Burning
by Marie Thomas McNaughton
“Hot, thought the Parisians.”
But they didn’t know. Couldn’t know hot until, if ever they traveled the Sahara, the Sahel. Abdul laughed when they said, “Il fait si chaud.” Laughter was his learned response to so much that Parisians said, thought, did. Because laughter was less toxic than the confusion and anger he had first felt upon arriving in the City of Light.
Light, he thought. They did not know light either, until it glared, reflecting, refracting the glinting sand dunes as high as, higher than, an apartment block on the Champs-Élysées.
Yes, he thought, returning to his lost theme. Humor was better than rage, though it had taken years of living among the most arrogant of Europeans, the haughty Parisians who believed they lived in the center of the world, when, in reality, they were as far from holy Mecca as they could be in thought, if not geography.
PROMPT:
“Hot, thought the Parisians.” — first line of Suite Française, a WWII novel by Irène Némirovsky, a French novelist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin who drafted the long-unpublished manuscript just before her 1942 deportation and death in Auschwitz.
