One Hybrid Prose Poem Story by Fizza Abbas

 

Self Obituary That All Porcelain Dolls Will Cry Over

 

Year: AI vs Humans < AI 
Date: I-have-lived-good-30-years

 

Bakho

 

They usually write obituaries in the third person, but since I’m writing mine from somewhere between the past and the future—peeling a banana because it helps me relax (it never did when I was alive, though)—I suppose I get to break the rules. These fucking humans make everything so complicated. I know, I know, it’s hypocritical of me to say that since I was one too. Was. 

I always envied the pulp of a banana. Look at its audacity—stripteasing in front of the eater, luring him in with its soft, golden flesh, pretending it's in control. As if its sole purpose is to pierce its claws into the eater’s throat—I will eat you alive. But in the end, it’s the eater who devours it, not the other way around. Someone should’ve given it a reality check. 

I’ve always been the peel. Scarred and soft. Too gullible for flesh to take advantage of, too trusting for other fruits to share their secrets with. I spent my thirty years like that—sweet, soft, easy to consume. I was eaten alive multiple times, but my carapace was too thick for them to chew completely. So they left the bones, took the flesh. 

"You taste delicious," some perverts would say before even looking at my skin. I always wondered—how do these people gauge the taste of a woman before devouring her? Do they have a different set of taste buds? A thermometer, perhaps, where the mercury rises from bearable to unbearable, stopping somewhere in the middle? Leaving the woman with no choice but to see herself through the eyes of a predator? 

We humans have always been like this. Since the dawn of civilization. Peeling the world apart, one layer at a time. Now, all that remains is the skin of humanity—its epidermis, a sheen of technological advancements, its eureka moments they never tire of bragging about. The dermis? Strategic geopolitical maneuvers: 'Yo, man, I brokered a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel.' 'Well, fuck you, America, we built DeepSeek—what now?' And beneath it all, the hypodermis—the doomsday clock, now ticking one second closer to midnight this year. 

 

But why should I care? I’m dead already. And yet, I left a skeleton of humanity somewhere with my corpse, so it still worries me. I’m writing this obituary from my grave, sharing this banana with lovely maggots, carrion beetles, and flesh flies—little gourmets using it as ketchup to dip my flesh into. The bones? Long gone, claimed by the patient gnawing of scavengers, the slow dissolution of the earth, and time itself, which never fails to erode what remains. I died somewhere between the moment an orphan in Gaza breathed their last and when an adult made a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the planet’s most powerful person, and everyone stood powerlessly, including me. 

 

I was a writer who always protested and challenged through her writing. But I failed miserably because I couldn’t feel the jagged wreckage of the crash piercing through my corpse. 

Don’t remember me in your thoughts or else I’ll keep aching.  

Keep no connection with me.  

I don’t want to worry about you, your world, but me, mine.  

For once, at least.  

Let me live, please.

 

 

Fizza Abbas is a writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her work has appeared in more than 100 journals, both online and in print. Her work has also been nominated for Best of The Net and shortlisted for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021.