In Abscess of Choices
By Ashwaq Shukralla
Ashwaq Shukralla writes
in her spare time and she
writes to share her voice,
be it through personal
reflections, poetry or short
stories. She was inspired to
write as a child after reading
books and poems in English,
Arabic and Russian, where
even though their words
differed their messages
did not. Much of her work
is a reflective commentary
on everyday concepts and
affairs.
One of my stranger childhood memories is of
me sitting on the carpeted floor of a living room
one night, watching someone carefully puncture
an abscess on another child’s stomach and then
patiently drain it. All the trapped dirt, blood and
lymph surfaced and oozed and bled in yellow and
purple and red. It was the most gruesome thing
my little eyes had seen. It was a relief when the
resulting wound began to heal, so quickly in fact it
was almost as if the body was grateful for being cut
open. The adult who had done this thought it was
a success. It was.
Little did I know then how common this exercise
is in all aspects of life. Everybody is walking around
with an invisible scalpel, cutting and discarding
from themselves whatever they find unbefitting
at the time. People are always drifting like kites,
burning bridges or boarding flights. If someone is
stuck in the mud, it is not too farfetched to imagine
50
Perle
APRIL - MAY 2017