sags everywhere, revealing webs of veins on the dorsal side of her hand and accentuating the jut of her elbow and wrist bone. She sits on two stairs so that her knees pump up to her elbows, and she angles the pot on her thighs towards her mouth. Her scarf, wrinkled with individual yarns looping out in the places her nails caught a loose seam, is pinned into a claw clip in her hair and drips down loosely around her neck, swooning from the left shoulder to the right. And like this, Mami scrapes the pot with her bare fingers and shovels puddles of salan onto her tongue. Even after all of that evolution, development from monkeys per Charles Darwin’s insistence, and after being the worshipped inhabitants of heaven as per the messengers of God’s insistences, the human being still defecates and needs to plumps himself with food, licking his fingers clean from the leftover fat and salt. People eating, no matter how rich and how fat, and Mami, especially, have that look from charity commercials about the paupers and forgotten beet farmers in rural India, Syria, or Africa—they possess the camera with their big, watery eyes, shaming you for sitting in your fat house and watching this commercial on your widescreen 4K sixty-five inch smart LED television with HDR. Under all that french Caron Poivre perfume, the rich sovereign emperor plops down with his fat rolls and eats like his billy goat outside. When I watch people eat, I can’t ever think about the palaces waiting for me in Hell’s Kitchen this fall or my varsity track team captain crush from chem, and I have the temptation to slap myself for ever pushing away my egg pizza, and my bro for stepping on his peanut butter bagel.

3. You know, in that Turkish show ~Resurrection~, the kids there respect their parents. Like ertugrul bey, the goody-goody macho hero of the whole production, will just pull up after exiling himself for ninety-nine days and immediatley know about the screwed traitor in the nomad group, the Seljuk stateswoman trying to bed his brother, and the guy who flaked from alp practice because of a “hamstring strain.” When savior batman ertugrul shows up to his parents’ tent and tells them that it’s the family’s sus uncle that’s been jeopardizing their nomad group’s safety, everytime, poor mommy and daddy are like what, son, you don’t know what you’re saying, how could uncle joe do all these abominable acts(?). The thing is tho that ertugrul, my boy, knows that he’s right and yet he still won’t choke his parents or his blind, sweaty brothers. He’ll just walk away with a paw on his heart and be like, mommy, daddy, bey, son of my birth creature, just watch me prove you wrong, let me bring you da evidence, and then he’ll roll off to skin the Mongol Noyan or the tyrannic Templars himself. I made a joke the first few episodes that this show is basically 17920 hours of grown men and women calling each other bae, but, you know what, nobody ever claimed that this was the Persian Game of Thrones. And, you know what, yeah, the show isn’t the idealistic pro-muslim show a tyrannical never-questioned-his-faith musliman will want to show because, hell, we have muslims here worshipping idols and being their own gods. But the point is that no one ever claimed this show was anything and ertugrul bey was born a bey and, thus, had to respect his parents or else be exiled.

4. So, one day, Mami was pulling weeds and rooting white-head mushrooms from the front lawn and this British twenty-something pulls up in front of our house and says that he’s a contractor, third-generation family business. He tells Mami that our driveway tiling and paint job is pretty rough, has poor stability and is cracking prematurely, and that he can patch it up for a good price. It’s the peak of the coronavirus, so, when he pulls up, Mami screams Stay back! Stay back! Stay back *fiend*! The guy naturally stops in his path and introduces himself from ten feet away, says, hi, my name is bart bill, the second oldest son of the great Kingston contractor oliver bill. He tries to convince Mami to hire him to pave the driveway, and, after taking out some bricks and showing Mami a generous ~laminated~ portfolio of his work, Mami says okay, okay, you’re capable obviously, but I need to ask my husband. Heh, this is just a one day offer, the guy says. I can only do this for under nine-hundred if you say yes right now. But, sir, I can’t say yes right now without my husband’s knowledge! So the guy scratches his ducktail and says, alright, I’ll give you till six tonight to give me a dingle and say yes. And so he deposits his professional business card in the mailbox and leaves in his white Bill Paving & Masonry pick-up truck. Mami tells Baba about the British twenty-something, the second oldest son of a legendary London contractor, with a cheap deal and some good experience under his ranch belt, and Baba says okay, fine. So Mami calls bart bill up and tells him you’re hired. But then Mami has an everyday epiphany at midnight—realizes that we need extra cash for my bro’s AP Scholar dinner at the Chinese Pagoda buffet and, considering that it’s midnight, she waits till nine in the morning to cancel. But, even after canceling, bart bill, the british dude, yeets up into our driveway at ten anyway and punches Mami in her sinuses. My bro was drowsed in sleep and I was boiling some cream cheese for a garlic alfredo sauce while bill bart cursed Mami by the seven celestial heavens and finally left. Because, the thing is, not even God has all lovers in this world.

5. I wanted to start oiling my scalp with raw egg and a generous sprinkling of pepper and salt cuz I heard that it was good for gardening lucious, thick hair. I was inspired by Ed from 90 Day Finance, dude put a bucket-load of mayo in his hair to grow it back, and reported at least “feeling better,” so I told myself, here goes nothing, let’s give this thing a try. But having dead fetus chicken spread all of your head like mustard seeds or canola oil is like covering yourself in someone else’s feces and saying, hey, this is fine, it’s all for beauty anyway. Becoming a beauty is pain, but it can’t possibly mean sitting there with an aborted fetus chicken spreading its goop and somber worldly remains in your hair follicles in the high name of beauty. So I sat there with the egg guck in my hair for a solid two minutes before plunging my head into the bathroom sink and scraping every last cell off with nails.

6. To the people who build families and break them apart: because Baba and Mami didn’t really love each other from their Official Desi arranged marriage at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. It was a pampered, (half-)baked love after years of honey-mooning and Mami kept quiet about his six-day, fifty week night-shift as a NJ Transit signalman and UberBlack driver and the becoming a sleep-deprived generic zombie even after graduate school back in Lahore’s Minhaj University because Baba’s not there to support her with two newborns, he kept saying, here, here, the money, money, money, money, until one day Mami said enough, what’s with you and the green stuff? and that’s when she dreamed of our dining table lying in our driveway (the same driveway that bart bill tried to fix, by the way, because we never moved from Elizabeth despite the bad public schools and bad neighborhood), shattered into individual body parts, like a discarded lego set. ertugrul macho hero said to his Mami: I am your martyr. And, like abraham and the prophets after him said, those who leave their homes in the cause of God, and are then slain or die—on them will God bestow verily a goodly Provision, so ertugrul was really tinkering with his path to God’s promised heaven.

7. Because it’s also like what my friend at my fifth grade bus stop who went on to a Massachusetts boarding school where she was choked by the son of the best violinist in Singapore on Christmas Eve ‘19 for refusing to submit to his intimacy said: I am atheist because I am tired of my mom, that crazy Mormon...I am always dominant—a conquerer on top always. And I like experimentation. And, me, I said that I am a switch, and I still am. Because bart bill was slightly in the right. Call it blasphemy, but the poor brit lost a paycheck that morning because he could’ve been stabilizing and paving someone else’s driveway in that time slot if Mami had canceled earlier. But punching Mami, childish cuz what grown, professional gentleman has such a fragile temper. And when it comes to the egg business, is it really that scandalous to enjoy eating the thing if the egg was never fertilized by a rooster—was the chick really aborted, really unborn if it never had a baba in the first place(?) And it’s true that all of us humans, when we eat and defecate and get diarrhea and the coronavirus, are primitive despite the fluoride crowns in our teeth cavities. Sometimes I watch people eat. Mami has been a vegetarian since Baba told her two months ago that her last night in this house is creeping along like a black cat and, then, what’s she gonna do? Foreign country, hijabi immigrant, master’s degree from a supposed terrorist country and college that no one in these lands will ever recognize, english torn apart by long a’s and homophones, 50-year-old menopause woman. Sometimes I watch people eat—their hands shoveling the delectable food into their mouth. My brother, in his new metal braces and sore gums, trying to choke down creamy molasses peanut butter because of a friend’s mean dare, and me, trying to eat peppered and salted boiled egg again because I’m balding from stress. AP’s are next week and sal khan can’t teach me how to stop shaking long enough, how to pick up a pencil with the fingers currently occupied with feeling the balding patch of hair just above the right-side of my forehead, to actually learn about limits.

8. Yet Mami tries to run away barefoot one night. She sat with me at my study desk in the basement before she made the attempt, said, son of my husband, this is my struggle, you just study for your worldly Cornell and Brown and become a doctor and help people...I’ll float the boat for now. Your Baba is a big child, no logic, just impulse and an infinite view of the world as if everything’s possible with a little bit of money. Be with my truth.

9. To Mami: I never claimed to be your martyr and you never explicitly asked me to become one, and, yet I get the feeling that you expect me to submit to martyrdom if the time and place and circumstance ever presents itself. And I am scared because I do and do not want to contribute to the demolition of this.

10. To the people who build families and break them apart: because it’s apparently okay to hate temper-tantrum big babies like bart bill but blasphemy to really hate your Baba, sire. Because this life of mine is built on his night-shift yellow taxi cab and NJ Transit train money and his dreams of Gatsby’s American Dream, old sport, and his dramatic flight to America after rejection from every A-level Karachi engineering college left him sour, and his liberation from the corrupt mafias and whitening powders of the third world south asia. bart bill left with his truck and his portfolio and his legacy and Mami’s bloody sinuses and never came back for the driveway and my Baba is pooling on the living room couch right now, discovering the sub-tik-tok-genre of Bollywood music dubs. Because blood cannot be colored with lies, its knots are forever, and your life is you being an unthankful submitter to your God whose debt you can never repay for 90 years straight.

11. What I mean to say is that the eggs had a chance to blossom into little roosters and hens, and peanut butter is in its final, holy form of creamy molasses peanut butter, the non-organic kind.

12. To the people who build families and break them apart: because you cannot be the gods of creation, and yet you become one anyway with your partner.