Tempered Magazine December 2013 // January 2014 // Issue 01 | Page 38
add legs to my list of deadly things.
Everyone knows that your legs can’t
kill you.
Once she told me that the cells of
her legs were like Judas from Jesus
Christ Superstar. Traitorous. Killing
themselves and taking others with
them. But still a little more likeable
than Jesus, who is honestly sort of
self-involved and annoying. Although
I think she just liked Judas because
he was like Jimi Hendrix. And she
could name any Jimi Hendrix guitar
lick in the world. She proved it on a
morning radio show when she won
one hundred dollars for identifying
his version of the “Star Spangled
Banner” correctly after only hearing
the opening two notes. Anahita
had a tendency to like people who
killed themselves: Judas, Jimi,
Janis Joplin, Kurt Kobain, Alexander
McQueen, her cells.
One day when I went to visit, she
complained that the bathrooms didn’t
even have tampons in them because
she was stuck in the stupid children’s
ward. A few months later, when
she told me she didn’t even get her
period anymore, I said “Well that’s
38
good! At least it won’t be your uterus
that finished you!”
When Osama bin Laden was killed,
my friend posted a Facebook status
that said “I pray that all of Bin
Laden’s virgins have rusty razorblades in their vaginas.”
At her funeral, I watched the men
carry her body to the grave, draped
in white. Death white, virginal
white. As I hesitatingly repeated the
unfamiliar Arabic and Farsi words—
Allahu Akbar, khoda chkoob e—I
realized that all I and most Americans
knew about death and Islam was that
men got their forty virgins when they
went to heaven. But where the hell
did those virgins come from?
“Your cousin is Heather McNamara?
I saw a piece at her performance
space last weekend. It was
perfection.” Anahita’s sister said it
at the one-year memorial service.
Yes, my perfect cousin fortunately
survived despite the menace of her
uterus. She decided she didn’t like
Yale, and she did like women—like
in a lesbian way—and relocated
to New York to dev V