Three Thousand, and My Best Friend
by: Max Jaw (Sasa Teodosijev)
Serbia, civil war, early nineties…
Igor had a video game ‘Super Mario 3’
we played it every day
We’d fire up the TV,
the controllers,
and his Mom would bake us treats
Him Mom, the conjurer of my first lust,
the mistress of a young man’s dreams
She wore nylons, knee-high dresses,
crossing her legs every time she sat
Oh, the countless nights I spent creating friction
thinking of those legs…
His Dad was an asshole!
He’d come home, dish out rules.
We couldn’t play past eight,
we couldn’t eat more than one treat,
and worst of all,
he would touch her, hug her, kiss her
I hated that man.
I imagined him dying
and me moving in
I would have sex with his mom,
we would play video games,
and we would eat an unlimited amount of
the Goddamned treats!
One day it happened!
I saw them leaving:
the car, the bags….
I ran out
Igor was crying, he didn’t want to go,
but they were muslim,
and it was no longer safe
-not where we lived-
so they ran
I can still smell the freshly sparked fuel
rushing through the carburetor
Their German two-stroke car spat smoke in my face,
and the tires kicked so fucking hurriedly,
ripping my heart out
The last thing I remember
was the back of his little blonde head,
as I thought…
‘There goes my best friend!’
Not much later, I was informed:
They were killed at the border
by a Serbian war criminal
He murdered over three thousand people;
a mass so big it is but a statistic
Within those three thousand
there were: Video games,
those sexy legs,
the most delicious treats,
an asshole dad,
and my best friend
‘Three Thousand, and My Best Friend’
That’s how I remember them
Music by:
- No.2 Remembering Her – Esther Abrami
- Allégro – Emmit Fen
- Lifting Dreams – Aakash Gandhi
