DEVOURERS

two;

A LIFETIME AWAY, Fatima Hameed is setting fire to the last two years of her life.

This impromptu bonfire out on the quad in front of her dorm isn't impromptu at all. Rather contrary, in fact. Think of the breaking down of a person as an excruciatingly slow process. Every year, and month, and week, and day, and hour, and second---all of it spent slowly being worn down to this. The most primal human urge of all: destruction.

It's not even a bonfire at all, actually. It's more like a barbeque. Occasionally, she douses the charred remains of her college textbooks in lighter fluid, just to watch the flames leap up and eat away at the night. She watches with a childish glee, as her textbooks—some of them bought second and third hand off of some bookshop, very outdated editions—gradually turn into nothing at all.

' It's almost 3 AM on a Tuesday night. There is absolutely no one out here. Just her and the fire. She closes her eyes, tips her face up to the sky, and her mind is blissfully full. No static. No grey. The absence of color isn't darkness—it's transparency. It's the ability to live your life while all the while seeing that there is nothing worthwhile in between birth and death. No event, no tragedy, no routine strong or thick enough to fill up the holes in your head where emotion and memory and reason were supposed to be.

College was just another attempt at trying to be something that she wasn't. Normal, functioning, capable, competent. Fatima laughs, harshly. This life isn't hers. Her name doesn't even feel like hers. Reality isn't hers.

Skipped classes, disapproving professors, unfulfilled potential (two words her advisor threw around a lot) and parties where she sat in a corner, nursing a drink and talked to anyone and everyone without a single fucking idea of what was coming out of her mouth, but reveling in the laughter, the 'you're so funny's and coming back to her to her dorm, alone and bleary-eyed and half-way to drunk and staring up at her ceiling while the girl next door fucked the brains out of some guy. College ruled, best time of her fucking life, look Fatima there goes Justin with a condom on his face, but it's not used, thank god. Can you imagine?

Day after day after day of the same thing. How miserable. How terrible.

The fire is dying down. Fatima bends down and picks up a notebook—one filled with very important looking notes from her freshman year—and she throws it into the fire and douses it with lighter fluid again. The heat is comforting.

She pulls her phone out of her pocket, takes a picture—for her eyes, only—and considers calling her mother. What time must it be, back there? Morning. Her mother must be awake. Mummy, who always wakes up in the morning for a bowl of oatmeal on weekdays and a roti with some curry on weekends. Mummy, who had pleaded with Fatima to tell her if there was any problem, despite Fatima's repeated assurances that everything was just fine, no, there's no reason I'm tired, it's okay, really.

She calls her mother.

Her mother, god bless her, answers on the first ring.

"Hello, Fatima," says Mummy, and Fatima could weep at the sheer joy of hearing her name being pronounced right for the first time in a week. In Bengali, her mother says, "Is something wrong? Why are you calling so late?"

"Nothing's wrong," Fatima answers back, and she closes her eyes, enjoys the effortless way her native language rolls off of her tongue. Speaking in the language of home. "I just wanted to call you."

"Oh. How is school?"

"School's great," Fatima says, and means it.

"You sound happy."

"I am. I am very happy."

"Did you win something?" her mother asks, and she sounds so genuinely excited Fatima almost doesn't tell her the truth.

"No. I just—do you know how you always asked me if something was wrong?"

"Yes," her mother says. Her voice has gone quiet. "I remember."

"Well," Fatima says. "I fixed it."

"Did you?"

"Yes," Fatima says. And in English, she says, "I'm dropping out of college, ma."