This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.

They cut open my father’s chest and splayed his ribs out beneath their halogen lamps and, inside his heart, they inserted a ticking device whose purpose we couldn’t exactly discern, and then they sewed him back up like a pouch of coins and sent him out into the cold world with a bomb tick-ticking away in his chest, his scar like a border dividing a formerly peaceful tribe into warring political factions or rival criminal gangs who will cut open a man’s chest and rip out his heart and eat a chunk, to demonstrate, I think, the depth of their barbarity, but what my father notices, when he sits in our living room to watch grainy cellphone footage of this performance, is that the cannibal grimaces while eating the human heart, as if not totally committed to the act, even though, my father argues, if he, watching the footage, has noticed the grimace, then surely rival gang members will have noticed the weakness, too, and that will condemn not only the cannibal but his associates—former commandos trained by the Navy SEALs or the Foreign Legionnaires or Mossad—who, in a matter of months, will be hunted down and turned into the videos my father watches in our living room, despite the fact that I block the websites where he finds these videos, and, because I suspect that my brother is secretly sending him new websites, I confront him about it when he returns home from the butcher shop where he works, but of course my brother denies everything and blames “the algorithm” of our father’s Facebook and, when I tell him that you don’t see gore on Facebook, he says you don’t see gore on American Facebook, but on Afghan Facebook people post dead bodies all the time, and I say, “But those Afghans are publicizing war crimes,” and he says, “It all fucks with your head just the same,” and I say, “If you know it fucks with your head, then why keep sending him videos?,” to which my brother responds, “Remember when ‘Three Guys One Hammer’ was spreading around at school, and Aziz sent me the clip on MySpace, and I watched it in short snippets, feeling sick the whole time, and even later that night, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the dead man’s face floating above me, so I gave up on sleep and went out to the living room and found Dad sitting in the dark, shirtless and bleary-eyed and watching TV, and I sat down near him, and on the television gray wolves were stripping the carcass of a caribou, and, at some point, while watching the wolves, Dad put his hand on the sofa cushion next to me, but, when I reached out to touch him, Dad flinched and pulled away because, it turned out, he had been asleep the whole time, and it took him a moment to realize where he was and who I was, and, really just to fill up the silence, I asked him if he had sleepwalked before, and Dad said that during the Soviet war, when he used to sleep on the roof of his home in Logar, he’d wake up in nearby orchards or fields or in front of a random house, which, minutes later, would get bombed, and he said it took him two nights to realize what God wanted from him, and, after that, every time he woke up in front of a home, he would bang on the door until someone came out, and he saved eight families from bombings before word spread to the local Communists that a boy in the village had intel on Soviet air strikes, and within a few days he was kidnapped and smuggled into a government dungeon, where he was interrogated for hours by two Russians and an Afghan, who accused him of having a source on the inside, and when Dad asked, ‘Inside what?,’ the Russians stripped him of his clothes and brought out a rusty drill stained with blood, and Dad lied and claimed that his source was named Arman, just Arman, after which he was hauled up two flights of stairs into an ordinary office space, and there, in a conference room, he was instructed to look into an adjacent conference room filled with ‘Armans’ drinking vodka, and when the interrogators asked Dad which Arman was his Arman, Dad picked out an Arman at random, who, with a bottle still in hand, was dragged off and tortured for days until he was shot in the head and tossed into the same cell as Dad, where, fortunately, in the constant dark, Dad could not see his mutilated face, and at first Dad ignored his cellmate, or cursed him, or kicked his corpse, but, after a while, he apologized to Arman, over and over he apologized, until one night Arman said that he wouldn’t forgive him, and in response Dad cried, ‘I’m going mad, aren’t I?,’ and Arman replied, ‘You seem fine to me,’ and for several nights and days Dad didn’t say a word, hoping that Arman wouldn’t speak again, but the moment Dad gave in and called out to him in a fit of loneliness Arman replied, ‘Oh, so now you want to talk?,’ and he did, and they did, they chatted, for weeks, then months, during which Arman recounted his life in the slums with his father and five older sisters, his vegetable cart, his policeman uncle, his exemplary test scores, his acceptance into a prestigious military academy, his first interactions with Communists, with the works of Marx and Lenin, his meetings with Taraki and Babrak and Najibullah, the Najibullah, who took Arman under his wing and convinced him to join KhAD, and, in the end, cradled Arman’s head and wiped away his tears before shooting him in the face, but although Dad appreciated Arman’s stories, the way they killed time, he noticed inconsistencies in Arman’s narratives—one night Arman’s father was a brutish drunk, coming home from the brickyard to beat his children at random, but the next night he was a sickly coward, who had failed to protect Arman and his sisters from rapist policemen, and, on some nights, Arman’s mother had died giving birth, and, on others, she’d withered away from sickle-cell anemia—but Dad was careful never to contradict his cellmate, for fear of losing his company, until one day Arman scoffed at the idea of a life beyond death, and Dad pointed out the irony of a ghost denying the afterlife, to which Arman replied, ‘The closest I have ever come to feeling faith was when I was twelve years old, and I went to the mosque to steal sandals, it was autumn, and it was Jummah, and the trees in the courtyard were dying so beautifully, and, with a big bag of sandals in hand, I heard the new imam recite a Hadith in which the archangel Jibril tore out the heart of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and I found myself so mesmerized by the story that I sort of sleepwalked into the mosque, but, as I pressed through the rows of worshippers, someone grabbed my arm and the bag of sandals and outed me as a thief, and a mob quickly formed and hauled me outside and tied me to the base of a mulberry tree, and I don’t know how many times they whipped me before I passed out, but I woke up on a cot in the mosque, bandaged all over, with the new imam sitting nearby, reading the Quran, and, when I asked the imam why he hadn’t stopped the mob, he sent me away with two hundred afghanis in my pocket, but out in the courtyard I found that my own sandals had been stolen,’ and it was at this point in the story—with Arman sitting on the steps of the mosque, barefoot and bandaged—that Dad fell entirely into his hallucination, he said that he saw the mulberry tree in the courtyard spotted with blood, and he smelled rain and smoke in the air, and he heard a street vender call out ‘Paraki! Paraki!’ so mournfully, you might have thought it was the name of his dead mother, and Dad said that he felt the wounds on his back reopening, and, in that moment, he said, he wanted everything, including himself, to die, not only to die but to be cast back into oblivion, and Dad said that in the same moment he wanted everything, including himself, to live, not only to live but to live eternally, without pain, and, just when Dad felt that his heart was going to burst from his chest, Arman stopped speaking altogether, and, three days later, Dad was released in some sort of bureaucratic mixup, and he returned home only to discover that his village had been obliterated, and so he travelled through the mountains into Peshawar, and there he found his family practically starving in a refugee camp, and when he approached his mother near her tent all he said was ‘Mother,’ and she looked up and fainted, because, you see, everyone had thought that Dad was dead, and it was as if he’d returned to them a ghost, and he said that he felt like a ghost, and, even sitting with me that night, telling his story, he was conscious of the fact that everything he said sounded preposterous, like a fever dream—and if he had not lived his life, he said, he would not believe it either—and I remember thinking that Dad still wasn’t completely awake because he never spoke like that again.” ♦