— Fiction —

Home Istan

Salaam alaikum, fellow Sand Cats! It is I, Mint Teabag. For those of you not familiar with that particular moniker, I also went by Bejeweled Dagger-Dick and Crust-Eye. I was excited when the mullahs finally lifted that ban on Internet use. I guess freedom really is on the march. I have been trying to contact my fellow Felines of the Desert for quite some time now. As most of you know, my dad shipped us off to Dearborn Michigan, the summer after our junior year. There is so much to say, I hardly know where to begin. I guess a good place to start would be an apology. Aziz, my former best friend, I’m really sorry about breaking your hookah the night before I took off for the Great Satan. Oh, and sorry about defiling your sister that night as well. I hope your father didn’t really “bury her up to her eyes in the hot dung of a thousand camels.”

Go, Sand Cats! I got wind of the clobbering you gave those jerks from Yemen North. I wish I was there to witness the look on their muktar’s face as you danced around the disemboweled goat carcass. What a rush it must have been. I witnessed the Red Wings lift the cup, but it left me feeling all the more home sick. I’m sure most of you have taken your third or fourth wife by now. Alas, I am still unwed, and not for a lack of trying. Not two weeks ago, I spotted this black rose of a woman smoking hashish in the parking lot of one of fathers’ convenience stores. She suggested I close up the shop since it was well past 11 o’clock already. We spent a lovely Detroit summer evening together, getting high and shoving ice cream bars up one another’s asses. Unfortunately, Father burst in on us, just as we had ripped open a box of the dark-chocolate Häagen-Dazs bars, or maybe the toffee ones—I can’t recall for sure, we were pretty high! Father chased us from the store and hasn’t spoken to me since. I haven’t seen him this angry since freshman year, when Aziz, Fatima, and I were honing our stone-tossing skills, with the aid of some stray mutts. Not that Father is a dog lover by any means; I think it was the fact that we cracked his brand-new Mercedes windshield. You always did have a cannon for an arm, Fatima. Best wishes to all my Arid Kitten cohorts, and write back soon. Mint Teabag, over and out!