They all have only this word in their mouths: to understand. How can you explain what derives from mystery? Before Yacine, I looked without seeing. I had put my eyes, covered with a tenacious film of melancoly, onto the scrap heap, in the attic of my outcasts, for such a long time that my eyes were like two pieces of fruit rotted on their branch. I don't know by what chance I found them one day at the bottom of Yacine's eyes. Immersed in his, they rubbed themselves, clean themselves of abstinence, of blind absence, the absence of all that is for me like a hole in nothingness. My eyes returned to me with sparkles of joy on a shining surface of arrogence. With unknown shivers. Finally, with a possible hope, though still without a goal. Before Yacine I could only tolerate the night. Night that erased the day's disasters. The darkroom night where I tried to develope the flim of imprecise dreams so as to escape from the shame and the guilt of having stayed alive. From out of Yacines eyes came light, without my having looked at it. Then the sky rose up, unfurled like a symphony: the dawn trembled like a resolving chord in a nacreous instant. The zenith's diamonds exploded into fireworks. The sunset's violins stretched out their sighs until desire blazed. The moon's laughter blew away the stars. Touching Yacine's skin, I came to know my own, his vigor and his seed heretofore hidden pleasure's long discharges adn short-circuits. Maybe we'd relearned to see together or one through the other, like two very sick people who have slowly come back to life through the same vision. Now I believe this was so. Since then, it hasn't mattered if the other were far away: he was always there in that state of attention itself, only drawn toward living in the liberated moment. Since then, from teh depths of my fears, I have seen the world through the light of Yacine's eyes.
-L'interdite, Malika Mokkedem

September 11th
Nobody is innocent, right? Isn't that what all of the holy books say? We're all sinners? But after the Trade Center, it was all about the innocent victims, all the innocent victims, and I kept thinking-I knew one of those guys in the towers was raping his daughter. Raping her. Maybe he was raping his son, too. And beating his wife. I think about that morning, and I wonder if the bastard was smiling when he hopped on a train for work. I think about his daughter and son sitting in some generic and heartless suburban classroom, just sad and broken and dying inside. And his wife sitting at home dying inside. That bastard gests off his train and walks up to his office on the hundred and seventh floor or something, and everybody loves him there. He's a hero at work. And Mr. Hero is sitting at his desk, smiling and being heroic, when that airplane flies straight into his office. Flies right through the window and obliterates him, completely disappears him. And the news travels, right? The wife turns on the television and sees the towers burning, and the teachers wheel televisions into the classrooms, and the son and daughter watch the towers burning. The wife and kids count the floors, right? They count all the way up to the hundred and seventh floor, and they see it burning, and they're happy, right? They're hopeful, right? Aren't they hopeful? Then the first tower comes down. Both towers come down. And the wife is jumping up and down at the home. She's celebrating. But the kids have to stay calm, because they're in public, you know, but inside they're jumping up and down like their mom. They run home, and all three of them sit in the living room together at watch the news, and they wait. Yeah, they wait for him to come home. The news is talking about the survivors, right? About the people who made it out. And the wife and kids are praying to God he died. That he burned to death or jumped out a window or was running down the stairs when the tower fell. They sit in the living room for three days, waiting for him to come home, and then they wait for three more days, waiting for him to come home, and on the seventh day, they realize he isn't coming home. He's dead and they're happy. The monster is gone and they're celebrating. They dance around the living room and sing songs and dance dances and they're happy. Don't you think all of this is possible? Don't you think there was at least one man in the towers who deserved to die? Don't you think there's a wife and kids who're happy he died? Don't you think there's some daughter walking around who whispers Osama's name with tenderness and affection? Don't you think there's a wife out there who thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama's rage?
From Sherman Alexie's book Ten Little Indians

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her
There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look-here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers-many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
-American Gods by Neil Gaiman

And we are all going to go read this because once again slacksoft has made beauty.
Goddamn, I gotta find out who this guy is in real life and start stalking him.

The best written story in the world.