“Marty of Karbala,” by Daniel Aristi

He wasn’t all that the judge said he was. He was some, and not all the time, at that. He was still Marty, doing Marty things. Marty The Dervish, Marty The Top, Marty The Wolverine, and Sir Marty of the Burning Wells. He liked his cigarette in between courses at dinner claiming that Camels enhanced the taste of the food: ‘y’all add salt, I have a smoke: big, fuckin’ deal. Hypertension will kill y’all faster than fuckin’ cancer.’ General laughter. ‘Like air freshener on shit, man,’ he would then add with a flourish, his latest trademark Martyism, the air freshener dictum. ‘His chest has no lungs,’ his folks back home used to fable, ‘all the space has been taken up by the heart.’ Allegedly, even his ribs were long-gone, too, pulverized by the cardiac hammering, such was the extent of Marty’s bonhomie. But one day in June he sat little Jessie on the lawnmower and off they ran in the garden and screamed away like bald eagles, blitzing the grass full throttle, searching for insurgents behind the tool shack. ‘Oh, I see,’ people tell me then, ‘I see.’

Image Credit: © Kreatiw / Dollar Photo Club