I stopped as if emulsified in the middle of the street. A motorbike swerved, brushing my leg, and another came so close that I could hear the driver screaming at me as she swerved – her leg hitting the taxi driving next to her. I felt something at my back, grabbing my elbow, and looking down, saw a miniature woman at my side. She was dressed in a bright yellow outfit that resembled cotton pajamas. She yelled at me, pointing to the other side of the street, her words sounding like an irritated mother’s even though she was probably half my age. When we got to the other curb, she was still yelling.
“Move as a fish swimming,” she was saying, her arms outstretched and palms together, moving back and forth to demonstrate how a fish moves through its ocean of hazards. She said it again, louder, nodding this time, moving her hands with determination. She was looking straight up at me, imploring me, searching my face with her dark eyes. My forehead burned as if it had been scrubbed with steel wool. For a second, all the street’s sounds were silenced. Then she hit my arm, and pointed to her eyes, and moved herself back across the street, through the traffic, in the same way her hands had moved, sliding into a shop’s entryway, turning once again to look at me. My hand went up and my fingers moved stiffly.
Pain in my abdomen returned me to the noise of the street, and I turned around and saw the long wooden green shack with the word toilet outlined in red – the street’s public bathroom. It contained a few stalls with holes dug into the earth, the perimeters surrounded by dried feces and hungry bugs. I had been there before.
The stall’s walls moved but the air stayed still. I squatted, forcing my butt over the hole, pushing my shorts away from my body to prevent soiling them any further. The heat was overwhelming, as if I had perched my ass over a stove’s burner. I tried urinating but couldn’t. I had to breathe, and when I did, the smell, like two hands on my throat, wouldn’t let me. I knew, at that point, that I could die here – death by defecation.
Unable to stay squatting another second, I prayed that the shit would stop coming, and lurched forward, throwing open its unlatched door, scaring an Asian woman who stood with her small son, exposing my bare white, bloated stomach and stained underwear, my shorts at my ankles. My hands gripped the pavement as I threw up, mostly dry heaves, but a few chunks of saltines from my morning breakfast came out in shreds. The woman grabbed her son’s hand and ran, and those passing along the street backed away, making wide circles around me. I imagined a million eyes on me, but when I finally pulled up my shorts, no one seemed to notice or care; my vomit pooled, cooking in the heat.
I had left the scarf in the stall but I wasn’t about to retrieve it, so I tore off two long pieces of tissue and stuck a piece in each nostril. It took me a long time to flag down a taxi, standing on the street corner with tissue sticking out of my nostrils, smelling like a pile of human shit. My skin pulled tighter and tighter around my torso; loneliness buzzed among the hundreds – thousands – of people who looked nothing like me. .I tried locking eyes with someone, anyone, but no one met my gaze.
