1001 Ways to Embarrass Yourself While Avoiding Injuries

She rolled the cigarette between two calloused fingers, savouring the feel. A wisp of smoke from between her chapped lips floated into the air, a silent song of something. 'Vol vol vol.' Indila's 'Derniere Danse' played in the cafe elsewhere, the melancholy song filling her ears and slowly falling into her. This is France, she thought to herself, a twenty five year old Malaysian immigrant with a baggage of hyphenated identities sitting in an isolated French cafe smoking a Chinese cigarette listening to a French-Algerian-Cambodian-Egyptian-Indian singer. As Indila works herself into a beautiful tragedy, she puts her head in her hands then takes a drag of her cigarette. There is a certain delicious irony in that ,she feels, especially with the rise of the National Front in France, people looking at her funny because of her name, the fact that she doesn't go to Church, mostly reads East Asian philosophers instead of Satre, eats neither pork nor beef, has a ...

She spits the blood out of her mouth onto the bathroom floor; staining the impeccably white marble tiles a scarlet red. He pushes her down to the floor and kicks the area she thinks her left kidney might be and slams the mahogany door shut. A sudden bout of nausea takes ahold of her and she crawls, with great difficulty to the expensive toilet, and grips the toilet seat. Her stomach heaves a few times. But she doesn't throw up. Too little food, she thinks, silently in her mind. She lies against the wall, a frail hand resting on her throbbing back, the other on her throbbing head. Out of nowhere, or perhaps somewhere, a dark faraway somewhere, there flitted out a memory. Blurred, unfocused and most certainly hazy, but still a memory. She was sitting at her neighbourhood's library and worrying about her university exams, rubbing a spot just above the left side of her temple, where she frequently got headaches.  Her hands were shoved inside her warm purple jacket sleeves as...