Josip Novakovich

The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.

… when you don’t get the shade of a word because you haven’t grown up listening to American lullabies, your friends smile patronizingly; when you don’t get accents because you haven’t grown up with them while your ear was flexible, your friends treat you as a comic alien, an aquamarine creature—you grope with your fins in the sand (and the sand seems to be English, while the water would be your native tongue). Tell me about the advantage then! My writer friends put me in my place, show me how superficial my project of writing in English must be. Where in me are those soulful contacts with words that can be made only with mother’s nipple between your naked gums?

A car with a Black man and woman in it stopped. The man rolled down the window, and asked me: “Is everything all right?”

“I was just attacked by three guys, they knocked me over the head…”

“You seem to be all right,” he said.

“I don’t know. Could you give me a ride?” His concern made me feel that I could trust him though by now it was clear that I could not trust my feelings.

“Not really. I need to take my girlfriend home. Good luck!”