by Maria Zafar
On a particularly unpleasant day in the last week of April, after being laid off work, I returned home to a very angry man. I stood in the doorway, partially aware of the swarm of mosquitoes pushing their way in, and the very strange man digging into the tiled floor of my living room.
I thought it rude to ask him to leave when he was halfway through whatever it was that he was doing. So, I left the door ajar and tiptoed around the shattered pieces of tile to go make dinner.
Tossing and turning at night, I finally gave up on sleep and just listened to him screaming into the void that he had dug into my living room. Over the dull days to come, I grew accustomed to him since he never ate and mostly made himself scarce.
The hunt for a new job hadn’t yet begun, and I had found the never-ending sound of his guttural screams somewhat comforting, like the monotonous hum of a refrigerator—afraid he’d be done with it too soon.
But he was an angry man, a very angry man. The void in my living room was growing wider and wider, now reverberating his screams as if something was answering him back. I had moved my furniture several times to keep it from falling over. My couch pushed to the far end of my living room, and my four-person dining table flipped over it, were now completely unreachable. Then, one by one, I saw everything I owned disappear into the screaming abyss.
At first, I was sad; I had no TV to watch, no couch to sit on, but once I got accustomed to eating my meals standing up, things felt better than ever. I realized I had always preferred the gaping void over the furniture.
The angry man had now started meddling in other things. He’d pace the room whenever my mother insisted she had raised my brother and me as equals. Foaming at the mouth, he’d hurl slurs whenever my husband accused me of indulging the angry man beyond his welcome. He’d writhe on the floor, kicking, limbs flailing like a toddler, whenever my father preached piety.
The angry man pulled his hair out, punched walls, and broke stuff whenever I felt small under the weight of my own resilience.
At last, my home is nothing but a chasm, simply incapable of holding anything that doesn’t belong, and I have decided the angry man stays.
Maria Zafar is a short fiction writer and a literary critic from Pakistan. She sneaks in writing between being tackled by her sons and reading indie books for editorial reviews. Her writings have appeared in Exist Otherwise, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Tasavvurnama, and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram, Substack, and BlueSky as @sullenchaos