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Back The Wild Ones Save as PDF
Chapters (61)
  1. Cover
  2. PRAISE FOR The Wild Ones
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. The Beginning, or How Paheli Became the First Wild One; With a Cameo by Taraana, the Boy Made of Stars.
  7. An Introduction; Hold On to Your Hats.
  8. The Sweetness in the Sugarcane, or The Impractical Nature of Immortality
  9. Paheli: The Vagrant Experiences of a Mango Addict
  10. Cotton Candy Sugar Screams
  11. From the Book of MEMORIES
  12. “Will You Walk into My Parlor?” Said the Spider to the Fly.
  13. The Best Ice Cream in the World, Teddy Bears, and a Tree Creature.
  14. From the Book of MEMORIES
  15. I.
  16. The Reappearance of the Boy Made of Stars and the Plight of the Girl by the Oleander Lane.
  17. Paheli: An Interlude in Blue
  18. Besieged in the Between
  19. Tea, the City of Stairs, and the Story of a Boy
  20. From the Book of MEMORIES
  21. Heartbreak, Stone Buildings, and Tandoori
  22. Observations, Conversations, and Hot Parantha
  23. Paheli: The Spies Who Came In from the Between
  24. From the Book of MEMORIES
  25. The French Quarter, the Spanish Half, and Eulalie
  26. Paheli: The Eggplant Overture
  27. Sunny Jelly Beans, Po’Boys, and “Alouette”
  28. From the Book of MEMORIES
  29. The Keeper of the Green and the Mysteries of Magic
  30. Blood and the Between
  31. The Library of the Lost and the Stories of the Silenced
  32. Walking in Wicked Ways or The Importance of Balık Ekmek
  33. From the Book of MEMORIES
  34. Looking for the Needle in the Haystack
  35. Paheli: The Peculiar Crackle in the Electricity
  36. Ten Degrees Past Despair
  37. The Fault in the Stars
  38. The Blue City in the Mountains
  39. Paheli: Disharmony in the Attics
  40. From the Book of MEMORIES
  41. Paheli: Continued
  42. The Politics of a Body, the Politics of Pleasure
  43. The Medina, the Riad, and the Red City
  44. Paheli: The Atlas Mountains, the Cozy Rooftop, and the Confession, Possibly of Love
  45. From the Book of MEMORIES
  46. Souks, Spices, and Survival: A Guide into Chaos
  47. Jemaa el-Fna: The Mosque at the End of the World
  48. Paheli: A Moment in Chartreuse
  49. From the Book of MEMORIES
  50. Paheli: On the Frailties of the Heart
  51. Sonagi, or A Sudden Rain
  52. Paheli: The Cheese in the Trap
  53. Paheli: The Maze and the Minotaur
  54. A New Era, a New Dar; the River Sings
  55. The Burning Door, the Fallen City, and Taraana 2.0
  56. Paheli: The Beginning of Forever
  57. From the Book of MEMORIES
  58. Moving One Rock at a Time Will Eventually Move a Mountain, aka Goodbye
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. More from the Author
  61. About the Author

Other people see the girl’s distress, but not one of them moves to intercede. Funny how often situations like this occur.

Time shifts and the men succeed in isolating the girl. The back of the stadium is deserted. The music from the festival is a distant thump. The girl whimpers.

We follow and we watch, transfixed. Her terror echoes all our pasts.

We do not hate all men. Just most of them. That old adage, you know? Guilty until proven innocent.

When we invited men into our stories, into our bedrooms, under our skin, and close to our hearts, we didn’t expect them to destroy us as a demonstration of their strength, as an expression of their masculinity. But they did. Or at least they tried to.

None of us were saved by any princes. No kind woodcutters passed by when the wolves were making meals of us.

But we survived. If not in entirety, then in fragments.

Paheli moves. We flow behind her, almost as if we are one body, and perhaps in this moment we are.

The men see us too late. They see our bodies, our mouths, our hips, our femininity, and they think us weak.

Paheli steps forward and all attention falls on her. She is like a storm at dusk, our Paheli. Her eyes are the blue of broken hearts and her face is the reason for them. She becomes the only one they can see and the girl is left to flee. She hesitates before some sense of self-preservation pushes her away. The men barely react; it is almost as if they are in thrall to Paheli.

We take a deep breath, and then all of us scream at the same time. The men fall to their knees, their hands around their ears. The lights in the festival flicker twice before returning to their original brightness. The men do not recover. They won’t. They will hear our screams in their dreams. The sound will haunt them. They will lose sleep. Their relationships will suffer. Perhaps they will lose their jobs and livelihoods.

The irony of having screams as weapons is not lost on us. Our screams work differently on humans and middle worlders. For humans, the effect is somewhat akin to having an excess of electricity in their brains. For middle worlders, a Wild One’s scream means being injected with more magic than their bodies can safely contain. The effect is the same.

“Let’s go,” Paheli says, and we heed her. We leave the festival before the Sugar Queen is crowned and the city before the clock strikes midnight.

From the Book of MEMORIES

TALEI

CITY OF ORIGIN: SUVA