Even if I replaced the piercings in my ear with transparent studs and lied about a worried wife waiting back home for me and wore long sleeves over the ink that covers my arms and told crass jokes about cheap whores and faggots and cloaked the laugh my ex-boyfriend called impish and grew a thick and wiry beard full of secrets and lowered the pitch of my voice and kept my wrist taut and my shoulders square and my gaze as straightforward as a drone strike

My father said the Taliban would still kill me and they’d kill him, too.

Return to Tell Me Like You Mean It volume 4.