Tempered Magazine December 2013 // January 2014 // Issue 01 | Page 38

add legs to my list of deadly things. Everyone knows that your legs can’t kill you. Once she told me that the cells of her legs were like Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar. Traitorous. Killing themselves and taking others with them. But still a little more likeable than Jesus, who is honestly sort of self-involved and annoying. Although I think she just liked Judas because he was like Jimi Hendrix. And she could name any Jimi Hendrix guitar lick in the world. She proved it on a morning radio show when she won one hundred dollars for identifying his version of the “Star Spangled Banner” correctly after only hearing the opening two notes. Anahita had a tendency to like people who killed themselves: Judas, Jimi, Janis Joplin, Kurt Kobain, Alexander McQueen, her cells. One day when I went to visit, she complained that the bathrooms didn’t even have tampons in them because she was stuck in the stupid children’s ward. A few months later, when she told me she didn’t even get her period anymore, I said “Well that’s 38 good! At least it won’t be your uterus that finished you!” When Osama bin Laden was killed, my friend posted a Facebook status that said “I pray that all of Bin Laden’s virgins have rusty razorblades in their vaginas.” At her funeral, I watched the men carry her body to the grave, draped in white. Death white, virginal white. As I hesitatingly repeated the unfamiliar Arabic and Farsi words— Allahu Akbar, khoda chkoob e—I realized that all I and most Americans knew about death and Islam was that men got their forty virgins when they went to heaven. But where the hell did those virgins come from? “Your cousin is Heather McNamara? I saw a piece at her performance space last weekend. It was perfection.” Anahita’s sister said it at the one-year memorial service. Yes, my perfect cousin fortunately survived despite the menace of her uterus. She decided she didn’t like Yale, and she did like women—like in a lesbian way—and relocated to New York to dev V