What I did on my holidays
Kevin Armor Harris
My job was printing school books for children, but one day I left early as that was for the best. I’d met someone who suggested we go on this trip. So yes it was a break from work. I sat in the back of the truck with a few belongings, the womenfolk silent, the children asking Are we nearly there yet? We got to the seafront and met up with some of the others. Long wait among the flotsam. We’d hired a boat and eventually set off, into the wind. The boat was blown over early on, but we all got back in and distributed our weight more sensibly and got going again. I’m not sure we did all get back in though, one of the children I didn’t see again, but it’s hard to know. So cold, so dark. I felt sick but as I’d not had food for days nothing came of it. We had no light. Huge ships crossed before us through the night and each time we braced in dread against the wake. A tiny boat, but 26 souls, all scarred in some ways. Who would still call us souls? They could brush us away as if we were crumbs. We were invisible, we all were used to being invisible, to being arbitrarily vulnerable, without cause or recourse. Some were wailing, some weeping, some numb in silence. In my head I kept repeating ill-remembered lines of Darwish: ‘there’s nothing behind us except what’s behind’.
“Your testimony in the asylum interview may be the only evidence you can provide… Try and think about ways you can try and remain calm and protect yourself when talking about emotional issues”.
A woman was holding tight to her chest a small stone, she said it was from her garden. The things we cling to, even when there is nothing else, no clinging nor no grip in our redundant hands. ‘Where shall we go when there’s no land there, and no sky?’
“If you’d been suffering persecution over time, what was it about that final event or threat that made you leave at that point?”
It can be comforting, momentarily, to acknowledge the absurdity of suffering. You embrace the newness because it is change, and a chance, and you hold the mental posture of that clasping, that grasping, with all your exhausted strength, that clutch that you have made groping towards the future, you hold that tension even as the terror swells in you with the black depth threatening, luring, in the lightless night, the great fearsome shapes bulking above you in the desperate gloom—and hope, hope is a glint you think you saw near the horizon that you thought you’d seen, that cannot be seen, hope is a glint you strain to glimpse again, to know if it is any stronger, and every time you look it is not.
“Were there bad conditions? For example, many people sharing a small cell, withholding food rations, no ‘yard’ time outside, or were you kept in isolation? Did you experience torture?”
“You should also speak to your lawyer about getting a ‘scarring’ report”.
You may be asked
“how you managed to survive”
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Aphoristic addenda
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Here, people have lost their sense of rootedness, they are indifferent to their own roots. How then could they express concern for those who have been uprooted?
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And they say, Have you ever had any convictions? Yes I say, would you like to hear some of them?
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Humans have cursed themselves with this nonsensical notion of justice. Life on this planet did not evolve with the possibility of any such thing. Diversity, yes, collectivity, yes—from the first bacteria to the great oxidation catastrophe to this wretched anthropocene—but justice is a fictional device that can’t be made to stick on living or dying. It’s a flimsy disguise for the ineluctability of suffering.
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘I walked on my heart’ in A river dies of thirst, trans Catherine Cobham, Saqi, 2024.
Kevin Armor Harris lives in England and writes short fictions and prose poems. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dream Catcher, Short Fiction, Thin Skin, Modern Literature, Metaworker, Literary Yard, Writer's Block, Streetcake, Bond Street Review and Flash Fiction North.